On arrival in Athens last Monday, weary from 24 hours in travel, I was faced with a round of poker and lost. Don’t use EuroChange. I thought I was being careful, and even made calculations on my computer before approaching the counter. But they take advantage of the tired and naive. I bid low, they pushed me up to a higher bid, and I was sold a deal I didn’t need: too much money; too much commission (foolishly absent from my accounts); and a guarantee of the same rate and no charges to exchange up to 30% of it back, when there was no chance I’d spend 70%. So really I was just conned. And as I exited the airport to get a bus ticket, there was Piraeus Bank with a better rate. So said a recently-skimmed finance textbook: banks can always offer better rates; they exchange much larger quantities in one go. Again, don’t use EuroChange.

So I spent the week trying to spend money, but the opportunity didn’t arise. The hotel was pre-paid and fed me each morning. Lunches were provided at the conference (I survived on salads and bread). James shouted me dinner on the first night; the conference had a cocktail dinner on the second (identical to the lunches), and a banquet on the third (different chef, but similar salads); and Itamar, an Israeli student with British sponsorship wouldn’t suffer the indignity of me paying for my own dinner on Thursday night. (Note that the vegetarian situation isn’t as harsh as suggested by My Big Fat Greek Wedding: some Greeks avoid meat a couple of days a week for religious reasons, there are spinach pastries, etc. But there’s still a lack of all-vegetarian venues and even fresh fruit, despite the orange trees standing in public squares.)

Friday night and Saturday lunch with a Chabad couple were free meals, but I hoped to bring a 20 Euro donation to synagogue as shabbat was entering. Close to shabbat, I was ready to hop off the metro at Thission Station when the train drove right past it, seemingly closed off for some time already. I had to change trains and go back. The sun was on the verge of setting as I left Monastiraki Station, so I had to dump the cash according to shabbat rules. I hope it found its way into good hands.

Despite my loss, I enjoyed Shabbat, the Greek traditions, the company and the cooked food that it brought. And stunning weather, in which I walked around all afternoon wherever I could go without a ticket. I saved the ticketed places for Sunday.

And yet when I turned up to buy a ticket when the National Archaeological Museum opened at 8:30 on Sunday morning, they let me in for free, because it was the first Sunday in April. Even the ticket I’d already bought for the Acropolis was useless, as they would let me enter gratis. Not surprisingly, by the time I got back to EuroChange at the airport, I’d only spent 56% of my cash, and that was some effort.

The archaeology of Athens is wonderful, both its larger preserved monuments and ruined capitals, and the huge collections of smaller artefacts spanning thousands of years of art. While its ancient temples and chambers of democracy are something to behold, for tourists they are essentially the city’s beginning and its end, especially as almost everything worth visiting closes by 3pm out of peak season. It was the first city I’ve travelled in where I’ve been tempted to leave for the airport early, for lack of anything better to do.

Like all cities, it does have its secrets, those places just a little off the beaten track that are cheaper and just as rewarding as the traditional traps. In particular, I enjoyed the Philopappos Hill (or Hill of Muses), and the view it gave in all directions, to the sea and to the hills. Starting out before everyone else turns up is also key: the sites close early, but they tend to open at 8 or 8:30, at which time you don’t need to push people out of the way just to get some quiet time with a statute of Hermes for a photo.

So I’m glad I wasn’t hanging around in Athens for much longer than needed to see it, but next time I hit the Agaean Peninsula, I’ll hope to spend more time on islands, at Delphi, Olympia, Thessaloniki, etc. Maybe by then they’ll have caught up with the world in smoking bans, and perhaps by then I’ll be wiser with my finances.

Conferences are all about communication and learning, but I feel like the main thing I’m learning is how to attend conferences. My supervisor considers that having spent a lot of money to get here, we should make sure we see as much of the conference as possible. Other people seem to think, that having spent so much to get here, one should make sure to see as much of the city as possible. It’s a matter of learning to know which sessions to take off and get out to see the city. And I’m apparently a slow learner, and have seen almost nothing of it, which means I’ll be cramming it into the next three days.

And then there’s the idea that once I’ve travelled halfway across the world, I should at least stay here for a little longer than a week. I was bound by two major concerts last week and Pesach (which I enjoy spending with my family in Sydney) next week, but I still feel guilty to be hopping back on a jet so soon.

And of course I could do with learning a little better how to present a paper. I gave my presentaton on Analysing Wikipedia and Gold-Standard Corpora for NER Training yesterday afternoon. Having gone over-time in my practice runs, I cut it down a little on stage. Apparently too much. The session chair didn’t need to hold up a single warning sign. Still, it left more time for questions, which showed people were interested, and I’ve had many compliments on an interesting presentation. I also need to work on fluency a little, but my supervisor tells me I’m much improved…

The learning curve’s a little steep. There are many PhD students here who seem to be becoming naturals at conference-going. Soon by me?

