My trip to Montpellier was very fun. I took the TGV. There is this new division of cars if you book online, IDzen and IDzap. On the way there, I was booked for IDzen, the section for quiet working and sleeping. (IDzap is billed as the party train, which it totally is not. I rode in IDzap on the way back to Paris. There were a few crying children, but mostly people were sleeping and working.) The conductor was not pleased with the people who were sitting around me, because the one guy answered his cell phone, and the young couple had a baby. So there was a whole discussion about IDzen and respecting the silence, and how none of us really cared, but the couple with the baby should probably move to another car. So they did.

I had called ahead for a reservation at the one-star Hotel Central, passage Belugou, very close to the train station and the Place de la Comédie. The phone conversation had been a little weird…I spoke to an elderly woman who asked me a lot of questions about how I had found the hotel. (It was listed with some other cheap hotels online, and I had already tried one other place that didn’t have any rooms free.) I found the Hotel Central pretty easily. When I went in, there was a young woman who greeted me, and I said, “Bonjour, j’ai une réservation.” And she called her mother, clearly the elderly woman from the phone. So I say “Bonjour” to her mother, who replies “Bon SOIR,” which was totally unfair because it was 5:00 PM and clearly on the borderline between day and evening. But I’m game, so I say, “Ah, oui, bon soir.” And I gave my name, and she says (in French) “Are you sure you have a reservation?” And I said, “Yes, I called on Tuesday,” and she said, “I’m just teasing you.” And I didn’t get the joke, but then I figured out that I must have gone up in pitch when I told her daughter I had a reservation, because that’s what you do in English. But if you do that in French it makes it a question. I guess it’s a question in American English, too, but culturally it means “I have a reservation [Now you’re going to take care of that for me, right?].” Anyway, she asked me if I wanted to eat breakfast there for 4 euros a day, and I figured, “Why not?”

So she gave me the key to room 13, on the third floor. Oh, I forgot to mention, this woman looks exactly like the grandmother in The Triplets of Belleville, only she doesn’t have a limp. She couldn’t have been taller than 4’6”. Anyway, room 13, for 25 euros a night, has two nice comfortable beds, and a bathroom with toilet, sink, and shower attached to the room. So I’m thinking, “How is this a one-star hotel? Is it just the price? Is it because there’s no TV?” After exploring Montpellier some, I went to bed and slept pretty well. The breakfast was well worth the cost (coffee, orange juice, a warm croissant, and a big piece of bread with butter and jam). The weird thing about the hotel was that I never saw any other guests. Everyone seemed to be related to the owner and her daughter. And there were all these dogs. There was a big German Shepherd who sat on the front steps and sort of glared at me every time I came in. And there were two little white dogs who kept bothering me while I was eating breakfast on Saturday morning. The other “one-star” aspect of the hotel was that I had to pay in cash when I checked out, as there was no credit card machine. Overall it was a very good hotel experience. Any potential shady dealings didn't seem threatening at all.

The conference was interesting. It was not bad for my first European conference. I was very glad I went as an observer before trying to give a paper at a conference here. Here are my observations:

1) Every single person went over time. Significantly. When moderators tried to keep presenters to time, the presenters made a big show of being offended. And going over time wasn’t built into the schedule, so it ended up being a problem, especially on the second day when some people had trains to catch in the afternoon.
2) French academics do not speak as clearly as French newscasters and game show hosts. There was one speaker who spoke very fast and had a southern accent. I understood the name of the playwright she was working on, and the title of one play. Beyond that, I was pretty lost.
3) The Q&A period is not about drawing connections between the papers presented. I tried doing that twice, and it really freaked people out.
4) Academic culture is otherwise not so different in France than in the U.S. There was a really pointless disciplinary argument on the first day, with this one theatre historian complaining that another person was looking at plays and dramatic criticism as a literary critic. And I was like, yeah, that guy is a literary critic. That’s what he does. There’s a philosopher here too. Are you going to be mad at him for being trained as a philosopher?

I made a little faux pas on the first day. The conference organizer got up and said, “OK, we’re going to lunch now. Follow me to the restaurant.” And so I got up and followed everyone to the restaurant. When I got there, I realized that lunch was just for the people who were presenting. So I made sure that was the case, and then I went elsewhere and got a sandwich. This one professor came up to me when they all got back from lunch and said, “You disappeared at lunch. What happened?” And I had to explain that I wasn’t invited. Then on the second day both organizers made a point of inviting me to lunch. So that was nice. It was pretty obvious that the reason I got invited was that some people had left in the morning, but I was fine with taking the free lunch.

The discussion at lunch was mostly about departmental committee assignments. And there was lots of gossip about other professors. I wish I had known who they were.

The trip back to Paris was uneventful. But it was nice to get back and feel like Paris was familiar. I tend to feel that way about the first trip away from a new place. When you come back, it starts to feel like home.