On the work end of things, I spent another excellent and incredibly productive day at the Brussels Info Center of the European Bureau for Lesser Used Languages.  While I was there, in fact looking at some materials about the revival (reemphasizing) of Welsh in Wales, a group of students and teachers from a heavily bilingual town in Wales came on a sort of field trip to the office.  Interesting.  I've gotten at this point a fairly extensive bibliography for Galicia (Galiza / Galicia), Wales (Cymru), and Ireland (Éire), and obviously Belgium.  Still left to go is Cataluña (Catalunya), for which I've seen a great deal of info and will obviously need to trudge through when I have a nice big block of time.  I seem to be heading in the direction of the possible working title "language policy and legislation versus language reality : convergence or divergence?"

Apparently I got busy during this period of time and didn't do too much picture taking.  Good for me.  I did go to the Katholieke Universiteit Brussel to meet with Peter Nelde and his team of researchers in het Onderzoekscentrum voor Meertaligheid (le Centre de Recherche sur le Plurilinguisme or The Center for Research on Multilingualism).  I will be going back there from time to time for the remainder of my stay here.  I also went for a preliminary meeting with a representative at the the Patronat Català Pro Europa.

So once again it has taken quite a while to get back to the web site.  The reason for this is that I actually had to work on my research and get things accomplished, leaving me with no time to spend on picture editing and page formatting.  This next group of pages I am presently putting up will probably be the last set until I get back to the United States in a few weeks (it is presently June 13).

May is the month of long weekends here, apparently.  First there is Labor Day weekend (3 days), then Ascension Thursday weekend (4 days), and then Whit Monday (3 days).  Luckily, spring was in the air for much of this time.  Most of my time was spent reading, researching, and writing parts of what would become my final paper to send to Prof. Arnulfo Ramírez in Bâton Rouge on selected language policies and cases of language planning in the European Union.  This concentration on work is reflected on the lack of photos.  The paper was faxed to L.S.U. on Friday May 7.  Woo hoo!

FRANCE signs the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages!!!  Now we await ratification...

Preparation, preparation, preparation...

I arrived at the airport without a place to stay for the four nights I would be in Edinburgh, only to find out that everything was booked due to the Rolling Stones concert that weekend.  Anyway, I found a place and got in touch with Will Lamb, who is working on his PhD in Celtic and Linguistics.  He informed me of a ceilidh that night.  I went and had a blast.  Saturday morning there was a demonstration supporting Breton-medium education demonstration held in front of the French Consulate on Randolph Crescent.  Despite my strong connections with the Consulat Général de France à La Nouvelle-Orléans, I attended.  Saturday afternoon was spent sightseeing and chatting with others who had been present at the demonstration...over a pint or two or three.  On Sunday morning I attended a service conducted in Gàidhlig and was instantly embraced by the congregation.  After spending a couple of hours in a bookstore (surprise) to avoid the downpour, I had a magnificent meal of haggis, neeps, and tatties...of course accompanied by a measure of incredibly smooth whisky.  I was then totally prepared for my meeting with Davyth Hicks, a Cornish speaker and PhD candidate at Edinburgh about Breton, Cornish, and celtic activism in general.  Monday brought about department visits to look at the postgraduate courses in Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Science, and Linguistics at The University of Edinburgh.