New Orleans: Thursday
May. 26th, 2005 02:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ellarienI am getting very tired, physically and mentally, what with the all the slow walking around with heavy bags and the being in crowds and the sitting in oral sessions. Right now I'm sitting on the floor of a quiet hallway, where there is power and wireless signal, trying to unwind.
New Orleans is not really my kind of town; it's dirty and not very safe-feeling, and the night-life aspect is not attractive to someone whose idea of a good night out is a quiet dinner, a bookstore, and home by 9pm. However, there are things about it that make me smile. Yesterday I went with a colleague to the aquarium, which was delightful and deserves its own multimedia post that I'm not going to try to put together until I get home. Today at lunchtime I went wandering around the mall, buying beads and postcards and admiring amber jewellery and embroidered and lacy table-linens and grinning at the existence of a stall selling nothing but New-Orleans-themed kitty kipple. (I must admit, I have a shallow materialistic streak. Even though part of me insists that that kind of mall sells almost nothing that anyone actually needs, I do enjoy wandering around them.)
This convention center is huge; the staff get around on golf-carts and bikes and tricycles, and it's a ten-minute hike from the room with our posters to the meeting room I'm sitting outside. In my wanderings in search of the room, I passed along a glass-sided hallway overlooking, on one side, our poster and exhibit room, and on the other that for the oil-refinery people who are also having a convention here. The contrast was striking; while ours was shabby and scattered, with intermittent carpet, home-made posters and milling attendees who barely aspire to business-casual, the other side was bright with customized carpeting and colourful, professional-looking booths. Their talks don't look nearly as interesting as ours, though.
I am bemused by the existence of people who apparently make a living studying leaves in streams, as evidenced by the presence of a whole session on the subject at the meeting. No doubt they would think the same about the existence of people who spend their lives analyzing solar acoustic waves. Rather more disturbing is the cheerful matter-of-factness with which, in the room on the other side of the wall, yet other people are discussing the Sumatran earthquakes as sources of messy data, with hardly even a mention of the human devastation they caused.
New Orleans is not really my kind of town; it's dirty and not very safe-feeling, and the night-life aspect is not attractive to someone whose idea of a good night out is a quiet dinner, a bookstore, and home by 9pm. However, there are things about it that make me smile. Yesterday I went with a colleague to the aquarium, which was delightful and deserves its own multimedia post that I'm not going to try to put together until I get home. Today at lunchtime I went wandering around the mall, buying beads and postcards and admiring amber jewellery and embroidered and lacy table-linens and grinning at the existence of a stall selling nothing but New-Orleans-themed kitty kipple. (I must admit, I have a shallow materialistic streak. Even though part of me insists that that kind of mall sells almost nothing that anyone actually needs, I do enjoy wandering around them.)
This convention center is huge; the staff get around on golf-carts and bikes and tricycles, and it's a ten-minute hike from the room with our posters to the meeting room I'm sitting outside. In my wanderings in search of the room, I passed along a glass-sided hallway overlooking, on one side, our poster and exhibit room, and on the other that for the oil-refinery people who are also having a convention here. The contrast was striking; while ours was shabby and scattered, with intermittent carpet, home-made posters and milling attendees who barely aspire to business-casual, the other side was bright with customized carpeting and colourful, professional-looking booths. Their talks don't look nearly as interesting as ours, though.
I am bemused by the existence of people who apparently make a living studying leaves in streams, as evidenced by the presence of a whole session on the subject at the meeting. No doubt they would think the same about the existence of people who spend their lives analyzing solar acoustic waves. Rather more disturbing is the cheerful matter-of-factness with which, in the room on the other side of the wall, yet other people are discussing the Sumatran earthquakes as sources of messy data, with hardly even a mention of the human devastation they caused.
