Monday, June 12, 2006

iceland, day 2

conference coffee break time!

dude... even though the sun goes down for 3 hours, it´s never dark here at all, so sleeping is weird. i woke up briefly at 1:30 am last night to find it still "dusky" outside... slightly disorienting!

speaking of funny things, who knew reykjavik was surrounded by mountains? lava fields yes, but yesterday was so foggy everything appeared flat... today, still overcast, but dude, mountains in the background everywhere you look.

i have to have walked 10 miles yesterday weaving around downtown reykjavik. very quaint for a city, but colorful and gorgeous and the people are incredibly friendly. highlights where city hall (where they have a huge room-sized 3D map of iceland and a few small art displays), the tjorn (lake) where i fed ducks with small children and happened upon a small military parade, and the ocean front.

today, 2 talks so far, 2 more and lunch before me. i will be the first person to give a whiteboard talk instead of a power point talk. the idea never crossed my mind to do anything else... i suppose i should make some sort of joke of "can you guess who my advisor is based on my form of presentation?" :P i will be incredibly happy in 4 hours when the trauma of being in front of a room of specialists is over with. frankly, everyone´s incredibly friendly and there´s no good reason to be worried... i just wanna have it over with!

just wait... next time i write i´ll just be enjoying myself instead of obsessing about my talk... exciting right?

yay iceland!

the end. (for now)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Kicking it old school! I've heard that some theoretical ecologists will show up with a transparency and a pen, and write nothing but equations, but I've yet to see it. I suppose I avoid those sessions at big meetings.

Our abstracts usually have a limit somewhere around 250-500 words-- not six pages, and our talks are 12-15 minutes, not 30. :)

How did your talk go? I saw you got scheduled right before tea-time: did you get lots of chatter over tea?