Paris
10/9/2011
Today was much like yesterday, locked in my room searching the web for references. I shot off the first page of the introduction to the Lit Review to my supervisors for comment. Tomorrow I may just get on a bus or train for awhile to look at Paris again.
I got an email back from James Taylor (aka Westall scholar) and he had suggestions for cheap hotels near London. Imperial college got back to me too, with a list of Conference Accommodation Hotels that they use, all the residential college vacation letting has finished (as I expected). They were not cheap hotels; oh for an expense account!
No word back from Vienna but that will come next week in working hours I expect. I will book a Hotel in Ghent tonight or tomorrow as the first step in my planning. Then the train from Ghent to Vienna and a Hotel in Vienna when I get a better idea of the timing needed. My final expense(s) and bookings will be the Train from Vienna to London and the hotel near London for the best part of two weeks. This is not going to be cheap.
I have been spoilt by having both London and Paris accommodation prepaid from Australia, so I did not see the funds going out of my travel reserve account. Without the accommodation costs, I have been living relatively cheaply for the last six weeks. All an illusion of course; add $50-60 per day to get the real expenditure!
I did go out for short while today to one of the little restaurants on "campus" for lunch. I ordered a cheese omelette with salad and chips but got a plain omellette (ie two scrambled eggs) and chips. Either I did not order correctly or they ran out of both filling and salad. No communication in French, English or international hand-signals. I may not go back there.
However, I found the other restaurant in the Spanish House, which looks really good. The problem is like the main refectory there is a price for students and another for researchers/visitors. Compared to "outside" it is still cheap but!!!! (An example, a coffee olai costs a student 1.5 Euro and it costs me 2.3 Euro, although we are both served the same coffee at the same time! Outside, 2.5 Euro at most places, sometimes a bit cheaper.)
On the way back from lunch I made a quick call into the local Supermarket for some fruit and tea-bags, but on the way back got caught up in a market of bric-a-brac (Antiques) that had set up stalls around the RER Train Station. Lots of shady characters and junk. Interesting but I held onto my wallet the whole time I was there; it had that feel about it. Back to work on the lit review then I quit for dinner. After dinner I reviewed some of my images from Le Havre and hopefully will be able to line them up with paintings in Lesueur's manuscript on Monday. Doing the Blog at the moment then bed. All a bit boring but reasonably productive.
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