Backblog (2): Norway

Skipping over a boring half-week with work and unsuccessfully trying to reschedule the generic Language in Context slot to Mondays, or Tuesdays, or anything but Wednesday afternoon... and we arrive at the 2nd PhD Conference in Linguistics and Philology, which was held in Bergen (Norway -- hence the post title) on June 4-6.

Flying out on the Sunday morning, a direct Widerøe flight from Edinburgh to Bergen in a relatively small propellor plane, although it was probably slightly bigger than the one I went to Shetland on last year. I had some difficulties tuning in to the flight attendant's strong Bergen accent, especially with the noise of the motors, but after five years of not actually speaking Norwegian I turned out to still be able to do so anyway. In Bergen I managed to get Norwegian money and find the airport bus to the center of town, and then quickly the hotel.

Hotel. This may be a bit of an overstatement. For £35 a night you would expect more than just a bed and a sink that doesn't actually drain, even in Norway. The light wasn't brilliant either (definitely not more than 30 W) but as it was summer and far North that didn't really matter as it didn't really get dark anyway. I quickly redefined 'hotel' as 'place to kip and nothing else' and stuck to it.

Went out wandering for the rest of the afternoon and evening, mostly oscillating between Bergenhus fort, the park at Lille Lungegårdsvann and Vågen/Bryggen. Found out where I could buy food (the Narvesen kiosk near Galleriet, or the one at Bryggen, or the Baker Brun at Zakariasbryggen) and did so. Danishes, which they call wienerbrød, are great. We have the skillingbolle, which is the local specialty: a cinnamonny Danish with a spiral of white icing. The prinsessebolle, which I can't really remember what it was but I think it's a skillingbolle without the icing. And the skolebolle, which is the skillingbolle with a big blob of set custard in the middle. Behold my breakfast for the next three days. I also need to mention the Imsdal bottled water with lime and fiber taste. Fiber, yes. Oddness.

It was fantastic weather both at Bergenhus fort...



... and at Lille Lungegårdsvann. (And also at Bryggen but I don't want to overdo it on the photo front.)



Then on Monday started the conference, which was the 'real' (right...) reason for going to Bergen. My talk was the first one up after the plenary, and it went alright. This meant that I had the rest of the conference to relax. As usual, you meet people on the first day of the conference that you hang out with for the rest of it. These were JT, a Serbian girl who grew up in Britain and is doing her PhD in Brighton on the syntax/semantics of modals; MF, a Spanish woman who is working on translation in Swansea and speaks with a Welsh lilt; and BUJ, who is from Hedmark but spent five years in Glasgow and sounds like it!

Best talk at the conference was probably the Polish girl who was talking about weak and strong adjective declensions in Old English. Interesting topic, well-presented and a convincing case. The worst talk... well, in reality this was probably the guy from Israel who rush-read through his paper with many an example in Hebrew and didn't quite succeed in telling us what he was actually talking about. But the cash prize goes to... RM from Zaporižža National University in the Ukraine. "Linguophilosophic parameters of English innovations in the sphere of new technologies." God knows what that was about; or probably he doesn't because it was completely incomprehensible and drowned in sixteen-line sentences with five-syllable words. It wouldn't have been so bad if she didn't always ask smart-arsy questions at all (!) the talks.

Also met the Icelandic incarnation of Miss Piggy. JB was chief organizer of the conference, and appears to suffer from a complexity of complexes. She really, really likes herself, is very proud of her achievements, and blames not getting all sorts of important jobs on old boys' networks. We call this a 'victim complex'. Of course these people, even though they haven't published as much as you, may well be as qualified, and just by 'being a single mother and working like a slave for eighteen hours a day' you don't always get what you want. Tough. She did get massive funding (£1m) for a project on case in Indo-European. Which, according to JB, shows that if you think big enough, it's possible to get funding, even for a woman, and even in the humanities. Think big enough. Would that be the reason for grabbing a bowl of peanuts ten minutes after the conference dinner while exclaiming, 'Gee, I'm hungry again already!'...

The flights back were okay. The plane from Bergen to Copenhagen was slightly delayed, which meant that I had to spend an extra half hour in an airport without decent shopping facilities whatsoever (yes, fags and booze, but who cares about that). The plane was a gigantic jumbo and I was sat right at the back next to a woman from Turku who had to run in Copenhagen to get her connecting flight to Stockholm. (Zigzagging your way through Scandinavia, nice...) Then had to spend some time in Copenhagen Airport until the flight to Edinburgh. Had a look at the gate where the Atlantic Airways plane to the Faroes was parked, but didn't recognize anyone. (Hey, I would easily recognize 45 Faroese people, which is 1/1000 of their population. This is a much larger proportion than what I know of the Dutch or Scottish population, and the chances of Faroese people flying to the Faroes from Denmark are also quite substantial, so it was worth a try, especially when bored.)

