Last winter, our group of eight Finnish scholars of antiquity applied to attend the conference. We also planned our travel and accommodation together. Juha, Saara and I agreed to travel to Paris by train, and Juha and I would also take the train back (Saara had to fly home because of her schedule). Juha is an experienced train traveler and took care of all the travel arrangements: he checked the timetables and connections, bought the ferry and train tickets, and booked an Airbnb. It was really easy and pleasant to travel under Juha’s expert guidance.
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| From Turku to Stockholm by ferry (Viking Grace) |
The journey began with the evening ferry from Turku to Stockholm on Sunday, 6th September. We arrived in Stockholm early at 7:30 a.m. We had almost the entire day before our train departed, so we took our time over breakfast at a nice café, wandered around Södermalm, sat in a library, and had Indian food for lunch. In the afternoon, we walked through the Old Town to the railway station where we boarded the night train to Hamburg at around 4:30 p.m. It was a very traditional sleeper train, which rattled, swayed, and made a lot of noise. We nevertheless had a great time admiring the scenery and enjoying the offerings in the restaurant car.
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| Tranströmer Library at Södermalm |
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| Snälltåget night train to Hamburg |
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| The cabin had six berths in total, but luckily there were only three of us |
After a restless night’s sleep, we had to get up at the crack of dawn to get off the train in Hamburg at around 5 a.m. After three hours of dozing at the station, we boarded a train to Frankfurt, where we continued our journey to Paris on a French TGV. There were no major surprises on the way, and we arrived in Paris more or less on schedule on Tuesday afternoon. From Gare de l’Est, we took the metro to our accommodation in Aubervilliers, a suburb of Paris. We were greeted by a somewhat austere but practical apartment in block of flats, clearly furnished specifically for short-term rentals. It had a mixed assortment of furniture and the kitchen was rather sparsely equipped. However, the apartment had good metro connections to both the conference and the center of Paris, and sharing the accommodation kept the cost down.
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| The only rain we got on the way to Paris caught us just as we were trying to get into our accommodation. |
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| Our apartment in Paris |
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| Aubervilliers |
On Wednesday, we had a full day off before the conference began. Being tired from traveling, we slept in and didn’t set off until around noon. Like proper tourists, we chose the Louvre as our destination even though we had visited it before. The collections there are so vast that there is plenty to see over multiple visits. We explored the Greek and Roman antiquities and French painting sections, among others, sometimes together and sometimes separately. After more than six hours at the museum, we set off in search of somewhere to eat south of the Seine. Maria joined us there; she had travelled from Rome to Paris on Wednesday and was staying with us. We ate at a Mexican restaurant and then returned to our accommodation.
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| The balloon that served as the Olympic cauldron during the 2024 Olympics in the Tuileries Garden |
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| Painting depicting the sights of Rome (Giovanni Paolo Panini, 1759) |
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| The Seine |
On Thursday the conference finally began. The venue was Campus Condorcet, part of a new campus complex in Aubervilliers. The conference program got off to a late start as the time and location of the welcome session had been changed at the last minute. Half of our Finnish delegation nevertheless got down to business right after that. In our first panel, Juha, Suvi, Jasmin and Enni gave excellent presentations on the portrayal of enemies in ancient Greek sources, nymphs in Augustan literature, foreign royal hostages in Roman sources, and the influence of Greco-Roman ideas about well-being on modern architecture in Finland. During the day, I also listened to several other presentations related to antiquity. In the evening, our entire conference group went out for dinner together.
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| Thursday's panelists |
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| Our Finnish delegation at dinner (photo: Jasmin Lukkari) |
On Friday, an interesting-sounding keynote lecture on migration and identities in antiquity was scheduled. The lecture had an English title in the program, but when the invited speaker began she announced that she had decided to give the lecture in French after all. She had prepared an English translation of her lecture, however, and offered to display it on the screen for us to read while she delivered the lecture in French. I decided not to stay and instead went for an early lunch.
In the afternoon, it was time for our second panel, in which Maria, Saara, Roosa and I gave papers. The topics covered the agency of practitioners of magic, the status of children in Roman religion, Martial’s poetic identity, and good and bad emperors in Late Antiquity. We were pleased with how both of our panels turned out. They had coherent themes, we stayed on schedule, the papers were of a high standard, and they stimulated good discussions. It was a shame, though, that there were rather few people in the audience. The conference as a whole seemed to suffer from low attendance, even though almost 200 people had registered for the conference.
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| Fridya's panelists (photo: Juha Isotalo) |
After Friday’s program ended, many of us headed to Montmartre. We visited the Sacré-Coeur Basilica, admired the views from the hill, and had dinner at a North African couscous restaurant. On our way to the restaurant, we noticed a commemorative plaque on the slope of the Sacré-Coeur hill explaining that fossil discoveries made there had inspired the development of modern paleontology.
