planes, trains, and taxis

After a very pleasant evening in Copenhagen it was up early and on to the next adventure for us. We got on to the right train and chugged off across the water to Sweden. This method of travel had been suggested by one of my colleagues and probably was great for someone on a vacation. For us, it was long and fairly torturous. We saw some pretty countryside and I even saw a beautiful deer standing in a field. Ok, been there, done that. We got to Borås after changing trains for the last hour of the trip and it was pouring. As we de-traiined (?) the two waiting taxis zoomed off. We huddled under a bridge with four other travelers who were clearly natives. They loaded themselves into the first taxi that appeared and with some advice to us to go knock on the door of the taxi office, which was part of the train station but looked abandoned, they roared away laughing merrily and leaving us to our fate. Ha, bloody ha! When we finally were able to rouse a taxi driver we were pretty fed up with the whole thing and soaked to the skin as well. Bear in mind that it is now about 1:00pm and the conference is due to start at 1:30. We get to the hotel, Michele runs in with her bags while I hold the taxi hostage. We splash into the conference venue at about 1:40, do the registration thing and dripping gently into the linoleum we squelch off to the welcome session. I take motes but don't have much sense of what he was talking about except that icebergs came into it. At 2:45 or so there is a break and we are desperate for caffeine. The coffee is fiendish but seems to perk us up. I go up to the room where our presentation is to be to get the powerpoints loaded. There doesn't seem to be anybody around to help so I open dropbox and start downloading my slides. While I'm doing that a student comes in and seeing that the projector isn't on pushes a button which shuts everything down. Oh swell. I'm wet, I'm tired and I've been in the same clothes since yesterday. Very nice. In the end whatever she did proved to be un-doable and we had to change rooms. This involved further delay while all four presenters loaded their slides from thumb drives. By the time we started a good 20 minutes had already elapsed. The moderator never asked the presenters. to be conscious of the time and the first three took their time and gassed on and on. You don't want to cause an international incident at these things, but really it was painful sitting there knowing that we would have about 7 minutes while all these other bozos -er, distinguished speakers, were taking their full 20 plus. And so the great adventure ended, not in a burst of glory, but a short sputter and sigh. Our slides were great, the talk was fine, what there was of it. Abiut three minutes into the talk, a great noisy crowd of participants started clomping into the room expecting the last talk of the day and I found myself having to talk over them. Well, I guess that is life on the international conference circuit. We got there, showed our slides, the paper will be published, and who the hell will care? A lot of traveling for a seven minute finale. Anyway, trying not to be bitter.

The day ended with a pleasant group dinner at the local kulturhaus and some exquisitely performed, incredibly depressing Jacques Brel songs (in Swedish). The whole thing just getting too surreal for me. Michele went off to see the library and I retreated tomy hotel room and went to bed.

The next day I was able to attend the first sessions of the day before I had to depart for the airpoort and my return trip to Copenhagen. I did meet and tallk to some very interesting peoople including a woman from New Zealand, several colleagues from Australia, my old pal Jim from Canada, and two young women from Namibia I think. Was the whole thing worth it? Hard to say at this point. It was great traveling with Michele and we actually got some work done and the conference paper isn't bad, so who knows.

I took a plane back to Copenhagen having had enough of trains, and had a restful evening catching up on emails and the blog. Now I'm about to pack up and head off to the terminal for a flight to London and the last lap of the trip. I'm meeting my friends in London tomorrow afternoon and seeing a show called War Horse (highly recommended by Edward P.) tomorrow night. And THEN home sweet home...