When I took my O-levels (way back before there weren't O-Levels - are there O-Levels again?) we had just two exam texts in English Literature. One was Merchant of Venice. The other was a television play by Tom Stoppard called Professional Foul. (Oh look!
It's on YouTube - of course at the time we never got to see it, because none of us had a video player and it wasn't even on video.) Now, this is of course a shockingly low number of texts, but it meant that we studied them pretty thoroughly. Professional Foul is a play about a Philosophy Professor traveling to what was then Soviet-controlled Czechoslovakia, purportedly to attend a conference, but really for an ulterior motive (in his case, to see England play Czechoslovakia at football. (That's partly what the Professional Foul refers to.) Now, I knew a little about football (so I knew that a professional foul was an intentional foul to prevent something bad happening) but nothing about Philosophy. I remember the play makes a joke about Quine and Hegel, Tom Stoppard being the insufferable show off that he is, which I don't think is funny even now I know who they are. But, long story short, here I am, a Philosophy (Associate) Professor,
at a conference in Prague. Funny old world, innit? Of course in the play the professor meets one of his old students, called Pavel Hollar (a transparent cypher for Vaclav Havel, whom Stoppard knew, this when he was just a poet, not President (or airport namesake - see below) who asks him to smuggle out inflammatory materials explaining the repression in Czechoslovakia at the time. Less likely to happen now. Although we did have to fill out a form on the plane promising that we hadn't been to West Africa within the last 42 days...
Anyway, here are some photos of the trip:
A weird Gehry-esque building at Charles De Gaulle airport in Paris
A weird Louis XIV-esque part of the waiting room at said airport (which was otherwise rather scruffy and down-at-heel, at least, as major international hubs go)
Talking of airports named after people - I think this person merits it more than De Gaulle.
After getting what seemed like an absurd amount of funny money out of an ATM, I asked whether I could get a bus to my hotel. Oh no, the buses only go to the city center. But apparently my hotel is nowhere near there. This is a little disappointing, but still: I paid a taxi driver another absurd amount of money to take me there. This is the kind of thing we drove past (for what seemed like an age). However, eventually we reached my hotel, which is nothing like what Jami had led me to expect. Contrary to what she said, it is very modern and it has complementary shampoo! Here's what my room looks like:
And here's the view from the window. I have to stay decent, because there are people in the offices right across:
After about 20 minutes Frederick just stopped walking. I asked if he wanted to keep going or head back to the car. He answered by turning and taking off at a fast run.
At home tea hit the spot. But then we had to head out to the damn pool. Again he was over the moon with excitement, until he spun around in the whirlpool for about 10 minutes and then turned deathly green. We're lucky we made it to the car before the dry heaves arrived. In about 20 minutes we head out AGAIN, this time to Ann Arbor. What drama will we encounter on this trip?
