I’ve been in Milan the last couple of days, attending the EGAIS workshop at the Universita Cattolica. We stayed in the university hotel, which was somewhat like being in monks’ cells, except more modern and with a bidet.

The first night Philippe and I went to the Duomo (cathedral) in the centre of Milan. Next to it is the famous Galleria shopping centre, which is purported to be the oldest in the world! It’s just beautiful. Unfortunately at 7pm on a Sunday night the Duomo was closed so we couldn’t go into it. But the outside was just stunning!

Duomo

Inside the Galleria are all the brand name shops: Prada, Louis Vuitton, etc. The architecture is just amazing, with beautiful murals inside, elaborate tiled murals along the floor, etc. The bars near by are set up so that the people drinking can sit and watch the people walk by, as if to watch a parade or a show. And it’s a perfect place for people-watching! On Sunday there was a brilliant pianist entertaining everyone with the piano music echoing throughout the halls.

Galleria

Pianist in the Galleria

Afterwards we ate seriously the best pizza I’ve ever had. It was delicious, cooked by real Italians in a woodfired pizza oven. Considering it was about 35 degrees in and outside before the oven came into play, you can imagine how hot it was inside. Still, we braved it because we were hungry and there were lots of people there so we figured it must have been good.

Authentic Pizza restaurant!

Pizza

Milan is amazing because of the little streets and architecture, and the tiny bars and restaurants around every corner. Not a lot is open before about 7.30; most Milanese don’t eat til 8.30-9pm at least in summer! (Which is when it starts to get dark.)

Milan Streets

That said, it must suck to drive around in Milan. All the streets are one way once you get off the main roads, and people park all over the place. Also there’s a high likelihood of running into a scooter or a pedestrian because those things are just everywhere.
I’d love to detail all the things I saw but I really only had a flying tour. Some of the things that really stuck out for me apart from the above is the ambiance of the place — it was really old and modern at the same time! Tiny narrow streets like the above would open into a plaza full of parked cars, or suddenly reveal an ancient church, or ancient ruins (like these of the Imperial Palace, circa 300-400AD):

Imperial Palace, Milan

The richness of the history of the place was just overwhelming. From the crumbling architecture

Architecture, next to the war memorial

to the immense grandioseness of the castle

Castello Sforzesco

you really felt like you were walking in history.
Also the beer was good, and they gave you heaps of free food (ranging from potato chips to elaborate sandwiches) when you ordered alcohol.

Sorry for the photo-heavy post, there’s heaps more in my gallery!

Oh yeah, and my talk went extremely well, which is both very relieving and very pleasing! The workshop was excellent too, lots of interesting and intelligent people sharing ideas and enjoying talking about the research we’re doing. Yay us!

Philippe, me, Penny, Sylvain, Fernand

Seilles

I arrived in Brussels on a warm Thursday morning after 24 hours in transit. The flights were uneventful, a bit of turbulence but nothing terrible; I let the bouncing of the plane rock me to sleep in a vaguely comforting manner. Abu Dhabi airport is a glazed green and blue tile extravaganza: everywhere men in white robes and headdresses, women in burkhas and chadors. Sitting in the main waiting area near a car up for raffle I saw small boys climb over the Mercedes and half-hearted security guards chase them away. It was hot, but the air conditioners blared full blast, yet somehow even the persistent cool air seemed to be a last-ditch battle of man against nature; blasting hot nature in this case.

The next flight was also uneventful, an older Belgian (Flemish) man sitting next to me tut-tutted about things but was generally quiet for the 7.5 hour flight. I watched cut-for-air travel movies, I suspect A Quantum of Solace was actually much improved, but Watchmen was just full of blurred giant blue wangs and (thankfully) a much less awkward sex scene.

I arrived in Brussels exhausted, my boss and his son Virgilio met me and took my bags and we navigated our way through the airport to the train station and then through the main train station for a trip that lasted 40 mins to Namur. I didn’t see much of Brussels but that’s probably a good thing, since I was very tired. When we arrived in Namur my boss’s wife met us and we drove around to see the university, where I met various important people but cannot remember their names for the life of me. Afterwards we went back to their house (in a village 25km away) where I had a much-longed-for shower and some delicious food, and tried not to fall asleep. A walk around the village showed a large number of geese in a house along the main road, I was a little sad to hear later that they were being fattened up for foie gras.

