Day 2 - Breakdancing

today i gave my talk. most of the day i was stuck inside a meeting room, or getting charged $5 for a cup of mango juice. drinks are really really expensive here. i got some beer with karen after the session and it they were $7 each. go figure. anyways, i found the secret passage to avoide the giant underground mall this morning. there's tiny alley's that, while crowded with restaurants, are not giant macy's and are actually neat since there's locals everywhere and you get to listen to conversation. singlish actually has a lot in common with hawaiian creole. including "yah". i really enjoy the walk to and from the conference center. the river view is just really nice. and, i noticed that the boardwalk is a "couples" hangout - there's this half-kilometer section where there are dimly lit benches and couples everywhere. it's really strange to see a whole row of couples, bench for bench, being all couple-ish. i finally felt like i was in different country on the walk home just noticing a few little things. another strange thing is that the parks and sidewalks were mostly empty and the people walking by were almost all young. i just noticed that. everywhere, they're young. in the giant malls, on the boardwalk at night, in the restaurant eating. young...... oh, and i saw again tonight a break-dancing session in the underpasses. and a sort-of drum circle. kids in shiny jeans & hats either drumming with sticks on the floor or break dancing. it was really neat to see. anyways, the talk went well. i was the closer and i got to do a pretty neat thing - all the people that did polarimetry thought it would be neat for me to do a final summary of the entire gound-based polarimetry results. it was pretty neat to see that.