20 Jul 2012: The Butterfly and the Pig

20 Jul 2012:

The Butterfly and the Pig

Glasgow, Scotland, UK

H: 18 L: 9 Weather: Clear to Partly Cloudy

Last Thursday was a wonderful day.  It started bright and early when Team Cairncross—aka me, Molly, and Christian, another student from the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany—leaded out together to the coffee shop to pick up coffee (for them) and food (for me).  Then PoRT's second day began.  Those of us who had attended the céilidh the night before shared smiles; now we were in on the great secret of each other's dance moves.

Unfortunately, the céilidh from the night before didn't help much with how tired I was feeling, and now I didn't have pre-presentation jitters to help keep me awake.  It was rough!  Some of the speakers, though, stick out.  One is a prominent music cognition researcher who was born and lived in the US, and then moved to the UK and lived there for a while.  Her accent was fascinating.  Not only did she have aspects of both British and North American dialects, but which accent she used depended on who she was talking to: she’d say [hæv] (i.e., the American “have”) to Americans and [hɑv] (i.e., the British “have”) to many others.  (Oh, and her presentation was pretty good, too.)

After the day’s conference events were done, there was nothing planned on the itinerary.  This is intentional.  Though the actual conference part of conferences is important, equally important are the post-conference hijinx, where professional bonds and friendships are formed over glasses of the local brews.  Essentially, at the end of the day of a conference, an unofficial bazaar forms, in which people attempt to merge into a group of fellow attendees.  Sometimes these mergers are fairly simple; people from the same university tend to pair up.  But once those initial pairs are created, things get more complicated; for example, last Thursday, a group of attendees had already gotten reservations at a restaurant.

Sometimes, though, the bargaining produces wonderful results, and that’s exactly what happened last Thursday!  Somewhat organically, seven of us merged together into a single group and had a wonderful night out.  We decided to go out for Indian food at a restaurant one of us found on Trip Advisor.  The problem for us was that we only had a vague idea where it was and a partially non-functioning couple of maps to help us on the way.  At first our conversation was fairly standard-variety: talking about the conference, about our research, about the talks we heard, et cetera.  By the time we made it to what we thought the street was that we were going to, though, we somehow decided that giving a high five meant getting married. (Thinking back, I’m pretty sure this had something to do with a conversation about the high rates of marriage/divorce in the United States.  Or maybe it didn’t.  I don’t know.  I talked about that at some point with someone.)  I was married for the first time at the corner of Kent Rd and North St in Glasgow.  However, as everyone knows, if you get married via high five, you can also get divorced via high five, so I was divorced within about five minutes.

After having a false alarm that our restaurant was a really shady-looking one kind of in a back alley, and getting married and divorced once more, we made it to the place, a Punjabi restaurant.  On the outside of the restaurant, they ha said there was a special deal for a pair of diners: ₤12 for shared appetizers, any entrée, and a bottle of wine.  Since there were 7 of us, one of us couldn’t pair up, but that worked just fine; we just had one person get a separate entrée and shared everything else.

When they first brought out the food, we were somewhat disappointed: they brought out a delicious thin salty bread (not naan… even I know what that is, and it came later), but it was gone within about 5 minutes.  Then the real fun began.  Plates began being brought out by the handful, all covered with chicken, vegetables, and pretty much anything you would ever see in an Indian restaurant all combined in one course.  Then they brought out rice (which people started to spoon onto my plate given how much I clearly enjoyed it) and then finally our entrees (I got lamb tikka Kashmiri).  We almost ran out of room on our table.  And it was all quite good.  Spicy?  Of course.  But we had the wine, and water, to wash it down with.

Meanwhile, I was teaching my fellow conferencegoers the ins and outs of Minnesotan English.  Minnesotan English, incidentally, sounds like “gay German”, according to many Europeans, and some members of this group were no exception.  The others were particularly amused by the phrase “yah, nooo” (as in, “yes, I have successfully perceived what you just said, but I disagree with you”).