Geese

The area is just gorgeous though — rolling green hills, fields of oats and wheat, gardens full of roses and lavender and other flowers, buildings flush against the main road with only a half metre of footpath between… I slept in the afternoon for a while but then went to bed around 10pm and woke up at 4.30 with a headache, a combination of bad sleeping practices on the plane and the weird European pillow I was given! I’ve since discovered it’s best to fold it in half to achieve less neck pain, heh.

Yesterday we went into town to register at the municipality. I won’t bore you with the details but drama erupted surrounding my visa and whether a single line on it meant I could leave Belgium and travel within Schengen states before my residency was processed. Of course this meant for a frantic amount of ringing around by my boss and his wife before coming to the conclusion that Belgian authorities have no idea what each other is doing, and 50% of the high level officials think that it would be okay and 50% adamantly stating no. We’re going to chance it, since the Australian embassy also said it would be okay and we now have a lot of phone numbers to people in high places who will hopefully back us up. Knowing my luck however, the passport agent won’t even see it and just process me as a general tourist, which would save everyone a lot of very silly headaches. Residency will appear in a few weeks and after that these problems will no longer be problematic :)

After that we went to the university and did some preparation for Milan; Narhui (the daughter) playing with her DS and colouring in pictures of horses (and then drawing me a lovely drawing of the koala I gave her along with other things) and being generally cute. Home later and a late lunch then we went to Virgilio’s school prize-giving ceremony which was a casual affair in a tiny gymnasium in Andenne. No 3 hours of bands and choirs and speeches, just a guy with a microphone and the teachers giving out their own awards. Virgilio won a prize for best in his year which he wasn’t so fussed about, he was more interested in the newest sort of potato gun attachment or something he could get for his many potato guns.

It was interesting at this affair, I was introduced to some of the teachers but not many of them spoke English so I ended up playing hand-clapping games and teaching basic English to Narhui, which was actually really fun. On the way back to the car we did colours and “The car is red!” (but how she says it, “le carrr ees rrrrrrrrhed!” — so cute!). She is more than happy to chatter away in French to me as well, we’ve got a bit of a system of hand gestures and repetition to work out what each other says now which is great.

I’m learning a lot of contextual French and am picking up more and more in my understanding of general conversations. It’s surprising how quickly it’s happening, actually. I’m far from having long conversations (especially since I still dont’ know how to do past tense, lol) but I’m learning lots of words and it’s surprising how much things like “je suis malade” accompanied by an agonised look and clutching at my head manages to get the message across that I’d like something for my headache. It’s very tiring to listen to French, unlike English where very softly-spoken words or rushed sentences can be sort of post-processed by the brain, I have to concentrate on each word and try to work out what it means or what the sentence generally means. So at the school function I was more than happy just to switch off trying to understand and do simple fun games with a 10 year old :)

Last night we watched “The Day the World Stood Still” in French with English subtitles which was nice :) Not a bad movie either really, though Keanu sounds surprisingly similar in French. Think I have my body clock back to normal now though, went to sleep about 11.30 and woke up just now at about 8.30, good times!

Today it’s work work work on the talk I’ll be giving in Milan on Tuesday. I also have to fix up my boss’s talk because his English is rather French and some concepts don’t translate so well. I get my flat soon too which is great — a brand new flat too! It’ll be ready to move into by the time I get home from Milan. As much as it’s lovely to stay with the family (they’re really great), it’ll be nice to have a place of my own so I can go and explore a lot more!

I find these guys so hilarious. I have a couple myself, but every time I go back to Techno City there are more of them! How could a simple plush rectangular cushion thing be so insanely cute? add some eyes and other facial characteristics, arms and legs, call it とふ and you have a winner!

Hannari Tofu in tofu boxes

These guys are in little tofu boxes like you might buy from the supermarket!

Hannari Tofu

More tofu…

Hannari Tofu

And more…

Hannari Tofu

All of these are separate claw machines…

Hannari Tofu

And finally, this one was awesome because it’s a tshirt thingy with a super angry looking tofu.

Hannari Tofu shirt

Bonus extra: I think this guy is supposed to be Natto, which is a fermented soy food that is kinda stinky.

Natto guy

Yeah, I’m a tofu tragic!

Pretty Tropical Fish

Nicholas and I went to Manly Oceanworld today, fulfilling yet another of the “things I want to do before moving to Belgium”. There are more photos in my photo gallery, and I’m pretty pleased with my new little Canon Ixus 90IS and its “aquarium” mode!
One of the best things was this awesome little rock fish which was decorating its area of the tank. It would go and pick up a mouthful of rocks, then come back and spit them into its little den. I managed to capture it on film, but it wouldn’t do its normal thing and instead did some crazy rock manoeuvres. Hrmpf.

