Winter travels part 3: Christmas, Scotland (and Texas)

Following on with my recap of our winter travels (see part 1 and part 2), we went to Scotland over Christmas. This trip mostly consisted of Maëlys meeting friends and relatives for the first time.

Great Grandma Turnbull with Maëlys.

Ken, a family friend, with Maëlys.

Me, Maëlys, my cousin Kathryn, and her daughter Jess. Jess is two days younger than Maëlys!

We've been to Scotland many times before, so we didn't do any sightseeing or anything. Strangely, it was unseasonably warm for most of our visit. I think it was about 12C (52F) on Christmas day. It's usually somewhere between 2C and 8C (35F and 46F), and doesn't get into the double figures until March.

Sunrise! At 8:30am. Gotta make the most of those 7 hour days.

It was great getting to see everyone and I was strangely proud when "showing off" Maëlys to people. A little like an enthusiastic schoolchild showing off their class project, "I made this". Except better! She seemed to enjoy the attention too, and wasn't afraid to meet new people as babies sometimes are.

After Hogmanay, I left for Paris, while Talia and Maëlys remained in Scotland. After three days I was leaving for Texas, for another conference (in Austin). We had originally intended to all go to Paris together, but Talia decided to stay in Scotland with my parents rather than be in Paris alone with Maëlys, which was a sensible decision, I think. Of course, my parents were thrilled to get to spend more time with their favourite granddaughter!

I had a couple of days in Paris, which was enough time to unpack and re-pack and to digest Julien Barnes' excellent novel The Sense of an Ending. Then I was off to Austin, Texas for a linguistics conference.

I don't have any pictures for you from Texas, I'm afraid. I was travelling light so I didn't take my camera, and I was in fact travelling so light that I forgot my phone charger, so I don't even have phone camera pictures. In any case, I spent most of the time at the conference hotel, so there isn't much of interest to report. It was in fact unseasonably cold in Austin, also around 12C (52F). I understand that normally it's more like 20C (68F).

It was a good conference, with excellent scientific content and good opportunities for me to meet other academic linguists, new and old. Still, I was very happy to get home, this being the longest I'd ever been away from Maëlys. It was also good to be stationary for a while after all this travelling.

Stay tuned, one more "winter travels" post to go and we'll be all caught up!

Winter travels part 2: Milan

The alps, as seen from my plane.

As Talia alluded to in a previous post, almost immediately after we got back to France from the USA I left France to go to Italy. Specifically to Milan, for an academic conference where I was presenting a paper. The timing was a little unfortunate, as it meant I was abandoning an exhausted Talia with a grumpy jet-lagged baby in the middle of Paris. I was jet lagged too, but I didn't have to deal with a baby...

A tram scoots through one of the medieval city gates. Not pictured: Roman ruins, ornate basilicas, Italians.

Instead, I had to deal with trams, mopeds, and medieval architecture. And excellent coffee.

Traffic.

Speaking of coffee, and food, on my very first morning I went to a local bakery that had been recommended to me for breakfast. I walk in, and the conversation goes something like this:

Baker: [some greeting which is neither buon giorno "good morning" nor salve "hello" (or even ciao, the informal version).]
Me: Buon giorno! Non parlo italiano. ["Good morning! I don't speak Italian."]
Baker: Ah! [stream of Italian, very quick, wherein he explains what each of the baked goods on offer are made of, what they taste like, how they're cooked, etc.]

It's not strictly true that I don't speak any Italian -- I was able to piece together the gist of what he said via my knowledge of French and Spanish -- I was amused by the knowing look he gave me, and by the fact that he very kindly explained everything to me, the confused foreigner, in Italian.

It's not that I expected him to speak English (especially as Italy is one of the most monolingual countries of the EU!), but I thought he would at least slow down, use simple phrases, or something. Maybe point at a bun, say cioccolate, molto bene, 'chocolate, very good', something like that.

In any case, if you must know, I ordered a cappuccino and a chocolate brioche. They were both molto bene, although the brioche was covered in powdered sugar and was quite messy.

It turns out that Italians aren't great at French either:

It should be "crêpes".

Apart from the food and the conferencing, my main activity in Milan was wandering the city and examining the architecture. Lots of churches of various shapes and sizes!

The famous Duomo cathedral.

Another angle on the Duomo.

The tower of the Basilica of Sant'Eustorgio.

All in all, it was a pleasant break from my usual routines. The conference went smoothly and my paper was well-received. I was very happy to get home to Talia and a sleepy baby, though.