My Monday and Tuesday were primarily spent in the meeting hall. The ICSG 2006 meeting usually has talks all day from 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM, with a two hour break for lunch and poster viewing. I’m not going to describe the meeting itself, on the thought that most of you out there reading this probably aren’t interested. The few of you that are I’ll tell you about it in person. I will say that my advisor Wladek Minor gave a pretty good presentation on Monday afternoon. There were a few technical issues with projectors and laptop power management to be worked out, but his talk went on without a hitch.

More or less, I think I’ve switched over to Beijing time. I still get pretty sleepy about 9:30 – 10:00 PM, and find myself waking up at 5:00 AM (those of you doing the math on my blog posting times will note that I’m posting these pretty early in the morning over here). But I’m no longer passing out from exhaustion in the middle of the afternoon. Unfortunately, I think I’ve adapted enough that I’m going to have to do it again when I get back to Charlottesville.

We are on our own for dinner most nights. On Monday night, I wandered by foot around the district where our hotel is located. There are a lot of restaurants and for some reason late-night hairstyling salons. I also saw some people playing pickup badminton in the street. I ending up going into a Chinese fast-food place called “Kung-Fu” (their logo included a cartoon representation of Bruce Lee) and ordering some sort of beef ribs meal. It included some bite-sized pieces of beef ribs, but for reasons I don’t understand, every piece had a chunk of bone in it. I had two or three pieces and then gave up. Thank God a big bowl of rice came with the meal.

The next night my dinner primarily consisted of Oreos.