Today I went outside of Sydney, to see a bit of the landscape. Various people had suggested the Blue Mountains as a nice place to go to, hence I went to Central and had a look at the network map. It turned out that quite many stations were located in the Blue Mountains, I simply chose a good sounding one, namely Wentworth Falls.
It turned out to be a very good choice, please see the media below. I first arrived in some small town, wherefrom I followed directions to some "National Park". As I wanted to see a bit of landscape, national park seemed just right. After some walk I arrived at a small hut where maps and similar stuff were available. In particular, one map of the whole area hang there, wherefrom I learned that the national park consisted of one central valley and surrounding cliffs.
Multiple routes were available, one going down into the valley, which seemed a nice idea, as I wanted to see as much difference in the landscape as possible. There were some texts saying stuff to the effect of "experienced walkers only", but nothing about not to use sandals.
As you'll likely see in the photos, the track was not always obvious, and once even consisted of a hanging rope, which I actually rather liked (this style of tracks, not the rope).
The sights were beautiful and the landscape really nice. After some hours I emerged on the other side of the valley, where I found that one does not need to go back to the hut, but arrives very near to the town. As I got a bit hungry by then, I visited the local supermarket and bought some "Ginger Nuts" — some small cookies. They were surprisingly hard to chew, but very tasty.
Nothing much happened today, except that a colegue invited me to his martial arts class for "Hapkido" — which was quite similar to what I learned in Germany. Also this was my first time at Bondi Junction, although I didn't really see much of it.
Great! A thunderstorm yesterday, and a not-as-sunny-as-usual day today did a good job undrying my martial arts clothing. No Aikido for me today.
Also we're making some progress with our MFC paper, which is due on June 6th. The ICE technical report progresses as well.
This morning I did some final optimizations to the modelchecker, I don't think there's much to do with it now, maybe somebody else will find a great high-level optimization, but I actually doubt it.