Travel

In June 2001, Bob and I traveled to Lijiang, the "Shangri-La" of China, in Yunnan Province. The people native to this part of China are not Han, but a minority culture called Naxi. Pictographic calligraphy is still practiced here. On the left we see a native calligrapher working on the piece shown on the right, which he made for Bob on the spot. On the front is the phrase in Naxi characters, on the back the same phrase in traditional Chinese letters. The English translation is roughly, "An intelligent and willful horse can overcome all difficulties."

In December 2001, we traveled to Stockholm for the hundredth anniversary of the Nobel Prize. On the left is pictured the stage with 250 living Laureates. Anita was seated in the center section with other spouses. To the right is the Nobel Banquet that traditionally follows the ceremony. Anita is seated to the far right. To the far left is Laureate Bob Richardson, currently (August 2003) the Provost of Cornell University. He is seated next to Dominique Parchet, the wife of Horst Stormer, who shared the Prize with Bob Laughlin in 1998. Between Dominique and Anita is Prof. Doug Osheroff, who shared the Prize with Richardson and is currently chair of the Physics Department at Stanford.

In June 2002 we attended a physics conference the Chinese University of Hong Kong, in Kowloon. This photograph is taken from the observation deck on Victoria Peak, on Hong Kong Island, just before sunset. That evening we had a terrific dinner downtown featuring green cow lung soup.

In June 2003 we attended a meeting of Nobel Laureates in St. Petersburg, Russia. During this trip we attended the first award ceremony of the International Global Energy Prize, at which both President Vladimir Putin and Ex-President Gorbachov were present. The highlight of the evening was not three, but six tenors, competing to see who could sing the best aria, followed by a banquet and fireworks at 10:00 pm (when it was still daylight). This photo shows an excursion to Catherine the Great's summer palace in Tsarskoe Selo, in English the "Tsar's village."

In July 2004, we traveled to the Republic of Korea to attend Bob's inauguration at KAIST (Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology) in Daejeon. We later traveled to witness the 35th International Physics Olympiad at the Pohang University of Science and Technology. Here we are visiting the thousand-year-old city sites of Gyeongju. On the left is a photo of a mound tomb called Cheongmachong or the "flying horse tomb" dating to the Silla people of 1400 years ago. On the right is the Chenomseongdae observatory, the oldest existing astronomical observatory in the Orient, built during Queen Seondeok's reign.