This week I am going to the Annual Meetings of the American Sociological Association. I just got an e-mail from my hotel with the subject line "Valuable Information About Your Stay." Turns out the most valuable piece of information was on the ASA website all along, but I didn't bother to look at it. The conference activities are taking place at the Convention Centre. My hotel--which is an official conference hotel and which I decided to stay at because a friend said he was staying there--is #5 on the map. Not that I can't deal with the walk, but it's going to be a pain to getting to things on time. ASA is usually held primarily in a couple hotels with the conference in the rooms of those hotels, which is great because then it makes it easy to run into people during the course of your day. The set up for this ASA is going to make it much harder to run into people, and the ability to coordinate things by phone is made more difficult by cross-border cel phone compatibility (e.g., mine will work, but cost 70 cents a minute, including to check e-mail from it).
In Quebec, the street signs say "Rue" instead of "Street." Rue is right.
(I am excited to be going to Montreal, don't get me wrong.)
11 comments:
but maybe all the cool kids are staying at your hotel.
This is why I was surprised when you first told me where you were staying. I thought, wow, how did he end up picking the furthest possible one?
I think I'm in no. 6. It's the first year that I'm staying in one of the conference hotels, and the conference isn't even in the conference hotels. Can't buy a break...
I swapped my phone (verizon) to a "North America" plan for a week -- that will give me an hour or so of Montreal-based connectivity per day, and I can swap back to my regular plan when I get home again. It's cheap enough that it's well worth it to not have to worry about the .65 c/minute that I'd otherwise incur.
But the MOST valuable information about your stay is that you MUST eat some poutine while you are in Montreal.
Alan: I might try that.
Tina: It's intriguing that you followed this up with an e-mail telling me that you are staying at a different hotel, thereby invalidating the possibility of all the cool kids being at mine.
Anon: I have no idea what poutine is, and I hope it is not some slang term for something I'd really rather you not be urging me toward on my blog.
a certain canadian grad student in the department assures me that poutine is quite good. can someone bring some back to wisconsin for me?
also, jeremy, have you thought about wearing a highly reflective, safety orange vest? that way, when you walk about montreal, all of the other sociologists will spot you easily.
I was told poutine is french fries and cheese curds smothered in gravy ... what kind of gravy, I have no idea, except that it is supposedly delicious even though it sounds kind of uhm, not.
As for phones, for the first time, I'll be trying out what I hope turns out to be yet another nifty Vonage feature. I'm taking my phone adapter (weighs a few ounces is all) and a phone, plugging it into my free internet connection in the hotel then making (and receiving) calls just like I'm sitting here in good old Madison. I'll let ya know how it goes. If I had a laptop with a network card I'd spring for the teeny tiny phone adaptor and ipod style head set and make calls from the laptop. Pretty darn cool.
The best part about this is that the ASA voted against Montreal before it voted for it. See my year-old blog post about this, if you want to be sad.
I, for one, think that sounds incredibly tasty.
(Then again, I've eaten and quite enjoyed fried squirrel.)
A native Canadier, now living her in LA, told me about it a few weeks back and explained that it was so good and yet so unhealthy that she ate nothing but salads for a week before she went home so's she could down several helpings of the stuff.
(As regards ass-whuppins, I'm a fan of the sub-genre of the "Alabama Ass Whuppin". That involves beating somebody to a pulp and them asking them "Y'awnt some more?" It adds a nice pyschological element to what would otherwise be a generic beatin'.)
Uh, that should be "here" in LA.
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