If you look at the other videos there you’ll find a hilarious one with a cuttlefish banging into the wall >_> I’m not sure if cuttlefish can skulk exactly but that’s sort of what it appears to do.

Anyway I had a lovely time and although the Manly aquarium isn’t as big and impressive as Sydney aquarium it does have the major benefit of being easy to get to and not filled with millions of tourists. :D

Haircut, Kindle, and Cupcakes!

Today was a good day! As you can see in the photo not only did I end up with a delicious box of cupcakes, but I have my brand new Kindle 2 which I am totally digging. Oh yeah and I got my hair cut as well. A bit shorter than before but I quite like it! (thanks Nicholas for the photo!)

The cupcakes from the “Cupcakes on Pitt” on York are really delicious. Tonight Nicholas and I shared a peppermint, a raspberry, and a green tea cake, and tomorrow we will probably plough through the blueberry, carrot, and tiramisu ones.

Today I also had my last French lesson. 4 weeks of intensive French at the Alliance Française was really quite awesome. I had a fabulous time with my fellow students (including the wonderfully talented Holly Throsby) and our intrepid professeuse Aurélie who really made the whole course for me! She was so bouncy and enthusiastic and obviously loved teaching, and was good at it to boot. I really feel like I’ve learned some basic language skills which is great :D I’ll need to study past tense though since we didn’t quite get to that stage in our course :( Anyway, AF French courses come highly recommended!

The next big highlight of the day was getting my Kindle! I had to trundle to the post office to pick it up and it was dutifully waiting for me to unwrap it and play! I managed to get some ebooks onto it and found it’s most excellent for reading while knitting, since you don’t have to hold the book down to keep your place (or ruin the spines). I might write a full Kindle review later, but since it’s about to be superceded by the DX it might not be worthwhile. Suffice to say, though, it feels excellent in my hands, is a joy to read from, the e-ink really is quite impressive, and I can see it becoming an essential part of my academic and non-academic work. I love the dictionary lookups, I love the annotations, the footnotes could use a bit of work but all in all it’s a very nice package. Only things I’m a bit meh about are lack of Whispernet outside the US, and lack of some sort of protective cover included with it. I’m currently knitting myself a kindlecosie but I suspect the one I’m making is too hairy >< (alpaca/angora so super fluffy) so I might have to make it something else instead, or give it a lining. Two thumbs up to the Kindle!

Also, I got my hair cut. I got it done by the same girl who did my hair for my sister’s wedding, and I quite like it — a bit shorter than last time but that just means that there’s more growth room til I can find a new hairdresser in Belgium! lol.

Anyway that’s what’s been up with me today. I had a good meeting with my new boss too, found out it gets to -25degC and snows in winter in Namur. Haha. I’ll need some new clothes when it gets to that point but I somehow doubt I’ll be able to find good clothes for general subzero wear here. :)

So if you have any good recommendations for books to get for my Kindle, please let me know!

I was reading the SMH when I encountered this article: a sort of “human interest” article about gender reassignment surgery and how it’s “ruined peoples’ lives”. I will state up front that I don’t know anyone who’s had gender reassignment surgery but I know a couple of people who are wanting it. It certainly doesn’t seem like a walk in the park, and they’ve already gone on heavy hormone regimes to feel more complete within themselves, but the surgery is outside their budgets for now. Anyway, with that disclaimer, I introduce the article:

Gender setters- when doctors play God.

Firstly, in this article there’s a lot of generalising going on. For one, these cases should be dealt with as any other malpractice case — in the first case, the patient stated that they didn’t want the operation to proceed, and the surgeons continued anyway; in the second case, the woman should have had more and better assessment before prescription of drugs & surgery.

“She acknowledges she gave consent for the procedure, but believes it was not informed consent. She feels she was mentally ill, and childhood abuse played a part in her gender confusion.”

These two cases seem pretty clear cut to me. In the first there was a definite request to halt the surgery. In the second, there is a tragic case of abuse and mental illness which the clinic’s doctors ignored. But this is not something restricted to gender reassignment surgery.

