September Tour, 2019
I started writing this blog entry last year, then got distracted by other things, picked it up at various times thereafter, and have now decided to have done with it. Authoring it in TEI was easy; publishing it via CETEICEAN less so. Anyway, here it is. Dealing with graphics is always an issue…
13 September: Bristol to London
Some boxes have been unpacked, and it’s possible to live in Clifton Park Road. But I have commitments on the continent and an urge to enjoy these dying days of free movement.
So with a nod from Mr Maneki-Neko, I abandoned Lilette to do more box work, and took the bus to Temple Meads, whence by Great Western and too many underground trains (top tip, which I had forgotten, there are two underground stations at Paddington: choosing the wrong one condemns you to an extra tedious interchange at Edgware Road) via Liverpool Street and the Central Line to far-flung Stratford-atte-Bowe, arriving in time for tea. I took this in the horrible coffee bar at the station exit, taking the opportunity to recharge my phone so that I could let Elizabeth and Daphne know grand-pere was in town.
It’s only a short walk from Stratford station to their house, and worth the effort especially if Daphne helps trundle my suitcase An agreeable evening in Maryland ensued, during which Daphne prepared a card for her dad since it’s his birthday tomorrow.
14 September: London to Munich
An early start next morning, since the plan is to get an 1100 Eurostar departure. Armed with my special spar-preise DB ticket von London nach Munchen (price 129.90), I head back to Stratford International, so-called, even though no international train has ever stopped here; nor are they likely to any time soon, alas. The sun shines none the less, and the streetscape has its moments:
A commuter train from the wilds of East Anglia deposits me at St Pancras, and I make my way through the usual processing to the Business Lounge, probably for the last time for a while, since my carte blanche membership expires next month.
Farewell to free coffee, free nibbles, and (in Paris) free cocktails. Farewell to a spot of calm before the journey and the sensation of being a member of a bourgeois elite; I am a man of the people once more, no longer worthy of such pampering, and unlikely to become so again any time soon since the number of agencies willing to shell out for my train trips to France is much reduced. Ah well, it was nice while it lasted.
But no matter, it’s time for me and the hoards to board ES9126, the 1110 departure for Brussells. My reserved seat, as usual, at the very end of the train.
The journey across Kent, under the channel, across Northern France, and into Belgium is, of course, utterly unremarkable, just as we like it, and we pull into Brussels Midi on time at 1405. At which point I discover that my promised onward connexion to Munich has already left, half an hour earlier than timetabled when I booked it. I remonstrate with a patient person in the Belgian ticket office, who passes me on to a patient person in the German ticket office. Neither of them can do anything practical other than propose a revised itinerary which, with the best will in the world, will get me into Munich two hours later than planned, precluding a pleasant Bavarian evening dinner. I therefore proceed out of the station into the street and seek some pleasant lunch instead. My anticipated modest 25 minute connexion time has transformed itself into a yawning two hour chasm but the sun is still shining and there are worse places to refresh oneself.
At least the train I am now catching is also re-timed 20 minutes earlier for engineering works. Off we go to Frankfurt on board ICE 215, re-timed but otherwise as reliable and comfortable as ever. At Frankfurt I change onto another ICE train, heading south to München. And so to the Ibis München City, chosen mainly for its proximity to the station, though the fact that they always give me a free drink on arrival may also have encouraged me. And a good night’s sleep, fuelled by fizzy lager.
15 September : Munich to Graz
Next morning, I dilly-dally over a German breakfast, check out, and walk back to the station in a leisurely manner. Hmm, maybe one should stock up on baked goods for the journey? A wide choice of tasty bakery, since this Germany
Which was all a mistake, since my onward train to Graz (the 1017 departure) has been re-timed to leave 30 minutes earlier than expected, i.e. just as I was strolling into the station and assessing the baked goods. Curses. I remonstrate further with a DB person, who seems strangely unmoved. My ticket is endorsed with the splendid phrase “zugbindung aufgehoben” and I am advised to proceed via the 1203 to Bischofshofen, where I can get a connexion to Graz. However, the prospect of hanging around at Munich station for two hours on a boring Sunday morning when the db lounge is closed does not appeal, so I re-assert control of my destiny and plot a slightly different route than they propose even though it won’t get me to Graz any sooner. I get a metro ticket to Munich OstBahnhof, where I catch the 1138 to Salzburg and enjoy a 20 minute pause for refreshment, (an abstemious glass of mineral water on a sunny terrace).
