Somehow May just whizzed by so quickly that I am left wondering what happened. Of course, what happened was that I spent large part of it on the road. On the day of our return from France I continued on to the U.S. directly from the airport. That in itself was a challenge, because we arrived late in the afternoon and by that time all of the flights for the U.S. have left already. In any case, we were at Stansted, a good 3 hour trip from either of the two large intercontinental airports. Luckily, a new brand of airline (EOS) has recently started to fly between Stansted and JFK. It is a smaller jet than the ones operated by the big airlines, but it has only business class. And most importantly, it left two hours after we arrived at the airport and so I was able to make the meeting the next morning. Shortly after coming back to London I was asked to fly to Moscow for another meeting. This was a very short, one night trip and so I could not take advantage of better weather than we had during our last visit to Russia. I did get a chance to visit the inside of the Moscow State University (also known as Lomonosov). The impressive building in the purest Stalinist style is one of the 7 (and the largest) built after the war by German prisoners in Moscow. Inside and out it does an excellent job of capturing the mood of that era.

(Click on the picture to see it full size, use a back button to return to this spot.) During the weekend back in London I headed to the Northern Downs, a range of chalk hills running approximately east-west to the south of London and easily reached by train. There is a trail along the ridge all the way to Dover, following a medieval pilgrimage route. I walked only a small part of it, from Farnham to Guildford (about 20 km). There are always lots of interesting things to see along these country trails. In addition, this was the time when bluebells were in full bloom and they alone were worth the trip.

Shortly afterwards I flew to Italy to take part in a one week geological fieldtrip. We started in Naples and then traveled south and east, crossing the Apennines and spending time in Puglia. From there we traveled north along the Adriatic coast to the vicinity of Pescara and spent a few days in the Majella mountain range before driving to Rome and than back home. This is a part of Italy I had not had a chance to visit before and full of surprises. I went for a walk one evening when we stopped in the town of Matera and literally stumbled on the town of Sassi. A better informed traveler would have known about its existence but that would have diminished the impression. This is arguably the oldest city in the world, occupied from stone age, when people lived in limestone caves and gradually started to build walls to partially enclose the entrance and then started to add other walls and eventually building houses above and in front of the caverns. This is also the town where Mel Gibson’s Passion of Christ was filmed – film I have not seen yet - I will now have to borrow it on DVD.

Back in London, we headed to Cambridge on Sunday to tour the university city and take a boat trip on the river Cam, which was full of people punting their rental boats in all conceivable directions. Amazingly, in spite of some close calls, we did not see anybody falling in the water. It would have been an unpleasant experience because in spite of this Sunday being close to the end of May, the weather was rather chilly.