After my last post, a bunch of went out for dinner at a restaurant on campus here. Our hosts for the workshop were unable to join us, though they recommended this place. Fortunately, one of the members of our group was a Taiwanese grad student from UCLA, and he was able to order and translate for us. I don’t know where we would’ve been without him.
There were 12 of us there, and we ordered 12 different dishes that we all passed around, as well as 6 beers that we shared (they come in big bottles here and they give you 2 or 3 oz glasses to drink them). It was a good meal. At the end of it, the bill came and the grad student did the math and told us that everyone owed 120 Taiwanese dollars…which is $4 in the US. FOUR DOLLARS! That has been the story for this week…dining out is relatively cheap.
We then went back to the hotel and I went to sleep. I got up early yesterday morning to go over my talk, which was in the afternoon. I hadn’t prepared for the talk as much as I usually do, so I wanted to remind myself of what I wanted to say. I then had breakfast and went up to the workshop.
It was another good day at the workshop. Good talks and good discussions. My talk was in the afternoon. Other than some technical issues with the projector, I think it went fine. Not my greatest presentation, but not my worst either. I knew I was in trouble, though, when I started talking about chondrule formation in shock waves (which is what my thesis was about). One of the organizers for this workshop really dislikes that model, and he wasn’t afraid to let me know. For the most part it was fine, though, whereas I’m willing to let people make their points in an argument, he is a bit more inclined to interrupt. To be honest, it seems I’m in the minority when it comes to that issue in scientific meetings, so it doesn’t bother me as much as it used to. Other than that, I think things went well.
Last night we went to a Japanese restaurant just on the edge of campus. Again it was quite good, and this time it cost $6 US. We came back to the hotel, and I read the Sports Illustrated I brought with me before turning out the lights and passing out.
One nice thing about yesterday was that I got my arrangements made for getting to the airport on Saturday to head home. It’s nice to start thinking about that. While it’ll be a monster of a trip, it’s nice thinking about being home, sitting with Nina and Emma, and having some sense of normalcy return. While there will be another trip 6 days after I get back, it’s one we’re doing together, so it’ll be much better….
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