Imagine this. You move house at the weekend. You don't take any time off work the next week but instead try to write an 8500 word essay for an exhibition catalogue which should be finished at the end of the week - you don't succeed. You take your mind off how tired you are by going to see The Eagle on Friday night (excellent). You spend Saturday thinking about and writing the talk you have to give the next day at your book launch! You relax on Saturday night by having your sister to stay in the new flat. You attend book launch - it seems to go well though it would have been nice if more people had been there. But it was Mothers' Day and the sun was shining. After lots of hobnobbing at said book launch you go out for Mothers' Day lunch with your mother. You eventually go home but can't collapse because early the next morning you are going to Amsterdam for 3 days to take part in a conference about 'Presenting "Islamic" Art in the Contemporary Context'. You are on a panel, something you have never done before, asked to present for 10 minutes on 'What makes Islamic art Islamic?' and to respond to three key questions the conference organisers have posed, which you don't understand. You will fly back from Amsterdam early Thursday morning and go straight into work, because you then have 3 working days to finish the aforementioned catalogue essay and deal with everything else that needs to be done before going away until the end of the month, to Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Iran... Who would manage to arrange such a crazy work schedule? Me, that's who.
We're in Day 2 of Amsterdam at this point. I have participated in the panel today - which seemed to go ok actually - and tomorrow unexpectedly have the morning off, before participating in a Think Tank in the afternoon about a planned exhibition of Islamic art. We're being well looked after, and staying in the once-grand musaktastic Hotel Krasnapolsky - I am blogging from the lobby, the first time I have managed to get online (we don't have an internet connection yet in the new flat) and not had to worry about change-of-address admin, trying to move over our contents insurance, etc etc.
The new flat is great, though we went through a stage the middle of last week of being very disorientated and slightly traumatised by the whole uprooting/touching down in a new place (though at the same time not new because only 250 m from the old place) where we don't know anyone. Probably because we were so tired and hadn't taken any time off work to 'settle in'. As you can see from the photos, we're living in a state of semi-chaos, semi-civilisation - we unpacked the kitchen, the bedroom and about half the living room, so it is livable in and it is starting to feel like home. But we're putting everthing else on hold until we get back from Central Asia.
My half hour's free internet connection is about to run out, and there's the conference dinner to rush to in a moment, so I will sign out for now. We should get online at home on Thursday so I will aim to blog again before our travel adventures! Just wanted to check in as I know some of you are wondering how the move went... I leave you with some flamingoes in Amsterdam zoo.
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