The Conference... almost!

July 8th, 2006

Woo hoo! We actually made it to ONE part of the conference today. Alysa had her poster session, but in turn, she missed lunch. At least I remembered to bring her a lemon soda. We have made two friends from the University of Loughborough (UK), Dan & Ross, who we have been running into the entire length of the conference. We actually ran into them at the poster session because Dan was presenting as well. Ross decided to join Tara and I for some lunch (even though he didn't eat) and I found out that there are people here from UT. The reason I know this is because I saw this guy Gary Beck who I met at NCA a couple of years ago. I will have to email my friend Lisa and mention that I saw him. I also just need to email her to catch up.

After that was over and done with, it was time for our day trip to Knossos. In order to get to Knossos, we actually ended up going all the way back to Heraklion (Iraklion) where we flew into from Athens. Alysa reminded me that over 6,000 people/day visit that and it's over 8,000 years old. Insane huh? According to legend (and as we double checked our guidebooks to be sure), the Minotaur may have been kept there! I know the guide also mentioned something about King Minos, but I can't remember it. Anyways, we happened upon Michael Hecht and his wife Ann and Denise and Jim were in the same place, but on a different bus. After our tour there, the bus took us into the center of Iraklion for about an hour to putz around. At that point, there wasn't much to see because almost everything was closed (the shops have wonky hours in Greece!), but somehow we managed to kill an hour. We actually didn't make it back to our hotel until almost 9pm and headed straight to dinner.

The cool part of dinner was watching the game for 3rd place at the World Cup. Turns out it was Germany vs. Portugal and Germany won. Tomorrow is the championship game between Italy and France and we (meaning me, Alysa, Tara, and Masaki) should be heading to Pizza di Napoli to watch it, if I'm not mistaken!

Well, it's time for bed... we have a LONG day tomorrow! Adio!