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Desheng (co-worker) and I flew into BWI Saturday
night, took the bus to Maryland
and a cab from the bust station to a house of a friend of Desheng.
I had fasted all day for Yom Kippur and we were both hungry. We took off
walking on a search for food. The area was dark with not much around and it
took us 45 minutes to find a Chinese take-out place. We walked back after
eating along those dark roads. Only later the next day did we find out that
the area is very dangerous and one should not be out after dark.
We did not sleep well in the cockroach infested smelly place,
but hey it was free. We woke up early—8am (5am CA time)—to get some early
tourist action going. The bus unfortunately never picked up so we had to walk
1 hour to the metro. On the walk we observed 1 church every 2 blocks, 1-2 cop
cars blaring by every 5 minutes, and 0 buses. We got into DC at 11am where we
met up with some sissies for brunch at Sign of the Whale.
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After brunch we took off to the White House and Washington Monument.
Next, we headed to the Reflection Pool, which is headed by a WW2 memorial.
We walked along the reflection pool until we got to the Lincoln Memorial.
We checked out the Korean War memorial on our way to Capitol/National Mall.
The first museum we went to was the Holocaust Museum.
Of course it was emotionally taxing, and though I did not learn much new I’m
glad I went.
I met up with Amina there and we walked over to the
Smithsonian’s Natural
History Museum.
This museum was very random in my opinion going from snake skeletons to the history
of baseball to the Hope Diamond.
Amina left to catch a train home (trains running
once every 5 hours) and
we hurried over to the Air
& Space Museum.
The museum was pretty good and we stayed until they closed.
Next we checked out the festival of the opening of the American Indian
Museum. They had great smelling over-priced corn and stuff. We tried to get
into that museum but it closed before we got there. We did not get a chance
to get to the International
Spy Museum
either where they have cool pen spy cameras and such but all the museums were
free so I can’t complain. The weather was very nice too.
We went to Capitol Hill (which Desheng had
previously thought was the White House) as a last stop.
Desheng’s friends, Hopei & Jon in Bethesda, MD,
invited us over for dinner and they provided us with an 8 course delicious
meal and drove us all the way back to our smelly roach home. We were very
appreciative of the ride since our feet were dead and we may have been dead
too had we tried to walk around again late at night with all our stuff. They
drove us to our hotel, which was a very comfortable Marriot.
We woke up at 7:30am to get to the conference breakfast. The food was very
fancy, the posters were interesting, and the talks were ok. I saw people I
met in Montana (Volker, Qingyuan, Amanda) and 1 guy
who was a candidate for a faculty position that I was the student rep of for
the search committee. I hung out with Maggi Kelly
(1 of my advisors) a lot. Afterwards a Maryland
student drove us around the campus a bit, we returned
to the hotel for some email checking, ordered some room service and went to
sleep.
The next day was more interesting with my session (Water & Energy Cycle)
being focused on, and me presenting my poster. Lots of talking and meeting
people. Good food again. Next morning was boring, but then we went to Goddard Space Center
for a tour, which was ok.
On our way back, I went on the bus microphone and asked if anyone was going
to the airport so that we could split a cab. I found a guy who had rented a
car and was driving so I told him that I really really
liked his poster, which caused everyone around to laugh. We came back and all
the poster boards had disappeared so a lot of us lost our posters. Some
people were quite upset since they had paid a lot for expensive glossy paper
or they were supposed to present the poster again this weekend. A guy I met
named Matthew from EPS at Berkeley
stuck around to find his poster and said he would bring mine back for me if
it turned up. The flight back was fast, I hung out with the captain in the
cockpit for a bit during a stop (he gave me a deck of cards if I could guess
his age and I was 1 year off). That night I slept soundly.
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