Boston

Enjoying my last moments in Hilton (Where Rich People Stay) and its free lobby Internet, beyond this point it will be roughing it out with hostels and couches and homelessness! Big fluffy pillows (all four of you) and bouncy bed, I will miss you all. I have not managed to get accommodation in San Fran yet, it seems that CSers are really busy in the summer and my one-CS-request-at-a-time policy really is not efficient enough to get me someone that will host. May have to send multiple requests this time. The reason why I'm not doing multiple requests is because when I tried it in Bangalore, I actually got 3 people agreeing to host and I had to turn down 2... and it felt kinda bad.

O good people of Bangalore, bless you and your couches and Tejas and Vineet and Alysha.

But desperate times call for desperate measures I guess. Things will turn out well and I shall stop stressing about it. There are more important things to stress about like the imminent presentation that I have to do in a topic that I have no idea about. I am resenting this presentation because it deprived me of a chance to go to a hippie festival that some CSers were going to this weekend =( And it's not even my presentation, I'm doing it as a favour for a friend. Good karma, good karma.

Boston CSers! I established contact with this guy Tony before my trip, so we met up and had a couple of drinks with his friend Kate, on Thursday. Being rather socially inept when sober, I was rather quiet for the first tenth of the evening until they plied me with sufficient beer for me to crack my first joke (about Tony playing the tambourine with Led Zeppelin) (hey it rhymes!) and things just took off from there.

And yes it was the first tenth of the evening, because the evening lasted till late wee hours of the morning 9am the next day. We went from the bar to Kate's boyfriend Brian's restaurant, where we met up with another two equally crazy guys Andrew and Ian, had some more beer and this amazing pizza-like thing that had cheese and peach on it, from Brian's kitchen. Yummm. And they are such funny people! By this point I was laughing so much that my cheeks hurt. I haven't laughed this hard in ages. At 2am when they needed to close and we were literally asked to leave, we decided to go to another place to drink Andrew's bottles of wine stashed in his backpack. (Don't ask.)

This other place I shall keep enshrouded in mystery because it is potentially incriminatory. It is very cool, has an elevator to the roof and a secret bar in the basement, that's all you need to know. Played the piano and looked at the birds in the cage and tried to get the in-house jukebox to work and played foosball and looked at Malaysia on the globe and went to the rooftop to look at Boston at night and fixed cocktails in the secret bar and woke up completely hungover in a huge luxurious bed the second morning.

When I left the place with the warm Bostonian morning sunshine in my face, I was momentarily disoriented. It was a surreal night.

Yesterday I didn't do much but try to recover from the hangover and comfort my roommate who apparently had spent the night yelling at her husband on the phone when I was out getting pissed. Oh yes I have a roommate in Hilton (Where Rich People Stay) because being the broke grad student that I am I can only afford half the luxury, even when I am reimbursed. She's very sweet, another grad student that I got connected with through the conference roommate matching system.

When I managed to drag myself out of bed at about 6pm, I took a walk to Washington Street where Kate told me had some kind of art gallery night, but I couldn't find it so I ended up walking to Chinatown to look at all the Chinese people. I would put up some pictures that I took en route but my camera's not with me right now. I think I have to go now for the presentation. Urgh.

Oh and my poster session went okay. Not many people were interested in the research because it was about Malaysia, and a prof walking by told me that he had no idea where Malaysia was. Sigh. Gotta run!