![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Genoa, day 1
Jun. 11th, 2010 06:09 pmHad a little bit of excitement this morning trying to get my train ticket from Bologna to Genova; I needed to use one of the self-service machines to print a ticket that had already been purchased, but none of the six options offered to me in English seemed anything vaguely like "retrieve ticket already purchased". I went to the info desk, and tried to explain my predicament (in English) to the man behind it, and when it was clear that I couldn't explain myself adequately, the man behind me started translating for me (very nice!). Finally, he said that if I waited a few minutes for him to get what he needed from the info desk, he'd help me navigate the machine, which worked just fine in Italian. (The option he selected is the one that was labeled "retract online ticket" in English, which doesn't sound at all like "please print my ticket"). But I'd left for the station early enough that I didn't panic for time, and the rest of the journey was unremarkable.
Genova is really a beautiful city, the little that I've seen of it; as soon as I got my bearings outside of the train station I rushed down to the workshop location (got there half-way into the second talk, not too bad), and then briefly ran back to my hotel, near the station, during the lunch break to check in. I'm now at the hotel catching up on internet stuff and then will hopefully take a nap before meeting up for lunch with the organizers, speakers, and other discussants at 8pm. I found that even though most of the talks are really unrelated to my areas of knowledge, I was still able to come up with a couple of interesting comments in response to the paper I was a discussant of, and I also wowed one of the organizers by pulling out one of the handouts from ESMLS detailing a 1340 statute from the Faculty of Arts at the University of Paris, discussing how semantics alone cannot determine truth conditions, you also have to take into account pragmatic considerations like context, intention, etc. He was so excited he went off and photocopied it right away. :)
The one damper in all of this is my ankle, which is not any better from yesterday. It is different, but it is different in such a way that worries me. The swelling is very localized (between the achilles tendon and the ankle bone on the outside). It's quite significant (you basically can't see the ankle bone). It doesn't hurt when I walk on it. It doesn't hurt when I rotate my ankle. It hurts when I press on it. It hurts more when I've just woken up and when I've been sitting a long time, and less when I've been walking around some. Elevation does nothing. And I cannot recall any precise instant where I could have done something that would've damaged the muscle/tendon (like stepped wrong, or tripped, or something). It just spontaneously swelled up and started hurting around lunch yesterday. This is all very suspiciously like my bout with thrombophlebitis two years ago. If it doesn't get any better over the weekend, I've got a feeling I'll be going in to the walk-in clinic Tuesday morning. But if it is thrombophlebitis again, then I shouldn't really be walking around for another three days before doing anything about it...
Genova is really a beautiful city, the little that I've seen of it; as soon as I got my bearings outside of the train station I rushed down to the workshop location (got there half-way into the second talk, not too bad), and then briefly ran back to my hotel, near the station, during the lunch break to check in. I'm now at the hotel catching up on internet stuff and then will hopefully take a nap before meeting up for lunch with the organizers, speakers, and other discussants at 8pm. I found that even though most of the talks are really unrelated to my areas of knowledge, I was still able to come up with a couple of interesting comments in response to the paper I was a discussant of, and I also wowed one of the organizers by pulling out one of the handouts from ESMLS detailing a 1340 statute from the Faculty of Arts at the University of Paris, discussing how semantics alone cannot determine truth conditions, you also have to take into account pragmatic considerations like context, intention, etc. He was so excited he went off and photocopied it right away. :)
The one damper in all of this is my ankle, which is not any better from yesterday. It is different, but it is different in such a way that worries me. The swelling is very localized (between the achilles tendon and the ankle bone on the outside). It's quite significant (you basically can't see the ankle bone). It doesn't hurt when I walk on it. It doesn't hurt when I rotate my ankle. It hurts when I press on it. It hurts more when I've just woken up and when I've been sitting a long time, and less when I've been walking around some. Elevation does nothing. And I cannot recall any precise instant where I could have done something that would've damaged the muscle/tendon (like stepped wrong, or tripped, or something). It just spontaneously swelled up and started hurting around lunch yesterday. This is all very suspiciously like my bout with thrombophlebitis two years ago. If it doesn't get any better over the weekend, I've got a feeling I'll be going in to the walk-in clinic Tuesday morning. But if it is thrombophlebitis again, then I shouldn't really be walking around for another three days before doing anything about it...
