Braunschweig City

From Wednesday ’till Saturday I was in Braunschweig for a conference on typology of writing systems. I’m usually busy with literature and the world around it, but I used to work for a professor who is more occupied with phonology, morphology and stuff like that (yeah! go look it up!). And when I did, one of things I had to was help organising the previous conference in Nijmegen (and maintain the website of the association organising it). Anyway, that was an awesome experience for me and the conference itself was pretty interesting as well. So, since then I’ve moved on more definitely to literature, but I kept my position as ‘Editor of the Website’ of the association. Bob, one of the guys I went to Rhodos with, was attending this year’s conference in Braunschweig, and since I still was involved in the association I decided to hop along.

It all looks pretty empty on the photo, but it is in fact – not. This photo was taken during one of the coffee breaks (we had to take a representative photo to get money from the university). Most of the presentations were quite interesting, but sitting in a room concentrating on what is being said for 8 hours a day was a bit much. The final talks went a bit past my head unfortunately. There were a lot of nice researchers there. We spent a lot of time talking to a crazy (in a good way) French duo who kept on correcting each other and being very firm in their assumptions (which was good for discussion purposes).

Also worth mentioning was our hotel (we had a cheaper hotel then most conference attendees): it was run by an older German couple who clearly hadn’t heard of what the modern world calls a ‘personal computer.’ Bills were presented handwritten in paper and it was quite obvious from entering on that there wouldn’t be wireless internet (though there was a network at the conference – that was good). The couple from the hotel were a bit like parents, we were expecting them to wait up for us in the evening asking us why we weren’t there for dinner and where the hell we have been the past hours, since we have to get up early again tomorrow?! But they did no such thing. Instead they treated us like their own children during breakfast and gave us personal attention (mehr Kaffee?) even when we didn’t ask for it. As a going away present we got a nice pen with a liitle red light in it. AWESOME! I would have expected a more traditional gift though – the interior of the hotel was quite kitsch and over the top… Yet I would recommend the hotel to anyone who hasn’t got a lot of money to spend. It made the trip extra nice.

Tomorrow I’m going to see Jason Mraz in the Heineken Music Hall. I have quite a heavy cold (since Friday actually) and hope I’ll be able to go tomorrow… Then it’s music making with Maarten and Arnoud on Tuesday and that’s all the nice bits for the week… Thesis research will be the rest of it. I guess.

~ by shlnl on September 21, 2008.