PS: I’m not really doing much on syntax myself; nor is the conference actually at Syntagma Square, the focal point of modern Athens…
PPS: Typed on my new MacBook.

I had been warned by others that there isn’t much exciting about manchester, or about the long trip there, which is expensive. One can get a train that only takes a couple of hours, but significantly cheaper is the 4h30 bus. On Tuesday I was able to find tickets for only 14 pounds return. Mind you, any sum in pounds sounds expensive to a foreigner in the UK.

Nonetheless when I actually had things sorted with Heather, the trip was up to 19 pounds. (I printed the ticket at an internet café the next day for 20p.) I would be leaving London on Friday at 11, and leaving Manchester on Sunday at 6… which would lose me two days’ tourism in London, and would gain me one in Manchester. As well as shabbat with Heather and her husband, Ben. Hopefully it would be nice.

But when it got to the morning when I had to go, I packed and made my vegemite-sandwitch lunch late, left late, the underground train didn’t come, and when it did come it was the wrong train, but I only realised that once the doors were closed, got off at the next station, and with the right train was still not in sight, panicked, caught a taxi, got to Victoria coach station having surely missed my bus. But I saw it across the road, hopped out of the cab and waved my ticket at the bus driver. Phew! Thankfully… He saw me but refused to open the doors.

I was really upset by now. Me, stingy me, who had been careful about every pound till here in London, had just spent 1.50 on the Tube, 9 on the cab, and the National Express offices were rightly saying that I had bought a class of ticket to Manchester that was not amendable. I would need to buy another: 12 o’clock was the next. That would be 21 pounds in person, or probably cheaper online.

It is useful here that public phones have numbers, so I took advantage of Heather’s caller-ID and she called me back on the public phone. Eventually we organised her to buy me a new ticket for 10 pounds, which the National Express office would print out for me with the right details given. I ran and caught the coach. It’s an absolutely beautiful day in London, and I’m on a bus.

And at one point when I needed to call Heather the phone booth I had been using was occupied. But that was okay, there were another three. Only, two rejected my coin, and one swallowed it. Another pound gone. I swore loudly in the nearly-private confines of the phonebooth.

So there it is. What was a cheap trip to Manchester was now 19.00 + 0.20 + 1.50 + 9.00 + 10.00… which is even more in Australian dollars.

But who’s counting?
The lessons:

• You pay a lot to have friends.
• Don’t miss your bus. It’s a waste of time and money. Really.
• Never take a taxi in traffic when you’re late.
• The UK is still expensive.

PS: It turns out that in front of me on the bus were sitting three Israelis. When I eventually worked up the courage to ask them why they were visiting, I found that they were coming for the Manchester United FC pilgrimage site Old Trafford and nothing else. I don’t know if they’re going back to London for night, but 10 hours for that… makes my trip feel undoubtedly worthwhile, even with its travails.

Despite the looming clouds (I guess that’s something clouds can do), the views were beautiful—although very hand-sculpted, so different from, say, the beauty of the Blue Mountains, or Yosemite. (Indeed, Western Europe is hardly known for its natural beauty, but its culture and history.)

While the site has much grand, open, landcaped scenery abutting the palace itself, it also has numerous gardens or groes led to by alleys, each with their own statues and ornaments. Although so close to the massive palace, the world outside of the grove is hidden. Where there were tourists on the other end of the alley, it is suddenly and completely private. The solace is enchanting. Due to the weather, and my upset about a broken camera, I didn’t explore as many of these groves as I might have liked, but some that I saw, such as one designed by painter Hubert Robert were really beautiful to just lie down next to, alongside some ducks, and enjoy the man-made sights and, closing my eyes, the natural sounds. An advantage of coming on a Monday with horrible weather is that I didn’t have to bear with too many other tourists as well. Living on such an estate must be divine.

All around were hundreds of fountains (only some in operation) and statues in limestone, granite, marble, bronze, gold. A lot of the gardens and its ornaments seemed to be themed around Roman mythology, with names like Apollo, Neptune, or Jupiter, and renaissance subjects like fauns and centaurs, as well as plenty of toga-wearing bearded men, babies (sometimes winged) and bare-breasted women. Indeed, these seem to be fairly popular images throughout the area- in contrast to America where breasts tend to be covered (but this isn’t often a problem as statues there are usually of former presidents).

As well as the handful of tourists that turned up (some by mistake) for the day, there were also some young school children. It is a wonder that for the children of Versailles, the palace gardens could be a sports field. University students might use the abundant quiet space for study, much as those in Montreal might use Second Cup.

No one raised in Sydney imagines having coffee in the late afternoon outside a seventeeth century palace, or walking past medieval ruins or a gothic cathedral on the way to school each day. But people here in Paris and other parts of Europe must do it everyday, most of the time completely oblivious. It is a wonderous idea to me; a thought I had wandering through Luxembourg Gardens a few days ago, and I still haven’t got over it.

It’s extraordinary to ponder.

