Have you thought about attending a Conference next year? OK! Find your topic, submit an abstract, save up and off you go. Last July I gave a paper at the Annual Conference of the European Association of Psychology and Law in Cracow, Poland.
I was warned not to travel alone, there would be drunkenness in the streets and bad tempered Poles. But no, I found Cracow a charming mediaeval city (popn. 800,000) with inhabitants to match. The old city at the heart of Cracow is World Heritage listed, as are popular tourist destinations, the Wieliczka Salt mine and the former Nazi Prison Camp, Auschwitz just a few kilometres away. There are few cars allowed, everyone walks and the warm summer weather entices eating and drinking outside until all hours.
The Conference host was the Institute of Forensic Research of the Jagellonian University. This is where Marie Curie the only woman to win two Nobel prizes, and Copernicus, who "moved the Earth and Sun", were students. One hundred and thirty clever and interesting people from 28 countries, many from Eastern Europe, Scandinavia and Africa attended. Fortunately for monolingual Australian bush possums, the official language of the Conference was English.
The Conference venue was the 11th Century Larisch Palace where we heard and discussed interesting papers on psychology with a criminological focus. Presentations included research on personality disorders, detecting truths and lies, psychopathy and commission of crime. The proceedings will be published in hardback. Presenters were predominantly academics or lawyers. The focus of my paper was psychological assessment in the context of Australian family law.
The Conference Dinner was held in the Courtyard of the 14th Century Castle Niepolomice, built as a royal hunting castle on the edge of the Virgin Forest Niepolomicka, about 25 Km from Cracow. (Difference between a palace and castle? If you only live in a palace you don’t have fortification around your boundaries.) We were served honey vodka on arrival, ate a five course dinner by candlelight with fireworks to the accompaniment of a small string orchestra. Music for the refined ear is everywhere in Cracow, the kind of music I love and understand, strings and woodwind.
Excursions outside Krakow could be taken easily to the Wieliczka Salt Mine which has 7,000 visitors every day and provided a few moments of horror for me. Our guide Batek told us in his sing-song voice we were one hundred eighty three metres below the surface. He reassured us that the air is very pure and preserves all the wooden supports. Reassuring indeed! There is a sanatorium where asthmatics and anyone who has a glimpse of an anxiety attack, can spend the day 200 metres below the surface restoring their health. Highlights were the underground lake where one cannot drown because it is so salty, and the playing of Chopin in one of the large chapels, hollowed out of rock (about the size of the Monash Hospital next to Bentleigh Bayside Community Health Service).
After which it’s back to Australia to encourage others to "go visit" as they say.
Footnote: To my surprise the acknowledgement of BBCHS in my paper caught the eye of a South African lawyer who had been sponsored by the Bentleigh Rotary Club on an exchange program to Melbourne, Australia when she was 17. Small world!
