Saturday, July 08, 2006

Conferences in Belgium

I attended two conferences in Belgium this week. I got to Mons on Tuesday afternoon for the first one, "la Journée de la Nasalité", which was quite technical, but very interesting. It focused mostly on acoustic issues related to nasality. When I first got my hotel (Hotel Etna), I realized that I should have asked around before booking my room right by the train station... It felt like a dump where people go to get some, if you know what I mean. My view: a shut-down sex show viewing place. No wonder they had me pay for the room upon arrival. I will spare you the details (noise, shower, phone, service problems) but I will say that it was less than an ideal place to spend the night before a conference, especially on the night that the Italian soccer teams won their semi-final game against Germany. After Mons, I went to Louvain-la-Neuve for a second conference on prosodic aspects to sociolinguistic variation in French. It was great! I learned quite a bit about the sociophonetics, and about various research projects related to prosody and the perception of phonological fearures that are tied to social or geographic differenes. Although I got to Louvain-la-Neuve quite late on Wednesday night (long story!), I was able to walk around this brand-new university town in the following days. Everything there was designed to cater to the university, which was founded in 1425 in Louvain (Leuven) and got kicked out from Flemish territory in the late 60s, hence the creation of Louvain-la-Neuve. The town didn't feel like Europe at all. In fact, it felt like an unban laboratory where we live under the supervision of some crazy scientist, à la 1984. You should check it out sometime.

http://www.olln.be/ (website of the city of Ottignies-Louvain-la-Neuve) http://www.ucl.ac.be/en/intro.html (website of the Université catholique de Louvain)



A sign by my room door in Louvain-la-Neuve. It reads "Walen go hom", which was displayed at a demonstration for the departure of Walloons (Walloon students and their university) from Leuven, in the mid-60s.

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