And by the way:

1. I’ll now only be arriving in Israel after Shavuot, to give myself a bit more time in London
2. My camera started working again on the way home, so I’m not as completely depressed. =)

Tonight I went out for dinner with some friends from Montreal: Eve and Ilana, Eve’s boyfriend, Rafael, and her sister, Chloe. The plan was to go get kosher sushi from Sushi West in the trendy St Germain area. But, upon arrival, we saw that the large premises were packed with people at every table, and a few more waiting. It turns out this venue was only one in a chain of five throughout Paris, so we went to try another one, but it was full too. Driving on to a third Sushi West, it too was filled to capacity (at 9:30 on a Sunday!). By this time I was amazed and impressed: in Sydney it is difficult enough to get a kosher restaurant packed, and none is of that size.

We had to give up in the end, and settle for a place a short walk down the road: also sushi. (It seems Paris has at least 27 kosher sushi places.) But it was markedly cheaper and less classy, although a shorter menu too. The sushi itself was great. I got a miso soup, and six california roles, and ate some of Eve’s too. It was possibly an expensive meal by my travelling standards, but not bad for Paris.

I stand by the principle that kosher restaurants will survive only if they are first good restaurants and secondly kosher. Still, we could handle a quality kosher sushi restaurant in Sydney… It’s not that hard to find kosher fish, rice and nori. Or Japanese chefs in Sydney, I guess.

Thankfully, after Montreal, Europe has a few familiar faces. Although my friends in London are mostly out of town for some reason, I’ve now stayed with my Hillel house-mate for a few days in Amsterdam, and will soon hopefully stay with another in Paris. Which limits the amount of time I need to spend worrying about security and cost in hostels. Hostels here, it seems, are more expensive than in America, although their free breakfast might be a larger buffet. And while they have more security, they are perceived as less safe. So far, at least, I’ve walked away with what I came in with, except for a little food consumed here and there.

Food can be more difficult, too: In America, everything kosher is clearly labelled so, and although that doesn’t promise that the bagels you buy in the supermarket will taste any good, you know you can find them. Here, like in Sydney, everything works on lists, and if you don’t know it, or don’t hold it, you wouldn’t know what to buy and what not.

Correspondingly, I no longer walk around the streets wondering who’s Jewish and who not, like I could in New York, or at McGill. Even if there are Jews here and there in Europe, most don’t show it very loudly, except in their set areas. And yet Jews come up all the time; they are the history here: an old synagogue, a former economy, a street, an individual, a monument, a rumour. But in person, one identifies very few. But of course they exist, like the photographer that approached me and Naomi in Dam Square, Amsterdam, as we put tomatoes on our humous sandwiches, and greeted us, “It’s not easy eating kosher in Amsterdam…” He, holding a long-lensed mechanism, broke our conversation with occasional photo-snaps, while telling us about photojournalism and the art of the photographer. He entitled it a ‘derasha’.

A more surprising diffrence between the two sides of the Atlantic is that in Europe, people still pay to connect to the internet, it seems. American hostels would commonly have WiFi net connections for free. Here people still go to “Internet Cafés”, while in Montreal nearly all cafés would provide the Internet at no extra cost, albeit that you were expected to bring your own computer. In general, here one doesn’t see laptops on coffee tables anywhere as much as in North America. Maybe it’s just a suggestion that “coffee is coffee; work is work”.

And with coffee comes smoke. While in Australia I’ve quite happily gotten comfortable with smoke-free indoors, the rule here still seems to work on the old principle that “it’s okay to smoke unless we tell you not to”. Montreal recently went as far as to say smokers must distance themselves from building doorways by a couple of metres, but while most ignored that, there still wasn’t smoking inside the buildings.

Of course the mix of languages, too, is vastly changed from the Americas. While for me the English accent signifies “tourist” (which got very confusing at a few points), in the streets of Westminster, the snap-happy visitors speak Italian, Spanish, Russian, Polish, a completely different linguistic porridge to what I’m used to.

Then there are the bubblers (water fountains) at many public “restrooms” in America, but absent here. And the street signs which in Europe are on the walls of the street they refer to, which makes them obvious to find, but harder to read. And the theme of black metal gates with gold decoration wherever there is somewhere important. And other little things.

The bigger things are things that really create the entire atmosphere, like the city being constructed around smaller neighbourhoods which have their own square and tower, castle or church. There are monuments everywhere. Yet one thing in their design is also that most streets in the city are consistently built up to the same height, around 6-8 floors, which means that as you walk down them you are always shadowed on either side by their presence. And unlike Chicago or New York it’s not the complete shadow of sky-scrapers on either side. These old, 6-storey buildings on either side really define the feeling of walking around in Europe.

Now in my second week in Europe, I wish I had time to relate tale after tale… But I’m not sure I have the effort like I did in San Francisco. I still have a half-written blog entry recalling Pesach! So many stories left untold and I know that my laziness in this area only means I will likely forget them all. It also doesn’t help that no one’s regularly offering me free WiFi…