Miami

I haven't posted anything about Miami. The reason is that I wasn't really sure what to say.

The conference was pretty disappointing. About 1/3 of the talks were cancelled either right before, or after, the conference started. As a result there was a lot of empty time where there was nothing worth attending. You might think this wouldn't be so bad, because I would have plenty to explore in the city, except...

Miami sucks. Especially the area we were in: Downtown Miami. Looking out the window of our hotel (the hotel was quite nice) about every 2 out of 3 buildings was undergoing major construction. I mean major... like adding entire floors to buildings. As you can imagine, this made it a little hard to sleep past 6am. The area surrounding the hotel looked like a Nuke hit it. There was also a lot of crime.

We managed to make it to South Beach and back (which was both a feat of time management and survival skills). South Beach, contrary to what you might think, has basically no "shops" and is all restaurants/bars. But honestly, there is only so many meals a person can eat in a day, and this is me saying this!

My presentation went fine. To my knowledge so did all the others from my research group.

Oh, I did manage to go to two comic book shops in Miami. One was more of an "action figure" shop, and the actual comic shop was an over cluttered mess. I picked up a few things at each, including an awesome dragon for Liz.