From Salzburg, I proceed on to Bischofshofen, at which place, hard though it it is to spell, I transfer to EC163, the famous Transalpin express, a train so famous indeed that it has its own entry in Wikipedia. This was definitely worth waiting for as its route is mega-scenic and my re-ticketting has placed me in the first class carriage with huge observational windows. The sun is shining and the alpine scenery is indeed exceptionally, well, scenic.
I arrive into Graz at 18h22, precisely two hours later than expected, and take a taxi to my AirBNB, located in a pedestrian street the other side of the park which separates Karl Franzen’s magnificent University from the rest of the city. Ah Austria: how civilised. My residence for the next week is a bed-sit five minutes walk from the Uni, next door to a Chinese restaurant, and handy for the Spar, as well as assorted restaurants.
September 16–19 : Graz
The TEI Conference 2019 duly unfolds, with or without my attention. I confess to feeling somewhat alienated or excluded, though that is, of course, my own choice. After all this time the TEI has to be able to get by without me very well, after all and therefore by extension, I without it. I went to one side meeting of the TEI Council where the long standing question of how to introduce Standoff markup without totally screwing up the existing architecture was thrashed out, or churned about, or generally pondered. I went to some good sessions and some less good. The weather behaved impeccably and the sandwiches were irreproachable, not to mention the tasty packets of wafer biscuits and the curious tiny tubs of pumpkin oil.
The opening plenary was notable because Jan Rybicki suggested that TEI might possibly have something to offer statistically minded distant readers or stylometricians or whatever they are called this week. However, nobody seemed to take this very seriously, nor did I ever find anyone who wanted to go out for dinner with me. I spent many evenings arguing fruitlessly with the appalling telephone banking service offered by Santander. On the whole, and in retrospect, it was a rather depressing week. But the architecture was nice.
September 21 : Graz — Szombethaly
Casting off the dust of academic conferences, I took the 1108 departure from Graz down to the Hungarian border, and a place called Szentgotthárd, possibly the same saint as he of the pass, possibly not. In any case, this was a most agreeable journey, chuntering through the mountains and forests of lower Styria, with their gingerbread-style cottages, rural farmyards, fields of maize and pumpkins mostly now harvested for the winter. The train follows the route of a river, which I am mildly amused to learn is known as the Raab. At Saint Gotthard, I transfer to a waiting Hungarian train, which is a restful green and yellow colour.
Which train continues down the river valley to the nearest town, rejoicing in the name of Szombethaly, about which I know nothing, except that it was the birthplace of (a) Saint Martin, according to ancient medieval tradition and (b) Leo Bloom’s father, according to James Joyce. Arriving at 1915 I have time to admire a rather fine baroque station, and to wander down a main street clearly reconstructed quite recently, before checking into my allegedly boutique hotel at ?. Bags dumped, I sally forth in search of dinner. But who is this familiar figure, turning his head to greet me half way down the main drag? How very conceptual.
Dinner, when I find it, is decidedly Hungarian, being goulash and noodles, to the accompaniment of loud and very annoying light music.
September 22: Szombethaly — Budapest
I do have a little time to explore Szombethaly next morning, and the sun is shining in an attempt to encourage me. There are flowers and icecream and people shopping. In fact, it appears to be thriving on EU laissez-faire, and looks superficially like most other cities of this size across the continent. I didn’t have time to check out St Martin’s birthplace because it was located on the wrong side of the dual carriage way I was walking along towards the station.
Opposite the station, which I reached far too early, is the usual row of somewhat depressed snack bars and cafes, with a view over some strange sculpture and a seemingly abandoned bicycle. I had a coffee and wondered why for a while before soldiering on to catch the next train to Budapest, a train with first class coaches that boast real compartments and slightly tired red plush seats. Onward, through amusingly named stations like Tata, and hoorah for Budapest Keleti station which boasts the biggest information screen I have ever seen.
My phone beeps imperiously and lo, it is Carolin who has just arrived at her hotel and wants to start plotting our ELTeC course forthwith. My phone battery and signal are both failing, but I manage to find out where I am supposed to meet her and scurry down to the wonderful Hungarian metro.
