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

19 Jul 2012: How Do You Pronounce "Céilidh"?

19 Jul 2012:

How Do You Pronounce "Céilidh"?

Glasgow, Scotland, UK

H: 16 L: 11 Weather: Mostly Cloudy, Intermittent Rain

Thursday morning came early, or late, or something, because my internal clock was utterly confounded by what on earth was happening in the world.  I had looked the previous night to find a breakfast place.  Unlike the US, though, the concept of a "breakfast place" doesn't seem to exist in Scotland, so instead I found a coffee shop, where I bought a delicious piece of lemon cake and some apple juice and headed to the conference.

The conference venue was this beautiful building on campus that had a large lecture hall and looked like a converted church or something.  It was a pretty awesome venue, actually.  In case you were wondering, the conference itself was the Perspectives on Rhythm and Timing (PoRT) conference, which brought together researchers from speech and music perception.  You might be thinking this sounds like a really odd combination, but, actually, in cognition, it's one that totally makes sense, surprisingly enough, as speech and music are both complex sound signals that share things like rhythm.  And timing.  People there ranged in age/experience from professor on down to... me, pretty much.  I don't think there were any other undergrad-age people there.  People kept assuming I was a postdoc or PhD student, and I was just like "...er, yeah, um, what?"  I think the beard is definitely a good life decision.

My presentation was the first one scheduled from the submitted papers, which made it the first one after lunch.  I was entertained when the person who was running the technical aspects of the conference asked whether I wanted to use the podium microphone or have a portable one: of course I'd want to wander all over the place and flail!  My presentation wasn't the best I've ever made: I was sometimes unclear, went longer than I should have, and wasn't as on my feet during the Q&A as I should have been.  But I was satisfied with how it went, given how discombobulated by exhaustion I was.

(I’m writing at least part of this post from a real life British train!  That’s right, the British kind of British train, the kind that British people ride!  Zomg!  Exclamation points!

Anyway, some of it’s being written on the train, but this post may be somewhat weird, because at least some was written in Google Docs before I left.

OMG WE’RE MOVING.  ON A TRAIN.  TRAIN MOVING.  TRAINY TRAIN TRAIN.

PUBLIC TRANSIT WHAT IS THIS MADNESS.

Anyhow, now that I’m trainy train distracting trainy train train train, train train train, etc.

…)

Right.  Let me just try to continue writing from the point I was at previously.  Maybe?

I had a few music people tell me that my data was very impressive, which is important.  Devin and Laura told me to repeat, over and over again, the patterns of the data in the experiment—

(OMG TWO SEATS IN FRONT OF ME THE TRAIN CONDUCTOR IS GIVING THE CHICK SITTING IN THE SEAT A HARD TIME BECAUSE SHE DIDN’T BUY A TICKET AND SHE SAID “FUCK OFF” THAT IS SO BRITISH I LOVE EVERYTHING)

—and so I did, saying that the fact that lines in the figures didn’t overlap meant that the effect I wanted existed, and pointing out over and over again where the lines didn’t overlap.   I was complemented repeatedly for my pretty data.  If even music people at the very least understood that the pretty data was pretty, that meant I was doing my job.

Then came time for the craziness that was our official conference visit to a restaurant in Glasgow.  I bought the three-course meal, which was a good life decision, because that was the meal that included dessert.  We could choose from one of two options for each choice.  For dessert, I spied “Berry Pavlova”  as one of the options.  Intrigued, I asked those around me whether they knew what it was—

(OH MY GOD A TRAIN JUST PASSED BY.  MULTIPLE TRAINS.  WHAT IS THIS I DON’T EVEN.  AND THE SCENERY.  JUST THE SCENERY.)

—and they had no idea.  But it had “berry” in the name, so it couldn’t be so bad, right?

So here’s what Berry Pavlova is, if you ever happen to be in a position to get it, or at least a close approximation.  Take a vanilla cookie.  A specific kind; I don’t remember what they’re called, but the kind that were always in the bins in the grocery store next to strawberry and chocolate ones.  The kind that was like kind of crunchy and airy and stuff.  Now increase its size by five.  Then, take a whipped cream can.  Spray out half of the whipped cream on the cookie.  Finally, take five strawberries, dice them, and put them on top.  That’s a Berry Pavlova.  It was ridiculous and delicious, because the whipped cream was thick and sweet and so ridiculously creamy.  I was happy.

