-I had to take a slightly bitty route to Växjö: Dublin-Heathrow plane, Heathrow-Copenhagen plane, Copenhagen-Växjö train. (And taxis to Dublin Airport and to the hotel from Växjö train station.) This gave me plenty of time to sit around, bored and anxious, fretting over whether I'd be on time, whether my paper would go well, whether I'd get on with the other attendees, whether I'd be able to find my way around Växjö... I tried settling my nerves by reading On Strike Against God by Joanna Russ (I finished it on Saturday on the plane to Heathrow! It is OMG so good it made me cry and also made me want to quote it in big chunks in this very Livejournal, which I will probably do tonight when I get home!) and also Devices and Desires by KJ Parker (also very good, but in that dry, Parkeresque way where you're slightly mystified as to how sie makes minute descriptions of mediaeval button factories so incredibly fascinating). It sort of worked a bit.
-There are about four ways of pronouncing Växjö. The correct way is "VEK-werh", with the r being very slight and almost imperceptible, the e being more like a schwa than anything else, and the V being on the borderline between V and F. Even Swedish people get this wrong all the time. They tend to say "Vesher", which makes the Växjö natives smile politely while secretly grinding their teeth. (Okay, I don't actually know about the tooth-grinding. But it seems likely.)
-Linnaeus (who invented our current system of biological taxonomy) went to school in Växjö! I DID NOT KNOW THAT.
-When you take the train from Copenhagen to Växjö, you can see an offshore wind farm through the window as the train crosses the bridge between the two countries. (A bridge between countries? HOW AWESOME IS THAT. FOR REAL.)
-The hotel I stayed at is called Teleborgs Slott (pronounced "Telebory Slot"), and it is gorgeous. It's a castle, built circa 1900 as a wedding gift for the fiancée of the rich guy who built it; but the fiancée left him and they never got married! There's a room in the castle named after her. As a hotel, the Slott is super comfortable; I had a smallish but lovely room with a beautifully soft bed, and a TV, and complimentary toffees and mineral water. No ensuite bathroom and lots and lots of stairs, but this is made up for by the beautiful environment: it's on the shore of a lake surrounded by tall trees (fir and ash and birch). And it has gardens, and a deck overlooking the lake (in warmer weather you could eat your breakfast there). Ooh, and speaking of breakfast: the buffet laid on in the breakfast room was fabulous. Bread rolls (mmm, Swedish bread), hard-boiled eggs, ham, beef, salami, smoked salmon, prawns, fruit, juices, coffee, tea, fruit tea, muesli, yogurt...
-The conference food was also incredibly yummy and generous. During the dinner on the first evening, a local choir sang songs for us while we ate. They were good, too.
-Then on the second evening, we went to the hand papermill in Lessebo and ate a fabulous buffet dinner and made paper (I have my sheet of paper with the mill's crest on it!). I had delivered my paper (heh, a different kind of paper) in the morning, and it had gone really well, so all my anxiety had gone, and the papers in the afternoon had been fascinating, and I'd been hanging out with Sally Jane Thompson a lot (and she is a very cool individual), and the weather had been bright and dry and sunny and warm, and I was just so happy I felt like I was bubbling over, so I had to sneak away and phone Mum and babble excitedly, otherwise I thought I'd burst.
-That night I watched 'Allo 'Allo with Swedish subtitles. It is beyond weird that that show is so popular outside Britain.
-Highlights of the academic side of the conference, for me, were: Kai Mikkonen on focalisation in comics, and, in a similar vein, Felix Giesa on narratology and narration in comics; Dietrich Grünwald on "the picture-story as principle"; Sally Jane Thompson on cosmopolitanism and cultural tensions in comics; Christina Meyer on the use of frames in comics about 9/11 (which made me want to take a second look at In the Shadow of No Towers); a Swedish woman I don't remember the name of on book illustrations vs comic-book versions of Pippi in the South Seas; Olaf Moriarty Solstrund on the social dimension of webcomics; and a very good paper by Florian Gross on The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and its relationship to comics (both those that pre-existed the novel and those created as spinoffs). Lots of meaty ideas to chew on; I have about fifty ideas for further papers now.
-Because of the times of flights, I had to stay for a night in the Thistle Hotel in Heathrow. It was a lot less interesting than Teleborgs Slott; blandly acceptable, but staying more than a night there would be a bit depressing. But when I (inevitably) woke up two hours too early on Sunday morning, I was able to watch silly children's cartoons, which cheered me up. And it occurred to me that it had been too long since I'd watched silly children's cartoons; that all the thinking and planning I'd done for this trip, and in general, had left me with no time; more, with a feeling that I had Important Things To Think About and couldn't be wasting my time and/or brainspace on frivolities like silly children's cartoons. (And lest I be misunderstood -- I don't think all children's cartoons are silly. But the cartoon I watched most of that morning was Yu-Gi-Oh GX, which is very silly indeed.) I need to think more about this. Ponder the implications. I can slow down a little, maybe? Not always be chasing after the Next Big Thing that I absolutely have to do? Hmmm.
-All in all, a fantastic trip. I am back in work now and nobody's going to pay me to do nothing but read and study comics all day, but all the same I'm a happy bunny for having done it at all.