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| The Sacré-Coeur Basilica |
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| Commemorative plaque about the origins of paleontology |
There were still some presentations scheduled for Saturday morning, but I decided to skip them and instead went with Roosa to the enormous antiques market at Saint-Ouen. This Parisian suburb is famous for its flea markets and antique shops, which spread across several blocks. We only had the energy to explore the shop-lined streets of one block and a couple of covered markets. It was fascinating to see the kinds of things that were for sale—and just how much of it there was—even though I ultimately didn’t buy anything.
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| The outdoor antiques market at Saint-Ouen |
On Saturday afternoon, the conference program included some guided excursions. A few of us had chosen a tour of the Richelieu site of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. According to the information we had received beforehand, the groups were supposed to leave the campus at 2 p.m., but I noticed one group setting off as early as 1:40. I soon found my own group which was also getting ready to leave, even though not everyone had arrived yet. Apparently, the change of schedule had been mentioned during the previous day’s keynote lecture, but the information had not reached me. We nevertheless left at around 1:45, and no one even checked whether everyone who had registered for the excursion was there. To make matters worse, we had to pay for our own metro tickets to get to the site.
The library itself was magnificent and well worth seeing. The guided tour was interesting, although our young guide struggled somewhat with her English. As part of the tour, we also got to visit the library’s museum which contains a large collection of Greek and Roman artefacts. After the tour, we stayed in central Paris and met up for dinner with some of the others, who had visited the Musée de Cluny and gone book shopping instead of attending the guided tours.
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| The Labrouste Reading Room at the National Library |
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| Our group with our guide in the library lobby |
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| Dinner at a Greek restaurant (photo: Juha Isotalo) |
For some members of our group, the journey home came sooner than for others. Suvi left on Saturday afternoon, while Roosa, Maria and Jasmin left on Sunday. The rest of us spent Sunday in Paris. Saara, Juha and I visited the Musée d’Orsay which we explored for about three hours. There would have been much more to see but travel fatigue started to catch up with us. In addition to the masterpieces of French painting and sculpture, the building itself made a strong impression: it is a magnificent combination of late-19th-century steel architecture and modern museum interior. This former railway station is worth seeing in its own right. After the museum, we had a late lunch with Enni. We then returned to Aubervilliers, where we spent the evening in the garden of the Airbnb rented by Enni and Suvi, just a couple of blocks from our own accommodation.
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| The Musée d’Orsay building served as a railway station from 1900 to 1939 |
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| “The colours in this painting are really beautiful!” (photo: Juha Isotalo) |
Monday morning meant that it was time for the last of us to leave Paris. Enni and Saara flew home, while Juha and I headed to Gare de l’Est early in the morning. The route and connections were the same as on the way to Paris but in reverse: first a train from Paris to Hamburg via Frankfurt, then a night train from Hamburg to Stockholm, and finally a ferry to Turku. One memorable moment from the first train was when a fellow passenger asked us two Finns to be more quiet in an otherwise completely silent carriage. Apparently, we still have something to learn about French train etiquette.
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| A quick lunch at Frankfurt railway station, where we had a layover of about a half hour |
We arrived in Hamburg at around 5:30 p.m. with about six hours to spare before our next train. We decided to visit Miniatur Wunderland, one of Hamburg’s—and apparently Germany’s—most popular attractions. In the halls of a former industrial building, enormous and incredibly detailed miniature worlds have been built depicting different continents and cities. You can spot the Swiss Alps, the sights of Rome, casinos of Las Vegas, Pompeii and Vesuvius, Norwegian fjords, and all sorts of other places. Trains, cars, and other mechanical contraptions are constantly moving around, and everywhere you look there are amusing scenes and little details to discover. We could easily have spent the whole day there but we only had two hours before the exhibition closed.
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| Miniatur Wunderland, one of the absolute highlights of the entire trip! (photo: Juha Isotalo) |
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| Monks tinkering with the Pope’s popemobile outside St. Peter’s Basilica |
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| They took some artistic liberties with Pompeii (and many other places), but you can still recognize a lot of the details. |
Around midnight, we continued our journey on the night train to Stockholm. This time, there was no need to get up early—we could sleep in until breakfast around 10 a.m. We arrived in Stockholm just before 2 p.m., about an hour behind schedule. This was the only significant delay of the entire journey, and it didn’t affect our travel plans because Juha had planned sufficiently long connections for us. We had lunch in the Old Town, and I went to buy a painting I had seen in April during a holiday in Stockholm. We whiled away the time here and there until it was time to board the ferry to Turku in the evening. We arrived in Turku early on Wednesday, 16th September.
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| Shopping for art at Antikaffären PHM (photo: Juha Isotalo) |
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| We stopped for a drink at Pastis, a Parisian-style restaurant (photo: Juha Isotalo) |
The actual reason for the trip—the conference, whose organization left quite a lot to be desired—ultimately wasn’t the most important part of the experience. Much more valuable was getting to spend time with friends and colleagues, discuss and exchange ideas, and take a break from everyday routine. I believe that many of the conversations we had during the trip will lead to plenty of fruitful things professionally as well in the future.
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