Next came the céilidh, pronounced [kej.li] (“Kayleigh”) somehow.  (The Celtic languages are probably the only ones with a writing system as awful as English.)  A céilidh is a type of Gaelic dance festival, and I’m guessing it’s the antecedent of the square dance, because it consists of a bunch of dances with dance moves called out by a leader and fiddle music.  Also, a lot of kicking and swinging people around and do-see-doing.

Normally, this would be mildly entertaining, because it would involve dancing and rustic square dances.  This, however, was a céilidh at an academic conference full of rhythm and timing experts, which meant the dancing was, how shall we put this… quite unique.  There were a few plants in the audience, people who had already been to céilidhs, but the rest of us were just kind of groping around to try to figure out what to do.  Gender lines were frequently blurred as nearly everyone took the role of a male or female sometime during the night.  I danced with several professors I would not have been expecting to be the dancing type.  It was loads of fun; everyone was frequently out of breath and giggling and grinning and breaking some of the restaurant’s glasses and pitchers.  (According to the employees, it was an “average night”.)

The worst thing was the lack of air conditioning.  As you might imagine, I was, er, sopped by the end of the night.  For whatever reason, we were ushered out of the room by the songs “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)”, “Auld Lang Synge”, and, finally, in the piece-de-resistance, the “Hokey Pokey”.  By then, there wasn’t really a circle we could be putting ourselves “in” or “out” from, so we made do.  Chatting with some professors after, one posed the existential question of "What if the hokey-pokey really is what it's all about?"  After that,  it was time to go, and I went along with a group to a little pub on a street corner with a small group of potentially big-name music cognition people and the soon-to-be-big-name Molly Henry, who all shared Dayton, Ohio ties.  (I wonder if there’ll be a Dayton theme on this trip.)  There, I had a Strongbow on tap.  Mmm, delicious.

An Interlude in Edinburgh

"Help."

I've just finished watching the classic of Western cinema known as Howard the Duck with my friend Vasco and his girlfriend Holly. In Howard the Duck, an anthropomorphic duck travels to contemporary (i.e., 1980s) Cleveland, where he proceeds to stop an evil alien from destroying the earth using a big laser cannon that apparently fires the time vortex from the Doctor Who credits.

"Please help."

I'm currently traveling south on A7, having to carry my little Boston U notebook (obtained during my visit to them in the spring, as I checked out their computational neuroscience program) in my hand because it won't fit in my pocket. It's past 1, and almost entirely silent, but in a calming way—the silence of a city at sleep. It's pleasant out, and my leg is feeling better. I'm also heading entirely in the wrong way. I should be going north. In fact, I've been noticing that the ground has been rather flat, and I feel somehow that it should be sloping upwards, but, really, it's quite pleasant out, and the route was so simple, wasn't it? Tracing it out later, I took a wrong turn out of Vasco's apartment building; otherwise, I would have been walking in the correct direction. There's a cemetery just to my right.

I finally localize the voice. It's coming from a figure across the street, but she's moving towards me, crossing the road. She doesn't seem to be paying much attention to the street around her. My first thought is that she's going to be hit by a car. I look down the street both ways. My instincts aren't honed to the UK, but there's no cars anywhere.

"Help me." I think she figures just because I've stopped doesn't mean I've heard her. By now, I can tell from the tone of voice that this isn't the sort of "call 999" sort of shout - it's something less urgent but somehow more raw. She makes it to my side of the road.

She's clearly been crying. A bit of mascara on her cheeks. Her hands keep jumping up towards her face. She says something about her friends, and something about a bus. I don't get it the first time. "Sorry, what was that?"

She tries again. I had said enough to indicate I was an outsider, and so far most people have adapted a bit and slowed down when I haven't gotten things the first time, but she can't seem to. This time, though, I hear more. She was down there for... something. I still can't make it out. She's there with friends. But for some reason they leave without her. Maybe she has alternative ideas, but her phone is dead, or she doesn't have one; it's out of commission somehow. And now she needs to take the night bus, but she doesn't have any change. Not a penny.

"How can I help you?" I ask. I'm not much help. I don't even have a phone. My phone hasn't worked since the Detroit airport. I had to get a chip, or something, to get it to work in Europe, but I wasn't able to in the pre-Europe buzz.

"I... I..." She's still having a hard time speaking. Her breaths are ragged. "I just need the fare."

"How much is it?" At least I have some change.

"£3.50," she says. She seems a bit surprised. "Flat fare."

