Greetings from Croatia!

This year has been good for conferences – first CAMWS in Grand Rapids and now the XIIth International Colloquium on Roman Provincial Art in Pula, Croatia.  In retrospect, it’s amazing that I presented a paper in Pula.  I didn’t know about the colloquium until the day before the deadline and begged for another 24 hours to submit an abstract.  By the time I found out it had been accepted (through the program posted on the internet) I had missed the registration deadline.  I never received any information about the conference except for hotel information.  Somehow I made my way from Baton Rouge to Atlanta to New York to Venice, and then to Trieste by train and by bus to Pula, arriving 28 hours after I’d started my journey.  When I showed up with my 26 minute paper, I found out it as supposed to be 20 minutes – but this was an hour before I presented and it was too late to change anything.  It wasn’t until the last day of the conference that I discovered that the email address they had for me was wrong!  But my paper was well-received, and should be published in the Proceedings – a real publication for me!

Headquarters, Italian Community in Pula

In most other respects, the conference was extraordinarily well-organized.  It was held at the Headquarters of the Italian Community in Pula in a state of the art meeting room with simultaneous translation of papers into Croatian, German, English, French and Italian through headsets.  Coffee breaks were held on the expansive terrace and lunch was held in the lapidarium of the Archaeological Museum of Istria, where we stood on Roman mosaics and used tombstones as tables!

New friends at the Archaeological Museum of Istria

Several excursions were arranged, including cocktails at the archaeological site of Nesactium, lit by titi torches, with entertainment provided by a Roman music enthusiast:

We traveled to Brijuni National Park by boat, and visited local museums at Buzet  and Labin.  After the conference, there was an optional excursion to Nin, Zadar , and Split to see Diocletian’s Palace.  An anonymous benefactor made this excursion possible (Thanks, Dad!).  

Pula amphitheater at sunset

52 hours in Grand Rapids

There's something very comforting about the annual meeting of the Classical Association of the Middle West and South (CAMWS).  After last semester where the message I kept receiving was "the study of Latin and Greek is useless, you've wasted your entire academic career," it was nice to learn that classics is not endangered everywhere.

I gave a paper on poetic language in Tacitus' Germania that was quite well received.  I was invited as a special guest at the vice presidents' dinner to plan strategies against administrations that ruthlessly attack classics.  And I made a lot of new contacts and reconnected with colleagues from every stage in my career: people from Iowa, the Vergilian Society, Missouri, and those lucky folks who managed to escape Louisiana years ago who went on to forge successful careers in classics.

As for Grand Rapids, the conference was held at the elegant Amway Grand Plaza.  I had a corner room on the 19th floor overlooking the river.  I had dinner at San Chez Bistro, a tapas bar where I ordered albondigas (meatballs of Moroccan lamb, beef and chorizo over roasted vegetables, served in a black skillet) and queso recubierto which functioned quite nicely as dessert:  breaded baked goat cheese with crispy fried beets and orange blossom honey.  I had lunch one day at Angel's Thai Cafe where I had chicken pad cashew reminiscent of Springfield cashew chicken with the addition of bamboo shoots and water chestnuts (my favorite!).  Too bad the hotel food was so abysmal - I, for one, do not consider a chunk of tofu marinated in balsamic vinegar and served warm over an uninspired mixture of vegetables gourmet fare.

The best thing about these conferences is that they always renew my interest in classics.  After years at an institution that neither valued nor fostered academic excellence, CAMWS in Grand Rapids (co-sponsored by Calvin College and Grand Valley State University) was truly inspirational!