When I left Querétaro on Sept. 27, I went back to Mexico. I arrived at the airport a little before 8pm and my mom drove us to a plaza where an African singer was playing as part of the Fifth Chihuahua Festival of Art. The music was great and I was very excited that Juárez organizes such a cool festival, a festival that offers free music every night for over a week, bringing artists from all over the world. I only got to see Habid Koite (the African singer), but it was nice to know that this was offered.

A couple of days later I went to a play called "Ni el Sol ni la muerte pueden mirarse de frente" ("Neither the Sun or Death can look each other face to face"), a play by Wajdi Mouawad, a French-Libanese playwright. I didn't like the play at all. While the play used cool tricks like using projectors, playing with shadows and other things, the play had an incomprehensible story, a story which also seemed lifeless. The actors couldn't instill any life to that dialogue. I was confused for a lot of it and wished it ended sooner. However, some critics liked it and it seems that with more knowledge of mythology (like knowing who Cadmo is), it would be more interesting.

In my time in Juárez between the Ibero and coming back to New England I had a good time with my family (visiting also my uncle and father).

After leaving Cd. Juárez, I was one day in New Hampshire, a day I spent with Yuliia. The next day it was time to go to Orono, Maine.

Michael, Mark and I left New Hampshire at about 2pm. During the long drive, we saw the beautiful white mountains and enjoyed the foliage season. Mark and I talked about many things (mostly politics and math) and before we knew it, we were in Orono, Maine. That night we went to have dinner at the only restaurant that looked decent. The food was good.

I was procrastinating at night, not writing my talk, but at some point I checked the schedule and realized my talk wasn't the next day (Saturday) but two days from it (Sunday). I went to bed with great joy.

The next day, I enjoyed the conference. In the breaks I worked out some stuff about my research which made it much easier to plan the talk.
After the talks ended at around 5:30pm, we went to a pizza place for the "banquet". There I mainly spent time talking to Andrew Pollington, a number theorist who worked at BYU many years, but now works for the NSF. It was fun talking to him and his wife. I got to learn about what working at the NSF entails, how they liked Utah and hear fun cricket stories.
I had a really good time at the pizza place (even though the pizza was horrendous).

After I got to the hotel room and procrastinated a bit, I worked on my talk, which I finished at about 6:30am, thereby eliminating my sleep time.
The talk itself didn't go that great, mainly because I was tired and drank coffee (something I never do) which made me talk faster and not be in a good condition to give jokes and other things. I gave this talk again a week later in the Number Theory Seminar and did a much better job.

The ride back with Mark was also very nice. The conference was a very good experience.

Since I've been back from all this travelling. I have been working on writing a paper on Burgess, got some math meetings out of the way and played lots of soccer. The math is going well.

The soccer went as follows: On Tuesday my team won 4-2, I played well and had an amazing diving save. I also played a friendly game afterwards where we won 9-3 and I out first two goals (while being the goalkeeper). On Wednesday we tied 3-3, which felt like a loss, as we were up 3-0. I played well, but if I had played great we would have won. Those 3 goals they scored on me were savable. Hard or very hard to save, but savable. On Friday, I played poorly as a forward, mainly because I don't have cleats and this tournament is outdoors, hence cleats are necessary to run well. We lost 2-1 in a close match.

The other important event this week was adopting a dog. Yuliia and I have been wanting a dog for some time and after discussing it with our landlord we filled a form to apply for adoption of a dog of the Humane Society. Surprisingly, the next day we get a phone call that some dogs are up for adoption (they had told us that there weren't any available when we filled the form) and invited us to see them. We saw six dogs. We considered three dogs and the next day we saw all of them again (first day we spent two hours at the shelter, second day we spent three hours). We walked them and played with them and decided on getting a young Newfoundland (mixed with Labrador). The dog is smaller than normal Newfoundlands because of the mix breed, he is between 2 and 5 years old. He weighs 91 pounds. The dog is very sweet. He is house trained, doesn't bark, and he is very gentle when walking. Yuliia and I loved him and we adopted him. Since we are going out of town next week, the humane society will keep the dog one more week, so while he is adopted, he hasn't been to our house yet. Yuliia and I are looking forward to having him home.