Thanks God, It's Final!

Today was the last day of the conference, and I think my Korean colleague said it best, in this, the last slide of the conference:



Thanks God for crazy google-translated english. But seriously, this has been a productive and wonderful experience. My advisor took me out for coffee today, and told me that much like every southern woman of good breeding, every mathematician must have a debutante ball...and this conference was mine. This was my coming out as a professional, and it was a success.

Right now I'm positively bristling with ideas. There is so much that I want to learn, it's the best and craziest feeling. I don't even know where to begin: quaternion algebras, well-rounded lattices, Galois cohomology! They're all tugging at my brain right now. I have the urge to hunker down at a coffee shop for the next week and read till my eyes are burning and my teeth start to hurt (yeah, it's possible). However, that would be a course running in direct opposition to my much needed restorative break. We'll see.

I mentioned previously that Pucon has this beautiful Middle-Earth quality to it, in that most of the buildings are made out of wood, nay, trees!. Not wooden siding either, I mean, serious, knotty, twisted, tree-trunk, wood. It's beautiful. Here are some samples from the coffee shop I went to today. This shingled roof is peaked in this rackish almost Seussian angle:





Here you can see the treetrunks that are the support beams, and the low ceiling looks like somewhere a hobbit might live:







And here you can see my delicious Espresso Macciato. Served with a shot-glass of mineral water to cleanse the palate after the coffee. So sensible!



The adventure continues!

<3