Danes have a strange music taste, as a quick browse through the music store showed. The new Runrig album was at number 7 in their charts. Now I like Runrig, but even in Scotland it doesn't get to that high a chart position. The Danes also like Michael Learns to Rock, which I thought stopped making music aeons ago. Apparently not.

Oh well, I bought Danish water (Egekilde) and Swedish chocolate, and then a typically Danish hotdog which was very mustardy and little meaty. (Good thing I had the Danish water...) The girl who sold me the hotdog was obviously Danish but when I asked for a hotdog in Norwegian she answered in Swedish. I would probably have understood the Danish, at least I managed to understand the Danish the rest of the airport people spoke. (Mainly the three people I had to ask for directions to the nearest cash machine which was in a very odd location.)

The plane to Edinburgh was way too small for its own good. It was a jet plane, but it was the size of the thing I went to Shetland on. That didn't really add up, and I wasn't really happy during take off, which otherwise was very pretty as you could see the bridge over the Øresund, which starts right next to the airport. (Well I think it comes out of a tunnel underneath the airport there.) Must say I didn't really like the weather report for Edinburgh: overcast and 12 degrees, after having had bright sunshine and 25 degrees in Norway (!). But I survived, and the whole experience was a Good Thing.

Now it's time to go to a dinner party at EM's.

Backblog

And then suddenly three months went by without any updates. Oops. Which means that I now have an enormous backlog of adventures to relate. I don't think I'm going to manage to remember all the way back to March, but the recent past should be alright. So here we go, going in approximate reverse chronological disorder...

Last Saturday, JH and I went to see AF's choir in concert. It was nicely done, although we both had our thoughts about the singing skills of the girl with ringlets. AF also introduced us to his new boy. I say introduced; really AF just vaguely waved in the general direction and we had to wait until the boy introduced himself. He seems nice enough, but because the choir insisted on going to some odd pub miles away, we ended the night with a cup of tea at home and didn't get to meet him properly. As an aside, I was mildly annoyed by the gay militantism in the choir. Is there really a need to re-write all the lyrics? Especially those of negro spirituals from the abolition struggle? Oh, and claiming HIV as a gay disease, I thought the whole idea was to try to convince Bush that it isn't?

Moving on... On Friday I was extremely unmotivated, so I ended up going into town. I didn't buy any clothes because H&M decided not to have a sale on, but I did buy a 10-DVD set of Tintin cartoons for £20. Childhood memories. Although of course in my childhood Tintin didn't speak with an American accent. Still, have been enjoying some of the movies (there's 21 in all) already, but am trying not to watch too many of them too soon.

Friday's non-motivationality was directly related to Thursday, when I decided to try to work on the Evil Reviewer's comments on my taboo-language article. I need to relate it more to recent literature on language death. Great. I did a nice search, found nothing in the past ten years on language death apart from some monographs along the lines of 'Look at all the different ways language behaves. If we let languages die, we'll lose all of it which will greatly hamper the study of linguistics'. Agreed and all, but incredibly irrelevant to my article. As a result, within ten minutes of starting the editing I had crumpled up the piece of paper and physically chucked it against the wall, and sent AM an e-mail saying I was thinking of telling the editor to sod off with his effing journal. Still waiting for the masterplan to bypass the Evil Reviewer and get my article published...

All of last week was celebration week, really. On Monday, CH passed her viva and we had drinks in the Pear Tree. On Wednesday, RRV passed her viva, which was celebrated in style on Thursday with a mini-banquet and a concert by RRV's trio -- two flutes and piano, well impressed as well by TK's piano skills! -- in St Cecilia's Hall. And on Friday we celebrated AR's distinction in her MSc by drinks in the Pear Tree followed by Chinese buffet at Waverley.

The Saturday before that AF asked whether I wanted to go to Treefest with him. We ran into TB at the bus stop, and later also found some Shambles walking about. And later WB said he was coming too, so it was a big group. Treefest is a nice idea: see what things you can do with wood (especially the handicraftsmen were nice, although whether making wooden cubes from a tree with a chainsaw is a craft is another question) and make sure we treat our forests and our environment nicely. Too bad it was infested with tree-hugging hippies. Yuck! I wash my hands off them!

Walked home with WB and decided to try out the wooden spatula he bought at Treefest (for £3, but then again, it did come with the guarantee that this was the most fantastic spatula ever, and once you use it, you will never use another spatula again). So we had a stirfry, the spatula worked okay, and spent the rest of the evening pottering about in WB's room which turns out to double as a music studio. Some nepotist promotion: see some of the tracks at www.barras.ws (esp. 'Jane' and the Buddy Holly cover are nice), which incidentally weren't recorded in his room but in our office!