"No problem," I say. I get out my wallet. I need to fish through it a bit. Coins have different shapes and edges, in part, to help assist visually impaired people to find their coins without sight, but I don't know American coins well enough to do so, let alone British ones. But a £2 coin is pretty big and has two colors; the £1 coin is small and fat; and the 50p coin is large and thin. I know that much, at least. I give them to her.

She's still sniffling a bit, but manages a weak smile. "Thank you, thank you. Thank you so much. I don't have anything to give back to you. I'd do anything. I'm so embarrassed."

I mumble something along the lines of "Not a problem."

"I'm so embarrassed. Can I... can I get your phone number, or something? I'm so sorry. Thank you."

I'm not really sure what to say. That won't do you any good? I contemplate giving her my email address, but I don't have a pen or pencil. I had to borrow Vasco's pen to draw a map for the route I had been intending to take. I hate combining pen and pencil. It looks awful. Instead of doing that, I try to reroute the discussion. "Step onto the curb," I say. She's in a bus lane, but she's still on the street, and I'm still worried she'll be hit by a car. "Is there anything else I can do for you?"

"No, no, it's, it's fine," she says. "I'm so embarrassed."

"It's just fine. You need to get home," I say. A bit too abrupt, certainly. But I'm worried about her. She might be drunk. She needs to get somewhere safe. She has her fare now. "I hope you have a better evening than the one you've been having."

"Thank you, thank you," she says. "Thank you so much." She turns to leave, and starts walking north, the direction I should be walking. I head the other way. I look back over my shoulder. She's still walking, I think, or is she looking back at me?

'Stranger danger'. That's what we call it in the US, anyway. All the guidebooks are full of warnings. Wear a moneybelt. Keep it on you at all times, even when sleeping. Bring a bag to keep it in when you take a shower. Don't carry more than pocket money in your wallet, and get to your moneybelt outside of plain sight; go into a bathroom and switch out money and your ATM card there. When in a hostel, have a lock, and attach your suitcase to something a thief can't move.

And, of course: beware of these situations. I once saw a 20/20 special illustrating the dangers of travel in foreign countries. In other countries, groups of young children will come up to you, looking like beggars. They'll hold out cardboard for you to put change on. Meanwhile, some of them are rifling through your wallet, stealing it away and replacing it with a suitably similar replacement.

Here's how it could have happened. She comes up to me. Has a sob story. Asks for change. I take out my wallet and rifle through it. Meanwhile, it's dark out, the street is almost completely abandoned, I'm right by a cemetery, and I'm paying attention to her. Her accomplice comes out behind me. Brings himself to my attention. Brandishes his weapon. They know I have a wallet; it's even out. I can't help but give it up. I don't lose much, I suppose, but it's not a great way to start out my official vacation. I have to file a police report to try to recover my stolen property, and meanwhile I'm traumatized by everything that's happening.

But that's not what happened. At first, as I use the patented "satellites in the Northern Hemisphere point south" method to discover that I've walked for a mile in the wrong direction, I'm frustrated that I'm rewarded for my good deed by realizing that I've been going the wrong way. But then I realize that, if I hadn't been going the wrong way in the first place, I would never have been walking down that street at that time, and that woman may have still been frantically seeking someone who would lend her the change to get her back home safely.

I'm a good liberal mainline Protestant. I don't like to talk about religious stuff. But, after I reverse course, and later make myself lost for a second time, I find myself thanking God that I was put in the right place at the right time. If you don't subscribe to such beliefs, then spare a thought for the neurons that caused my brain to activate the "heading in the wrong direction" behavioral patterns. Yet things could have turned out so much differently if I had just looked around a bit, or thought more clearly, or, or, or.

I should have done more. I should have offered to walk with her to the bus stop to make sure she was picked up okay; I should have given my email address somehow and told her to email me when she got home, to ensure she had done so; I should have triple checked with her that I gave her the right fare. And maybe she didn't need it for a bus fare. Maybe she wanted it for something else. But, whatever it is she needed it for, she needed it more than me, so I'm just happy I was there.

On the way back, I also realized that, contra the instructions of the guidebooks, I had neglected to lock my suitcase and to the bed. And, guess what? When I got back, it was still there.

I'm sure there's a time and a place for stranger danger. Kids shouldn't be getting into random cars. But sometimes it's good just to let go of that advice and trust people. Trust that they have good intentions; trust that they have more than their own interest at mind; trust that they sometimes know what's best for them, and sometimes know what's best for you. I'll get burned for this someday. I know I will. And I went and locked up my suitcase like I was supposed to. But I'll keep trusting, because I know I should. Some days, the people really do just want £3.50.