Sunday 20th July — Friday 25th July, 2008

My supervisor Nemanja had once told me about a physicist (who shall remain unnamed) who had gone to a physics conference surrounded by some of the most interesting and prominent people in the field. Most physics conferences have an outing or formal dinner on one night, and this particular conference had organised a cruise. The physicist in question had attended the banquet out on the beautiful harbour, presumably had many interesting conversations and went and wrote about the poor quality of the food on his blog. Nemanja told me that it was extremely poor form when there was so much else to appreciate.

I am now in the position of writing a similar article, so let me preface it by saying Trieste has been fantastic. For example the sunsets here are gorgeous, and I will be following this up later with more pictures of the town itself. I have met people here who are interesting, intelligent and thoughtful. Having said all that, this is not a journal that is supposed to give advice to the physics community but rather a tale of my journey.

My advisor had encouraged my to splurge a little, even recommending the Guest house, but I did not want to take so much grant money. In the end I compromised by sharing a room with four others in the hostel. The location is a ten minute walk from the ICTP campus where the conference was being held, and had a balcony that overlooked the sea. To the best of my knowledge it did have one minor inconvenience: we were told by e-mail that check-in time on Sunday was between 3 pm and 5:30 pm! That is quite a narrow window to get to a hostel by, and I was glad I only had to come from Venice rather than try to negotiate my way into this window from the United States!

[As it later turned out, the e-mail was mistaken. Check-in was from 3 pm -- 11:30 pm.]

Besides the confusion over the check-in time, there were several things that made staying at this hostel difficult. First there were the time restrictions:

• The doors closed at midnight, if you were outside you slept on the beach
• The hostel closes from 10:00 am to 3:00 pm, so you have to leave during these times.

The first of these would not be too bad, as we were here for a summer school. It did mean that while chatting with others about physics downtown we had to keep a careful eye on the time. The second point is not so bad either during the week, but it limit the amount of sleep we could catch up on during the weekend. All in all the time restrictions were not so bad.

What was more annoying than the time restrictions was the fact that our hostel did not have a laundry. The two guest houses run by ICTP did have a couple of washing machines between them (for around 300 people) but in the end I gave up and took my laundry into town.

But the most annoying thing by far was not actually the hostel’s fault. When I met one of my roommates he introduced himself as a member of the plasma conference that would overlap with our conference for the first week. He then fished out a pair of earplugs and gave them to me. “You’ll need these” he informed me “because I snore.” Okay, I thought, I have shared rooms with people who snore before and I gratefully accepted the earplugs but I did not think I would need them.

I was so very wrong. The snoring was incredible. If I went out to the veranda outside our room which overlooked the sea his snoring was still the loudest sound you could here. Some people in the adjacent room had trouble sleeping because of it. Not that he wasn’t a nice guy; after all he had recognised that his snoring was an issue for others and tried to minimise our discomfort by supplying us with earplugs. This is a really thoughtful gesture and I really appreciate it. Nevertheless the earplugs really did very little. Even tired from a restless night on the benches of Venice airport the night before I could not do more than grab a few minutes sleep here and there.

After trying to get to sleep the first night I asked at the desk if there was any possibility of being moved. The guy behind the reception desk shrugged and told me that they were full; moving was not a possibility. I started to doze through some of the more familiar lectures, but managed to pay attention to the lectures that interested me. I would have liked to go and sleep during some of the familiar lectures or lunch break, but our hostel rules prevented it. By Thursday I was so tired that I asked one of the other conference attendees if he (or his five roommates) would mind if I slept on his floor. That night was the first night since I left Cambridge that I had a proper night’s sleep. In another day I could sleep peacefully throughout the night. Precious sleep; you never appreciate it until you are not getting enough of it.