I am leaving to go back to the states very early tomorrow morning, so today is my last full day here and of course it’s rainy and gross (although, I suppose I should be happy that it wasn’t like this the entire time). Luckily I had a bunch of work to do anywhere, so staying in my hotel room was kind of the general plan for most of the day anyway. (I decided against going to Ocean Park for many reasons, most of which were confirmed when I woke up still exhausted this morning and then also looked out the window.)
The last two days were filled with many awesome things which I will delve into more with future posts. Highlights include: going to Lantau Island (awesome cable car ride, giant Buddha statue, amazing view of some islands in the South China Sea), awesome (and inexpensive) sushi, amazing dim sum with the locals, watching the final horserace of the season with about 80,000 of my closest friends, and stores that sold only old school and/or hard to find LEGO mini-figs and other related geeky products. In short, it was a good weekend. I am also now really tired and looking forward to getting back to my normal level of exhaustion. :)
The conference was also really great and I was able to reconnect with old friends/colleagues and meet lots of new people and hear about all sorts of interesting projects and ideas that were floating around. This conference was especially great due to the great diversity of researchers, both in terms of intersecting and complementary fields of study but also in terms of backgrounds and countries and educational contexts. I think they said the conference had about 400 attendees from 38 different countries! Pretty cool.
Cynthia D'Angelo 