My previous post was mostly graffiti; this one is all graffiti. I do have some more photos of actual scenery coming up in the next batch, though.

Insulindeplein, also known as Berenkuil (which seems to mean "the bear pit"), is a double roundabout on one corner of the campus of the Technical University of Eindhoven, the Netherlands. Double, because the outer motorway roundabout surrounds a smaller bicycle roundabout (with a double ring). The bicycle roundabout is on a lower level than the cars, and lies within an enclosed oval park area connected to the outer sides of the motorways by four tunnels leading to eight ramps. The walls of the ramps leading down to the tunnels, the tunnels themselves, and the walls of the inner park are all covered with graffiti, some of it years old; apparently the municipality tolerates or even approves of graffiti art here as a way of keeping it out of other parts of town.

Anyway, while in Eindhoven I took quite a few photos of the ring and the graffiti in it; gallery here.

I took the Tuesday of my week in the Netherlands off, to go sightseeing in Amsterdam. We ended up spending much of the day sitting on canal boats and touring the Rijksmuseum and Van Gogh Museum, but we also found a nice tapas restaurant on Spuistraat (from which I took the following photo) and an interesting neighborhood nearby heavily covered in graffiti (most of the rest of the gallery).

It's been almost a month since I took them, but I finally found time to finish off processing my photos from London. Gallery online here. Unlike the other places we visited, I didn't split it into many smaller folders, because the photos were too varied. Subjects included the London Eye, South Bank skater park, Tate Modern, British Museum, Greenwich Observatory, British Library, and the markets on Portobello Road.

My photos from Prague are (finally) online. Sadly, I never did get a good shot of the astrological clock, and the ones from the mirror maze in the Eiffel tower didn't come out. Prague was shut down the first couple days we were there for a couple of national holidays, but it didn't really affect the touristy parts of the city where we were sightseeing.It was very helpful to have local friends; I think we found quite a bit more of the city than we would have on our own.

Another amusing incident happened here, that I also failed to capture on film: in the middle of the Charles Bridge one day, we ran into Subhash Suri with his wife and family (a daughter and son roughly the same age as ours). He's been on sabbatical in Zurich and came over as a tourist for the weekend...

As we get ready to leave Vienna, I've also finished processing my photos from Slovenia. Gallery here.

Some additional travel notes:

• Not in our Vienna guidebooks but worth a visit: the Globe Museum at the National Library and the Museum of Art Fakes near Hundertwasserhaus.
• It's hard to tell without a head-to-head comparison, but Siebensternbraü's Prager Dunkles seems like a good match for Guinness. Ottakringer Dunkles, not so much, though it's ok as dark beers go.
• We didn't make it to the Hofburg, but we did take a tour through Schönbrunn. Other tourists told us later that was the right choice.
• Similarly, in Slovenia, we didn't make it to the more famous Postojna Cave, but we did (as part of the conference excursion) see Škocjanske Jame. Again, the right choice, I think. The first part of Škocjan is just a limestone cave like many others, but the huge underground river canyon in the second part is amazing, like something out of the Lord of the Rings.
• We are bad tourists: we've come all the way to Vienna and not even tried to see anything related to opera or Mozart.

My gallery of photos from Ireland is now up. Some highlights:

The first batch of photos, of King John's Castle, were from the day I arrived with Mike Goodrich; we went sightseeing in the city in an attempt to stay awake and fight the jet lag, but not much else was open. The rest are from the day after the conference, when we took a bus tour of the west of Ireland:The Cliffs of Moher and The Burren. We were greatly entertained by the guide's talk about alien species and celtic tigers. But we only had three actual stops, at the Cliffs, the coast in the Burren, and Poulnaborne, also in the Burren. I would have had a fine time exploring any of the many ruined castles and old churches we passed, but we only slowed down for them, no stops. To be fair, the tour was very effective at showing me parts of Ireland that I likely wouldn't have gotten to on my own, and the group of people I spent most of the time with (Elena, Bettina, and myself) were responsible for some of the delays that may have prevented later stops... Anyway, after getting back to Limerick, we decided to make up for the tour's lacks by exploring a nearby ruin ourselves (with the addition of Ileana), including an interesting climb up its somewhat broken spiral stair. We then had a pleasant two-mile walk to town for dinner. So the third batch of photos represents that walk and exploration, and the final shot was while waiting for our table to be ready. The walk back was a lot darker and a little scarier (for those worried about werewolves, anyway), and didn't result in more photos.