south of the conference site

South of the conference site is where most of the University of Manchester can be found. I never went down there during the conference, though, and I doubt anyone else did either. But it’s a really nice area, with quite a number of obvious things to do to keep oneself entertained. But thank God I didn’t know about the big shisha bar down there. One of the nice things about Europe is being able to detox on the apple-scented goddess for awhile, and usually I can keep the habit kicked in Egypt for quite awhile after these trips. Given that I hate cigarettes and smoke shisha mostly for the taste, I suppose one gimmick I could try is to force myself each time to take not the standard apple flavor, but rather “honey” (a.k.a. the “car exhaust” flavor: the honey is so little tasted that I don’t see why they bother adding it).

After all these times to Europe, it still always surprises me just how dead things can be on Sundays. I think dead Sundays ended in the U.S. in about the late 1970’s, and I do have faint memories of them, but only faint ones. That was a nice battle between two of the things for which America is known: Protestant moralism, and crass comemrcialism, and the commercialism won in that case. (As a German acquaintance in Chicago once complained after finding yet another advertising flyer on his front porch: “What I don’t understand about America is that you are expected to buy at least one thing each day.”) But incidentally, given the deserved reputation for being more crassly commercialist than Europe, why don’t our sports teams have advertisements al over their names and uniforms as in Europe? It would be considered an outrage if American teams were named after newspapers and aspirin companies; I’m already annoyed by commercial stadium names, as are most of my friends.

I was just looking at travel records. My first trip to Europe was 20 years ago (later than many of my friends), and this is the 48th, though I’m not sure why I’ve been coming more than twice per year on average. Only 5 of those trips were for more than a month in duration; the others were short. The longest was my five-month stint in Amsterdam.

Threatening rain again, but let’s hope it doesn’t. My flight is late afternoon, which means another Chinatown lunch is possible.

Teaching started in Cairo today, but my classes not until tomorrow. We’re experimenting with a new teaching schedule this year for the first time. In the old days everyone was on a Sunday/Tuesday/Thursday or Monday/Wednesday schedule. The problem was that junior faculty were always saddled with the three-day schedule, leaving them to choose between sacrificing research and sacrificing all semblance of a social life. So now it’s Sunday/Wedesnday or Monday/Thursday. Most of the senior people seemed to view Sunday/Wednesday as obviously more dignified and prestigious, for reasons I don’t quite get. I chose Monday/Thursday, simply because I like weekends in Alexandria and Thursday tickets to Alexandria (and Saturday night tickets from Alex back to Cairo) can be tough tickets quite often. Another colleague, intensely Catholic, chose Monday/Thursday in order to leave Sunday open for religious events. Otherwise, Monday/Thursday was treated tacitly as the weaker of the two options by most people. There muyst be a Bourdieuian point there somewhere.

I’m sorry for the trip to end, but it’ll be Paris soon enough, less than three weeks from now.