Spasibo i do svidanya ...

Surprisingly quickly, the last day of the workshop dawns, and with it an insight into what our Serbian colleague is really doing: he is replicating on computer what a medieval scribe would want to have, in order to go on scrivening. Which is an admirable goal, and an artistic triumph when achieved, but seems to sadly miss the point of using a digital medium. Anyway, up the hill, puff pant, do the idiots' guide to XML technologies, and then the show-and-tell of TEI applications, and the coffee break is upon us before you can say “see TEI is way cool”. Then I make my farewell speech and hand over to Tania for the final practical exercise. This goes, so far as I can tell, very well. A hard core of a round dozen have survived thus far; Tania splits them into three groups, makes them do a quick document analysis on the Mayakovsky text, and then elicits from them all the elements they will need. Within ten minutes, they have all got a suitable schema out of Roma and are happily tagging the plain text of “Ya Sam” prepared for them earlier. Stronery, really, and they really deserve certificates, which we completely failed to prepare for them, shame.

At lunchtime, Viktor comes in to officially close us down, though the questions are still coming, and whisks the three of us away into a cupboard, where the University director presses quantities of Russian currency into our eager little hands. Unfortunately, we don't have time to spend it on much, since the conference is still going on; I leave Tanya and Alexei to it, and wander off in search of a Lufthansa office in the hope that they might know whether or not my errant phone has turned up yet (nope). But it was an interesting expedition, marred only by my feet, which are, frankly, rubbish when it comes to coping with more than 50 metres stroll, never mind one that includes some hills, and quite a bit of under-maintained concrete. I saw a nice park, and learned that you really can't get into any office building without showing your passport, just like it says in the guidebooks.
The view from the conference hall
Since it's now definitely raining outside, I sneak back into the conference hall and sit quietly in a corner typing; they're debating whether or not to set a pan-russian society of people interested in digital editing, or just keep tootling along (according to Kevin). A typical end-of-successful-conference debate, of course, but good to see they're having it, especially if they invite me back.

And eventually after many farewells, there was a very protracted and noisy dinner in the Tatar restaurant, which struggled to cope with 15 people ordering different things... that came in dribs and drabs interspersed with much beer. Ah well. I kissed everybody (3 times in Russia) and made appropriate farewells (I think). Tomorrow will be devoted to tourism

That ole TEI Workshop Magic

Day two dawns, somewhat the worse for vodka. Somehow I got up the hill to the computer lab in time for the “TEI basic” session, in which we introduce the niceties of actually marking up an issue of Punch in TEI. Amazingly, quite a few of the jokes survived translation, and all the students worked through the practical exercise with very little need for supervision. Let me record here how wonderful it is to have a properly prepared and tested exercise, translated properly into the local lingo. All praise to Alexei and Tanya! We went for a well earned lunch in a canteen resplendent with plastic flowers, where I turned down the bread soup, but enjoyed plof (rice and meat) and salad, and lemon tea. I retired to my hotel room and slept for most of the afternoon, partly because it was raining, mostly because the jet lag had caught up with me. Or maybe the vodka. In the evening, we went out for dinner in a fake German beer hall, where the beer was Czech and good, and the food took forever to come. I eat fish, and so did Tania,but was too tired to appreciate it fully.

Day three of the course, and we are still on a roll. Manuscripts! Names and Places! I'm impressed by the way everyone is still paying attention, and even asking good questions. The practical session has been postponed to day four, so that we could all enjoy a Cultural Visit to the University Library, where we dutifully gawped at various memorabilia of the long distinguished history of Kazan University, founded in the 18th century and the first University in Russia to do .. oh all sorts of things. Lobachevsky studied here, as did Lenin (but they threw him out for being too revolutionary) and Tolstoi (ditto, tho for reasons not explained). We also had a visit to the rare books room of the library, where we were given tantalising glimpses of some ancient manuscripts and assorted incunabula. No photos, no touchy-touchy.

After another canteen lunch, I went for a walk, which degenerated into a crawl, up to the Kremlin. Friday means weddings in Russia, so this was full of wedding parties as well as tourists
... it is all very scenic: and contains the biggest mosque in Russia, and also a fairly large and typically over decorated orthodox cathedral.
I prayed for better weather in both, and was duly rewarded by the sun coming out as I staggered back to the conference in time for a heated panel discussion on the inadequacies of Unicode as a means of representing Old Church Slavonic, featuring a rather provocative Serbian called Zoran Kostic from the Foundation of the Holy Monastery Hilandar. The Muscovites were having none of it, but his font (which he demonstrated to me over dinner) really is very beautiful. He's a real typographer and has no time for XML nonsense (his words, not mine). Dinner was in the Turkish restaurant down the road, and featured exotic dancing as well as a lot of chitchat with the students. Nadezhda Gorbachova from Perm graciously agreed to be my facebook friend, and Heinz Miklas from Austria danced impressively with one of the local exotic dancers.

