nottingham

So Friday i had a conference in nottingham, which is somewhere in the middle of england. I didnt even know the place existed outside of robin hood until a 2 years ago when marko told me he had spent a year there. So it turns out that not only does nottingham exist, but it is located right next to sherwood forest...amazing huh?
Actually that is about the most exciting thing that can be said about the place. The town/city itself is drab and grey, i can see why marko hated it. It is too big to be cute and too small to be a city, in the sense that at least manchester is. It is dull, there is little to do or see except a fake castle and some robin hood kitsh. There are two universities, neither of them really well regarded, and neither of them particularly attractive. The one holding the conference was relatively new, designed in the kind of university-campus “modern” architecture that will look dated and hideous in 20 years....kind of like all the buildings of the university of novi sad. I am sure they were the height of modern in 1970s! The conference room was awful, the ventilation system seemed to be down and within an hour we were all yawning and the windows were steamed up.
The conference organisor seemed like a really nice guy, and there were three other guys who seemed ok....the girls were pretty awful for the most part, especially the english ones. I had lunch with a 3 women who spent most of the the time talking about the gym, their diets, and how much wieght they resolved to loose in the new year. YUCK! Needless to say, they were all overwieght and out of shape! There were a few exceptions, there were three girls from york (two were actually taiwanese, and not fat) who seemed ok and told me i have to come up to york, and one girl from trinity in dublin was ok as well....the rest were atrocious. The talks were up and down. One of the girls from york presented her ideas which were obviously still in the beginning stages, but which were really interesting (age as travel)....the problem with these conferences is that by the time the second session came around, i was so brain dead that i couldnt really process what was being said....
The journey back was a kleidoscope of depressing grey downs, the majority of which i had never heard of. The english train network is illogical, the train lines run north to south, but there is almost nothing going east-west, so the people coming from places just a bit east or west of nottingham spent hours trying to get to the place. The trains here are also obscenely expensive, and got more so on 1 january. So from london to nottingham, the ticket was slightly over 50 pounds return.....the girl from dublin paid 27 pounds return to fly over! No logic....