September 23–24: Budapest
I am staying in a rather posh hotel on the umpteenth floor, commanding splendid views of what is probably a major traffic intersection, since I can see a bus station and a metro entrance as well as shoals of taxis all flowing beneath me. But duty calls, so off I trot to eat a light lunch and try to agree a plan of campaign for the next few days. The University buildings are a short walk away and a little less splendid than the ones in Graz, but built on a similar scale, with lots of staircases and grand corridors opening onto high ceilinged slightly grubby lecture halls. The gig is a COST Training Workshop on how to prepare texts for ELTeC, presented jointly with Martina Scholger from Graz and Christian Reul from Wurzburg but sadly no-one else much, since the training session is scheduled to run in parallel with the COST Workgroups, and indeed in parallel with other training sessions. I am mildly peeved about this, since it means I don’t get to argue with anyone about corpus design or encoding decisions but also mildly relieved since it means whatever the decisions (if any) are, it won’t be my fault. But the timetable is agreed, the materials are all more or less in place, and about a dozen people have turned up, including a couple of brainy Hungarians (one of them sporting James Cummings style socks with toes), a bloke in a yarmulka, and a lost Italian.
Over the next three days Martina brings everyone up to speed, more or less, on oXygen and TEI basics while I put in a very brief appearance at a Management Committee meeting; Christian introduces OCR4ALL ; and then I drive them through three prepared exercises: firstly using the magic of regexp to introduce basic tagging into some entirely markup-free Polish texts from Maceij; secondly using the magic of xslt (and oXygen) to do the same for some texts which have been saved in an Abbyy XML format, as tweaked by Christian; and thirdly, ditto ditto for some common or garden Word DOCX files. At some point during all this, there was also a plenary from visiting Australian celeb K Bode, though I found this almost entirely unintelligible. Anyway, a few new ELTeC novels were finally produced, and the two brainy Hungarians at least clearly enjoyed themselves, but by the end of the second day I was ready to run away again, which indeed I did during the penultimate coffee break, on the grounds that I had a flight to catch.
September 25: Budapest — Paris — Caen
Abandoning my principles in the interests of economy and previous committment, I allow myself to be processed via yet another airport, for another tedious Easy Jet flight, this time from Budapest to Paris CDG, which should arrive in time for me to zip across to Paris Montmartre and catch the last train to Caen. As, astonishingly, it does.
Being kettled repeatedly at Budapest airport before boarding is less horrible than it might have been since I have paid extra to get a seat at the front of the plane; the long walk around the Alphaville-like decor of Roissy Aeroport from the terminal to the RER station was no worse than usual; the RER train was no fuller of low life and american tourists than usual; and the intercité to Caen was actually on time. Caen station, or rather its entrance, seems to have moved since I was last there, but I still contrive to get myself to the Hotel du Chateau and collapse.
September 26: Caen
I am here for the annual meeting of the Conseil Scientifique of the Maison de la Recherche, a fixture not to be missed in my calendar (I think the first I attended was in May 2012 ). This select little group of aged sages has after all this time coalesced into a community of sorts which I am proud to feel a part of. And we are always treated to a feast of intellectual stimulation as well as some excellent dinners, some insight into the politics of the establishment as well as some intelligent conversation over lunch, not to mention the agreeable sensation of being valued, a heady mixture which Pascal Buleon is a past master in administering. This year we were introduced to Metope, the latest all singing all dancing TEI-based publishing framework from PUCC, which I rather enjoyed. We dined this year, as ever, in the duke’s Chateau, which to my enormous pleasure has recently acquired a large statue apparently named Lou.
September 27 : Caen — Bristol
I was planning to enjoy the journey back to Bristol, which I had planned to make by means of TER to Granville, a boat to Jersey, and a hedge-hopping flight from there. But stormy seas in the Manche meant that my ferry wasn’t going to sail, which in turn meant I had to reorganize my return entirely, cutting short my time in Caen. On the plus side, I got to ride back to Paris on a proper train; on the minus side I had to return to stinky old Paris CDG for an Easyjet to Bristol. Oh well. The actual flight from Paris to Bristol took 55 minutes, only 10 minutes more than the bus ride from Bristol Airport into town. I then had a twenty minute wait at College Green for the number 8 bus back to Clifton Down. Something not quite right there.