Secondly, it bothers me greatly that an article that tries to champion ethical values ends up casting a greater shadow of fear and uncertainty over those who legitimately and dearly wish to have gender reassignment surgery. Horror stories like those addressed by the article need to be discussed in the public sphere for sure, but they need to be treated sensitively. Although I have not experienced it myself, and can never fully understand what it is like to wish to be of the opposite gender, I can only imagine it must be a terribly difficult thing to come to terms with. This newspaper article cannot do much for those with gender dysmorphia who are also dealing with needing to explain complicated and sensitive issues with their families and friends.

What the article should have done was also look at some success stories, instead of simply going for, and ending with, the immediate drawing factor of the poor people unlucky enough to have to deal with a terrible clinic. Informed consent is an empowering device, and in these cases the clinic was terribly out of line in their poor informing practices. This does not mean, however, that all clinics are the same, and that gender reassignment surgery is a priori bad in all cases, just that, like many surgical procedures (especially cosmetic ones), they need to be treated with a lot of sensitivity and care.

Browsing the Kindle store after ordering a Kindle 2 (!!!) I found this gem:

Amazon.com: REMOVED — DON’T BUY eBook: Confucius: The Kindle Store.

To quote Nicholas:

“Can you buy it? I want to buy the book that both can and cannot be bought.”

The best bit:

What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?

	72% buy the item featured on this page: REMOVED — DON’T BUY $1.08
	28% buy The Analects of Confucius (with an Introduction by Robert Taylor) $0.95

I forgot to write about the pinball expo that we went to last weekend! Here are some photos:

Gypsy Grandma & Zoltan

Pinball Expo

It was pretty fun, but they blew a fuse or something toward the end of our visit which meant everything shut down. But I got to play some baseball pinball game and Nicholas played something else as well. And we watched some guy play a really old game as part of a competition (one with an analogue counter instead of a digital one!). He was rather large and made amusing noises every time he hit the paddle button thing, and did a little dance when he did well!

This weekend we went into the city on Saturday and used up some tickets we had to the Powerhouse Museum. It was pouring with rain as we walked from Town Hall over to the Powerhouse by way of the Pyrmont bridge, we got rather wet and ended up going via the shopping centre and convention centres instead of up the road. In there we found there’s a laser tag game, and briefly considered abandoning our earlier plans until we realised that the large group of tiny children around 8-10 years old or so were going to be particularly difficult adversaries considering a) their height, b) their general fitness levels, and c) the fact that 8-10 year old boys playing laser tag are undoubtedly going to be super hardcore players of laser tag. So we continued on our quest for Powerhouse Museum-ness.

When we arrived, unfortunately the Star Wars exhibit had closed, but that meant everything was pretty quiet, so we looked at design across the ages and played in the experimentation area. We also went in the “zero gravity” simulator in the space exhibit, which was basically a tunnel you walked into which had a rotating cylinder around it which, well, rotated. And worked extremely well. I felt really ill very quickly and so escaped out of the tunnel (and afterwards, when I went into confined spaces it felt as though everything was still spinning!) and generally think the whole thing very squicky. After that we wandered back to the city via Chinatown and Emperor Golden Puffs house (which is celebrating 30 years of puff making and giving 10% off everything in their bakery and restaurant) for some delicious hot puffs before venturing to George St to catch a bus to Circular Quay in order to walk over to the Wharf theatre to catch part of the Sydney Writers Festival.

At the Festival we saw a panel discussion on David Foster Wallace, an author who died far too young (committed suicide recently), and wrote many pieces including journalistic articles and fictional short stories and novels. Nicholas had just finished reading Infinite Jest, and I was half way through “A Supposedly Fun Thing I Will Never Do Again” (excruciatingly funny), so we decided it might be interesting to go to, and it was a really nice night out. A little wanky, sure, but what I thought would be a boring sort of lecture about really specific literary criticism turned into an interesting discussion about some of the things he used in his writing and the intricacies of running a major fan website for such an author. I’m sure there’ll be a movie available soon — the ABC was filming it so I’m sure we’ll see it some time. It’s worth a look if you’re at all interested in his work.

Another bus ride up to Pitt St and we went to Mother Chu’s Vegetarian Restaurant, which is always a delight. Mother Chu sits in the corner with a huge pile of books and writing paper and gazes over her empire with a matronly look, which is always inspiring because you get the distinct feeling that the people actually running things are extremely concerned about falling foul of this gaze and thus do their best to make sure you are always enjoying yourself as much as possible. Indeed, the food was excellent and the service similarly so. A brisk walk (and jog) back to Wynyard and the bus home and I was exhausted!

Today I wrote some of my book chapter. And procrastinated. And did some French. And fiddled with some things. And I’m going to watch the F1. Go Webber!