I was in Paris part of this week-end, where I had planned to attend the Bourbaki Seminar lecture of E. Breuillard on the recent works of Einsiedler, Lindenstraus, Michel and Venkatesh. Embarrassing scheduling mistakes on my part forced me to miss it, however, and to take an earlier train to Holland (where I am now, attending the conference on the analytic theory of automorphic forms coinciding with the 65th birthday of R. Bruggeman). Fortunately, I did manage on Saturday to pick up a copy of the physical Bourbaki report, so this was not entirely a disaster.
From Paris to Holland, I took the Thalys train, which is distinguished by having wireless on board and by quadrilingual announcements: French, because it starts from Paris and goes through parts of French-speaking Belgium, Dutch, because it crosses also Dutch-speaking Belgium and one branch reaches Holland, German, because of the other branch going to Köln, and finally English, for good measure.
In this multilingual environment, one notices that the names of a number of towns changes with the language; for instance, Köln is Cologne (famous for its eau) in French and English. The prize of variation on this trip was Liège, alias Luijk, alias Lüttich (alias Liege, if one wants to be picky). Hence the question of the day: which town has the most different names? (Say within same-alphabet countries, to avoid issues of transliteration).
