Lancaster Adventures

It's so warm here! I think that one of the people said enjoy the weather because it will never happen again. The temps have been in the 70-80's and that means our meeting rooms has been in the 90-100s I am guessing.

In an attempt to lower the heat in the room the physics boys got an air conditioning unit to place on the floor in the room. But what do you need with air conditioning units? Somewhere to exhaust.....but we are in the middle of a building....so in true nerd fasion : Get out the garbage bags and tape and we'll make an exhaust!

And it works. So now at least it's a bit cooler in here....although tons louder now too.

Yesterday during the afternoon session of the conference, Jason was working on his talk and we noticed that Power Point was all screwed up. I told him that I thought he should just quickly rewrite the whole thing in Power Point instead of trying to fix the current version. There was just something wrong with the colors and so every slide looked different. I thought since it was our first conference it should look as uniform as possible. I think it's because he wrote it on Power Point, then moved to Open Office, then back to Power Point and it wasn't happy. Anyways, after him giving me lots of big sighs and rolling of the eyes, I grabbed the laptop and had the talk moved over in about 2 hours. Now his talk looks great and he won't have to worry about it not transfering properly when opening it on the Windows machine.....too much anyways.

At the end of the afternoon session yesterday one of the graduate students from the University of Rome (by the way, how cool would it be to be able to say, "Yes I'm a student at the University of Rome"....anyways) mentioned that some of the folks were going to head into Lancaster town to watch the soccer match tonight and were going to meet at the Bookstore on Campus at 7:45. The dinner that is associated with the conference started at 7 so we thought we could go, grab some food and then meet up with people.

When we got to the place where the food was, which has been help yourself for all the other meals, we realized that for dinner instead it would be a sit down dinner. We sat with people that didn't talk much including a father and his daughter. The daughter, however, did spend the evening playing with her food which was quite entertaining. It was also about 8000 degrees in the dinner room, which made the steaming soup they served for the first course a bit annoying. I did overhear one of the women talking who is a professor at a university in Dublin called Trinity college (I think), talking about Guinness and when they first starting making it, they gave some certain about to the university for free (for advertising maybe since she said the college had already been there for a long time) and that it still goes on now. Which, you know is pretty sweet.

We finally got out of the dinner around 7:35 and went to make a run for the meet up. However, I had a whole pocket of pounds in my shorts in the rooms which I wanted for the bus so I could have change. Of course I get back to my room and my shorts have apparently dissappeared. Under the bed, in the closet, on the bed, under the desk. No. I was ripping the room apart, now convinced that someone had come into our room and stolen (cause that makes sense) my shorts. Jason came up and we continued to pull the room apart, and all of a sudden they were just on the bed. I still don't understand where they were before that. Anyways, I grabbed the pounds and we ran to the meeting point and alas we were about 5 minutes late and it looked like we had missed our meet up.

So Jason and I went into town anyways for something to do. We got off at the main city center and just walked around. The town of Lancaster is really cute. Very quaint with lots of shops and bars and old looking buildings and so on. We found a bar called The Sun Hotel Bar which was nice....lots of beer. We got two pints of beer and started watching the soccer match (Italy vs Germany in the semi-final). I'm sorry, I still don't get soccer. Nothing happened. The annoucers kept saying, "Ooooh this is a REAL nailbiter, there is so much tension in the air". Um, it's still 0-0. Most soccer games that I see final scores on are 0-0 or 0-1.....what flipping tension? Anyways we finished our pint (a real pint mind you so it was really big) and continued on our way. We took some pictures outside the bar and continued on our way.

We found the BEST seedy bar where the beers were....yep you guessed it 1 POUND!!!! It was a beer called Tetly's which was really good. I wonder if this is like their Budweiser beer. When they first poured it, it looked like Guinness with the sinking bubbles, but was a much lighter color. Tasty.

More soccer watching. More non-scoring. AND now I am noticing that the soccer players are quite the actors. Everytime they get hit or whatever they roll around on the ground grabbing their ankles, heads knees whatever. But THEN they just walk off the field like nothing was wrong. In fact many times, i would see the hit, then see the player look for the ref, THEN start rolling around. That being said, soccer players play hard. They are running all over the freakin' place and running into each other and in the end are big sweaty messes.

But still there is no scoring. Why not get rid of the goalies? Then the scores would be more like 6-4 or whatever since the non-goalie players do a nice job of defense anyways.

Ok that's it on my suggestions for soccer.

After the seedy bar we went in seach for some late night food and found a place that served food until 11pm. In the time that it took us to leave the seedy bar to find the place with the food Italy had scored twice. I was so annoyed that we had watched like 90 minutes of soccer and saw nothing happen and then in the 5 minutes it took to find food we miss two scores. Oh well. Go Italy!

After the food event we ran around the corner and found the bus back home. At this point after having 2.5 pints of beer apparently I was a little on the tipsy side and so Jason and I started taking funny face pictures of ourselves.

We didn't get up early this morning to run and are instead planning on going this evening since it's light until like 10pm here. Tomorrow we have an excursion which will go to the Lake District and we also have the conference dinner which will be at a hotel in town I guess. So I don't know if we'll have a chance to run tomorrow, unless we go first thing in the AM and since we are running tonight I don't know if it's such a good idea. We'll run Friday evening either way and then hopefully Saturday and Sunday. That's the idea anyways, we'll see how close we stick to it :-)