The thing of this gig is

Setting up a workshop is much the same wherever you go. You just need to find the right person to plead with, or be exceptionally polite to, in order to get access to the right set of computers. Then you need to check that they have actually installed the software you asked them to install when planning the workshop (which, if you asked the wrong person, they won't have); then check that the software can actually be installed and does behave as expected on the machines you're going to use (which in my case it didn't). Then there are minor things like getting handouts printed and duplicated, and meeting up with your fellow presenters when their mobile is switched off, and yours is lost somewhere in Frankfurt. So I missed the opening session of the conference but made friends with the lady who runs the Tsentra Informatsionii Tekhnologii instead. An hour or so later, I had seen Oxygen installed on a room full of computers, detected and removed a rogue byte-order-mark from one my Pushkin demo file, printed out and sent for copying two sets of handouts, and located Tanya waiting patiently for me at the back of the conference hall.

Over coffee, Tanya showed me a bunch of typos and other corrections that she'd found in the Russian version of the handouts, and I persuaded her that we didn't have time to correct them before starting the now urgent business of copying stuff onto the participants' gift usb keys (kindly provided by INTUTE UK to whom be praise). We sat there in the student canteen copying sticks for the next 30 minutes; students in implausibly short skirts wandered distractingly by. Then we lunched far too briefly at an interesting Uzbek restaurant further down the hill, and made it back in good time to Do The Gig – two lectures, each in English and Russian, followed by a Kofye Braik
(lemon tea in a plastic cup), and a 90 minute practical, at the end of which all two dozen students had successfully produced a well formed XML document. Phew. (did I say how hot it is in Kazan?)

Later that evening, I am invited to traditional Russian dinner upstairs in a Tatar restaurant: plates of salad, cold meat, etc. With copious amounts of wine, orange juice, and vodka. During this first course, people stood up one by one to make a polite self-introduction, usually followed by a formal toast and a bit of badinage, as far as I can judge (my neighbour was too busy enjoying to do more than give me brief explanations “he is from Perm” “they suggest we take conference to Lake Baikal” etc.) Enthused by vodka, I duly did my best, explaining that I came from a small University town west of the Urals and suffered from a distressing lack of geographical knowledge which I was excessively grateful for this opportunity to rectify. (Which is true: I have now met several people from places I never knew existed.) Everyone trouped out of the restaurant for a cigarette break between courses, even those who were not smoking, which gave me the chance to have my photo taken with people from Perm, and to chat with people from the Russian National Corpus in Moscow. I drank far too much vodka too.

Tatarstantastic!

I spent most of my first day in Tatarstan learning (again) how it feels to be a foreign eejut. It's not so bad. Viktor met me at the airport this morning, and drove me to the splendid Hotel Shaliapin Palace, where I promptly went to bed for a few hours. Then, about midday local time, I got up and explored a bit. Turning right out of the hotel, I set myself the goals (all eventually accomplished) of getting some rubles, a hairbrush, some razor blades, an alarum clock, and a new mobile. I managed to take in quite a bit of sight seeing, notably down in the enormous marketplace which stretches for miles down from the posh bit of town, getting increasingly exotic as it approaches the Volga.

Tatarstan is only 40% russian, and the rest is Tatars. I bought my alarm clock from a tatar lady in the Market,
and many others were selling strange herbs and spices and dried fruit. Why are only men allowed to sell dried fruit?
Why are there so many cheap shoes now that I don't need any? It was too hot to resolve these questions, so I staggered back to the posh bit of town, and worked out how to get a new phone for under 1000 rubles.

Better get back into work mode soon...

On the road again

I remembered to mow the lawn, and water the plants, and stop the milk, and empty the recycle bin into the compost maker, and put on the dishwasher, and take in the washing, and leave a note for the decorators. I set off up the road, and then remembered to go back and collect the charger for my mobile phone, oh irony. I caught the 1040 bus from Gloucester Green to Heathrow, and checked myself and my bag all the way to Kazan in good time. And although my flight was about half an hour late, I was not bothered, until I sat down in the nice restaurant at Frankfurt airport where I had promised myself a delicious Frankfurt dinner, and realiswed I had left my mobile on the plane. That's right, my mobile, the one with all the contact details for my colleagues in Kazan on it, along with all my other secret numbers. Bugger.

Back to the gate I just arrived at, off for a long trek across the airport to the official lost property reporting place. Of course, Lufthansa will deliver my handy as soon as they find it, wherever I am, aye even unto Kazan. But it may take a few hours for them to realise they have found it. Back across the airport and back in the restaurant, my waiter is consolatory as is the dinner I ordered, when it finally materalizes. And so is the half litre of Italian white wine I wash the spaetsle down with. Hey, I wasnt going to use the damn phone in Kazan anyway: too damn expensive.