Before leaving on Fall Break, I got to go to a talk by the inventor of the Lénárt sphere, which is a tool for helping students understand spherical geometry. Pictured here is my construction of an equilateral triangle on one of the spheres, as described in Book 1, Proposition 1 of Euclid's Elements. :)
When we weren't using the Lénárt spheres themselves, we messed around with oranges. I made this monstrosity myself!
I saw this funky little statue in Poiana and loved it.
The Black Church in Brașov, so named for a fire that blackened its walls in the 1600s.
One of the narrowest streets in Europe! It was built to give firefighters access between two larger streets in Brașov.
Catherine's Gate in Brașov, one of the remnants of the old walls for the city. The four little corner turrets mean that Brașov has the authority to decide capital punishment.
Looking down on Brașov from high on a hill!
These are the Hollywood-style letters above Brașov up close.
Dipika and Hiro, two of the other BSM students who climbed the hill with me. :)
Peleș Castle from afar, featuring some of the beautiful tree colors we had this weekend.
We weren't allowed to take pictures inside of Peleș Castle, but these are some of the pretty bits of artwork on the courtyard walls.
Bran castle was very different, with lots of bare stone and narrow staircases.
View looking out from Bran Castle.
This is about half of Bran Castle, as seen from inside the courtyard.
Our host gave us really good soup!
As far as I can tell it's foggy every morning in Transylvania. This was the best fog photo I got.
One of the better photos I got from the Sugo Cave.
One of the other BSM students trying to get through "The Birthing Hole," the tightest squeeze on our route. Past this point, I couldn't bring my phone because I would have broken it wriggling around.
Boating on the Red Lake, featuring some of the other BSM students.
A beautiful mountain gorge that we walked through on Monday.
There were a lot of very friendly dogs and cats out and about. Jake (pictured here) named this one George, and he followed us the entire time we were walking through the gorge.
Dipika found a pretty purple flower! It's all one petal.
Exterior tower of Dârjiu fortified church, one of the oldest Unitarian churches in the world.
Interior of the same church.
One of the murals on the wall, featuring the sort of medieval art that people love to make memes with. Tag yourself?
A hilltop cemetary in Sighișoara that I thought was really beautiful.
To be honest, I don't know what this building is. It was in Sighișoara and I thought it looked cool so I took a bunch of photos of it.
The top of the "Echo Chamber" in Salina Turda, which extends downwards for about 150 meters. Sound echoes for a loooong time if you yell from right here.
The main open area in Salina Turda. It's hard to get a sense of scale from the photo, but that's a Ferris wheel in the bottom center, and the lights at the far end of the room are 13 flights of stairs that you need to take to get to the bottom. It's HUGE.
In the same room, there's an underground lake with some weird, UFO-like structures built in it. I couldn't get very good photos of it but hopefully you get the idea. :)
The stairs one takes to get back aboveground from the salt mine.
There were a bunch of hanging lightbulbs in Cluj, and that's pretty much all I got to photograph in Cluj so here ya go.
The whole reason we had fall break now was October 23rd being a national holiday in Hungary, which these signs in Cluj commemorate.
The Romanian currency is the lei, some samples of which are depicted below. The bills feel weird and I much prefer the Hungarian forint.
After my trip, I went to a topology talk given by Dr. David Gay, who is working at the Max Planck Institute in Bonn this year. Before the talk, I helped him build this dodecahedron out of paper. It's a fun shape to make because they fit together to tile 3D space, like squares and hexagons fit together to tile the plane.
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