Our waiter even helped us join in on the linguistic zaniness, as his decidedly Glaswegian dialect was a constant source of delight.  He had been smiling at the half-Punjabi, half-Norwegian South Dakotan group member (you know, the usual.  ‘MURRKA.) all night, and finally he asked her whether she was Punjabi.  She responded in the affirmative, and he smiled and said a sentence that had the word “American” in it.  Glasgow English is quite strong to the untrained ear, the most striking part of which is the fact that all “r”s are tapped (or, roughly, “rolled”).  All of us were so pleased by his pronunciation of “American” that we had him say it again, which he did rather abashedly.  He also said he was disappointed that he wouldn’t be seeing her face again, which elsewhere would’ve been a little weird (especially considering the wedding ring on her hand); in Glasgow, though, spoken by this waiter, it was quite adorable and utterly winning, not at all threatening.

After we finished our meal, we set off for a pub called “The Butterfly and the Pig”.  Yes, that was its actual name, and, yes, that influenced our decision to follow the advice of one of the conference organizers to check it out.  It was totally worth it.  We were a bit worried walking down the street that it was on, as the street was full of pubs, not all of which seemed like they catered to a crowd that just came out of a conference.  I mean, conferencewear in the behavioral sciences isn’t all that fancy, but I haven’t yet been to a conference where presenters are presenting in midriff-baring shirts, short shorts, and high heels, so I couldn’t help but think that we might be out of place.

The Butterfly in the Pig was a breath of fresh air.  It was decidedly hip, but decidedly un-hipster; patrons were drinking cheerfully but no one was stumbling in and out completely wasted; a wide range of ages were represented.  I got married four times and divorced twice; my wife challenged me to an arm wrestling match (which I refused, given the fact that my loss was certain), so instead she arm wrestled with my husband.  They were fairly evenly matched.

Live music started shortly after we got in, and, though he was a 60s/70s cover singer who wasn’t all that great, it provided an excuse for a bit of dancing.  At one point, the cover singer was singing “Hey Ya”, and I obligingly shook it like a Polaroid picture; a Glaswegian walking by gave me what was apparently an exceedingly entertaining look and then gave me the thumbs up when I noticed him walking by.  My compatriots were no less talented.  At about midnight, some of us started to do some swing dancing.  One of the local women went up to one of the women in our group and told her that she wished the local men would dance like we did, but if she asked them to they’d probably hit her.  (Again: maybe a bit creepy outside Glasgow.  In Glasgow, it was a wonderful compliment!)  While we were swing dancing, a group of locals walked in and started joining us.  I had a chat with one of them that went something like this:

Him: So where are you all from?

Me: …the US, Cyprus and the UK, the US and France, the US, Germany, Sweden…

Him: Oh.  Uh.  What are you doing in Glasgow?

Me: We’re here for a conference.

Him: What kind of conference?

Me: An academic conference.

Him: What kind of academic conference?

Me: A music and language conference.

Him: Woah, those are so far apart! (holds hands out apart from each other)

Me: They have some stuff in common.

Him: Yeah, well, I guess you could… study… how we understand music.  And stuff.

Me: … … … … yes, that’s exactly right.

Him: Oh, okay.

Me: No, really, that’s really, really close to the truth.

…and it was.  And I’m still amazed that he came up with that from nowhere.  It turned out he was here for a stag party (but, because this was The Butterfly and the Pig, it was a totally classy, non-disruptive, but non-stuck-up stag party) for I think his brother or something.  He and his brother, originally Irish, were working in Dubai and had flown in to Glasgow, and the wedding itself was in Poland.  I was a bit confounded by the geographic complexity of what he was saying, but it was really interesting regardless.  And, as we all saw when he started whirling around the Cypriot amongst us, he turned out to be a phenomenal dancer.

We walked back together towards our lodgings, saying we’d definitely try to keep in touch.  And I really hope we do!

Flails,

Chris