Antwerp

Antwerp... we visited the International Migration organziation... pretty crummy though, very poor presentations. I had a hard time staying awake. We spent some time in Antwerp though, and it rained. We visited City Hall. Visited a home for smuggled people.

Canada Mission

Trip to the Canadian Mission today. Long, but well organized. Excellent presentation about trade, opening remarks, environmental policy... others not so excellent. We almost had a fight on our hands when the topic of seal hunting came up. The Memorial contingent was happy with the Canadian government position. We went to a reception after that at the ambassador's residence. Not bad digs. Excellent wine and food. Put to rest the grumbling about the generally crummy food we've been catered so far. I actually thought the food was excellent for lunch yesterday, but today's has not been met by favour in any quarter. Tomorrow we're going to Antwerp. Its crazy how much time we spend on these crazy tours. Basically 12 hours a day, at least, is taken up with something or other, and then we go out to eat, and then its basically time to go to bed. Fun though.

study tour

The study tour has started, and we had an exceptionally busy day. We spent a very long time learning about European Neigbourhood Policy at the Centre for European Policy Studies, followed by more at the European Policy Institute. The hotel is nice, no real problems. Lots of people from all over. Mostly Carleton students. They are very inquisitive.

Brussels

So, I'm in Brussels now. Another pleasant flying experience as usual. I got to spend about 7 hours in Gatwick, the first 3 of which were spent in line at customs. (pictured) Other than that, I checked into my hotel at the same time as an Italian school group, so I just about repeated the experience waiting for the pandamonium to subside. I'm currently assembling a group of pictures of Brussels' worst architecture... and my there's a lot of it. It seems to follow a lot of Ottawa's lead in terms of boring institutional government buildings. Not to say there aren't some nice ones to balance them out.

A trip to the Metropole

Visited Ottawa for a conference at Carleton, on the exciting topic of writing policy papers, or if you're REALLY lucky "memos to cabinet". Apparently that's where the action's at. I'll have to remember not to use so much jargon or too many acronyms in my writing in future. I expect my vast reading public to hold me to that.

The conference was fun overall, despite the high blowhard/human ratio. These guys really makes me want to avoid academia, since they actually seem to have enormously inflated opinions of themselves, despite the fact that they're still only PhD candidates. Also Ottawa managed to defy the odds and have good weather in March, impressing all the out-of-towners.

After all of that it was on to J(2)'s birthday. I had never been rock climbing on fake rocks before, but its more fun than you would think. So I improved my "spotting" skills as best I could, and managed not to drop too many of the guests. Family remains in place, largely unchanged, although the new porch is nice.

Movie Reviews

There's been a lot of talk about 300 and its various possible political meanings, but I thought this was a pretty good disection of what's going on:

The Metropolitician's review of the reviews

"The popular reading of King Leonidas as Bush, Xerxes and his empire as Iran, and the 300 who go into battle against the wishes of a corrupt and reticent people is superficial and facile at best, given the fact that this is one of the oldest and most retold stories in Western civilization on the one hand, and finds its origins in a comic book written well before the present crisis was at hand.

The styling of Xerxes as exotic, erotic Other is as old as British Orientalist depictions, and an ancient, decadent Orient steeped in mystery is a trope as old as the hills.

The muscles rippling on sweaty soldiers marching off to their sacred duties to orchestral fanfare and the sentimental, vaguely ethnic wail that started in Gladiator and continued through to Troy, Black Hawk Down, and now even the opening sequences of Battlestar Galactica, didn't strike me as "fascist" any more than The Rock did. "

Here's a follow up response to criticism

a conference to remember

I went to my first academic conference, and boy am I impressed. For some reason they picked me to greet the conference attendees, no doubt because of my well known social grace and charm. So I got to get up at 6AM while the dawn was still an unknown rumour. At least the traffic was quieter at that time in the morning. So then, after my successful meet n greet, I got to sit in on the first few hours discussing the fate of the Doha Round of WTO negotiations, and whether it was good, bad, or in between that it will bite the biscuit in the next few months. With a topic like that, its hard to go wrong, but I did find myself squirming a bit, until the fireworks started, and the rival camps began accusing each other of various attrocities. I had no idea what they were arguing about, other than the broad strokes that one of them was a dreaded "neo-liberal", while the rest were more orthodox academics, instinctively opposed to global hegemonic power practices. Much to my horror, I was seated next to the neo-liberal at lunch. After an awkward first half hour, I discovered he was from Ottawa, so we bonded over our dislike of the transit system.

After lunch it went on in much the same way, only longer and more boring, except that I got to hear rumours about the outrageous demands of the various attendees, including the one prof who was really annoyed that no prior arrangements had been made for him to sit in an aisle seat on the flight over. The funny thing is that he was actually really angry.

At the end of the day those who had "helped out" such as myself were invited to the wrapup dinner, while those who had merely enjoyed 9 hours of gruelling lectures were shown the door. I think they're trying to break the solidarity of our group. Anyway, it was a highlight since we got to partake in a regular feast at some upscale Chinese place downtown. Again, much to our horror they tried to seperate the grad students by placing us all at different tables in order to... I don't know exactly, but its the way they wanted it. However, once the profs got pretty liquored up everything was fine, and then they started milling, so we could once again rejoin the safety of our peergroup.