ESA-INTECOL Meeting at Montreal, Part 1

Je ne parlais Francois tre bien.

That seemed to be a line I used quite a bit when I was on my own in Montreal. Anyways, here's the highlights of the trip on a day-to-day basis. This will come in short installments as time allows since I seem to have been afflicted with a severe case of wanderlust...

Friday, August 5
The flights from Burbank and Dallas-Ft. Worth were fairly eventless, aside from the usual trouble of not being able to reach into the overhead bin to retrieve my poster and bumping my head while trying to step into my window seat on the plane. Getting to Montreal, however, was a lot more fun, especially when I had to hail a taxi to take me to the dorm room I was staying at, since by the time I went through customs and baggage claim, it was already about 20.30, so I was toast by then. The taxi driver said something in French but after a few attempts at my very limited French, including a few bits and pieces of Spanish and German, I finally pulled out the address of the place I was staying in and pointed to it. I was scared that I might get driven off to the wrong place, but thankfully, I got there safely. After checking in, my hunter instinct kicked in and i went out to search for food. Not having a clue, I decide to just walk in a random direction. What I didn't realize was that "random" led me to Rue St. Catherine, a part of town where every other door seemed to lead into a sex shop or a strip club. And then... the scariest thing happend to me. A man in his mid to late twenties approahced me and said something in French to me. I couldn't understand him, but I gathered the words "voulez vou coucher avec moi" (sp?) and something about money. Then the hunter left me and was replaced by the nerd. I bolted as fast as I could until I was clear and then after searching for a while, I gave up on the prospects of finding good food and settled for Burger King. Thank goodness for the universal language of fast food joints and the fact that they're tolerant of idiotic tourists/conference-goers who become tongue-tied!

Saturday, August 9
The first words that came out of my mouth when I woke up that morning: It's hot!. I had no air-conditioning in the room and it was pretty humid, so I wasn't exactly the happiest of campers, but I went off to 1) search for breakfast and 2) figure out where the Palais de Congres is. Breakfast wasn't too eventful, except for the fact that I was crazy enough to go back to Rue St. Catherine (AGAIN) since I noticed a lot of restaurants there along with the other stuff. It's much nicer in the day, but in my hunger, I almost walked into a strip club instead of the crepe place. The only thing that saved me was that I almost walked into a sign that had a bit of English on it that said Drag Queens Special. Go figure. Once I finished breakfast, I went to the Palais and did my usual registration thing. Only problem was that the person at the registration table had trouble with my last name and didn't believe me until I pulled out my passport and driver's license to prove that I am indeed who I was. With that over, I checked the schedule and location for presider training before embarking on a quest to at least identify potential hiding places around my lodging besides the, um, red-light district. This time, I went up Rue St. Denis, a long, busy street full of trendy shops and restaurants. Among the more... interesting ... places I passed by: several cafes with hookahs, a condom shop, and a pot shop. After a rather unsatisfying croissant for lunch at a small sandwich shop, I just kept going further up the street until I decided to return to the Palais for presider training. Along the way, I get hit with the creative bug and stop at an ice cream store, where I enjoyed some vegan ice cream while scribbling out lyrics that I need to put a melody to. Then I went to presider training, which was fairly uneventful aside from realizing that I was by far the youngest person and probably the only person in the room who didn't have a PhD yet. Put it this way... I felt rather... awkward around all these high-ranking scientists and professors. It went well, and I felt a lot more comfortable about presiding over a session after getting reassured that the worst things that could happen were equipment failures and people who had no concept of time since I had to keep the talks to 15 minutes and Q&A to 5 minutes. That night, I tried to force myself to sleep early, but my body hadn't adjusted to being on Eastern time and the heat + humidity + smell of pot smoke made it hard to sleep.

Sunday, August 9
I woke up really early, around 06.00 to make it in time to an 08.00 session on advanced statistical methods in ecology. After a rather yucky breakfast at Burger King, I made it to the Palais and found my way to the session. Note that the Palais is a real labyrinth and it's hard to find stuff at first. The session is great but there was a bit of a mix-up and the people forgot to provide us with tables, so I had to hold my super-heavy, monster of a laptop on my lap to following along with the examples in R. Not too far into the session, the post-doc in my lab, walks in and keeps me company in a sea of population and diversity ecolgists. He leaves shortly afterwards after he convinces me to let him have a copy of my poster so he can borrow some figures for his talk -- our research adviser had apparently wanted him to make some last minute changes. During the much-needed break, I go and find the post-doc to have lunch with him at some random Chinese restaurant where you have to be able to speak fluent Chinese to get the really good stuff. Afterwards, I go back, while the post-doc goes back to his presentation. The second half of the workshop was really boring... probably because the presenters weren't as interactive as the ones earlier and the material being covered was either far above my head or too elementary. I took a nice long nap. Then I went back to the dorm and started to scout around for more food areas. I ended up with a not-so-satisfying veggie and brie cheese sandwich and spent the rest of the evening working on Project Argonium, with little success thanks to the heat, humidity & stench of pot smoke.

Preliminary Argonium Material

Well... it's the night before I leave for Montreal for the annual Ecological Society of America conference... which should produce an interesting blog entry in itself, at least with my luck. One thing though is that I've finally had the guts to post some really preliminary Argonium material, at least non-embarassing stuff for someone with very limited training in composition and singing... and practically none in the harp. This includes a song where I wrote the lyrics but very loosely borrowed the melody line from a song that I can't get out of my head. With luck, the creative bug will be with me in Montreal (hopefully not while I'm presenting on carbon flux modelling or presiding over boreal/tundra nutrient cycle talks!) so I can really have some fun with Side-Project Argonium.

I have to admit, if I EVER had to leave science/engineering, I would want to dive into music. It's so much fun and it's a great stress relief! I know I'm probably going to remain in blissful obscurity, but hey, it's more for the fun than anything else. As that cliched saying goes... "Sing (or play other instrument) as if nobody's hearing!"

Mai-a-hee, Mai-a... oops!

So I've been working a bit on Project Argonium, which by the way, is moving a bit more slowly than I'd like because of the upcoming Ecological Society of America conference (which I'm presenting at and also presiding over a session on polar & boreal carbon cycles). Anyway, there's two songs by O-Zone that I especially enjoy and have an easy time actually remembering & pronouncing the lyrics. The first is "Despre Tine" and the second is "Dragostea Din Tei". (I love all of their songs actually... and I'm looking forward to what the three guys in the band, particularly Arsenium, are going to come up with). I digress, but anyway, I was heading out to work on some archery after about 2 hours of harp and vocal practice and I was still singing because I was having too much fun. For those of you who've never heard "Dragostea Din Tei", the song opens up with vocalizations that sounds like "Mai-a-hee, mai-a-hoo, mai-a-ho, mai-a-haha!" I was doing that part and I thought I was doing pretty well for someone with very little vocal training, since it does take a pretty wide vocal range to pull it off well.

Then I realized that I had several pairs of eyes on me, including the apartment manager and her adorable little sun conure (aka Napoleon if he were a parrot). The parrot merely started shrieking along with my... singing. Nobody really said anything directly to me, but I had a feeling that I hit on some sore nerves, judging from the puzzled glares I got. It was about 17.00hrs so I didn't think I'd disturb that many people, but now most of my neighbors just look at me funny.

As if that weren't enough, I got caught singing again, except this time I was singing "Despre Tine", which thankfully doesn't have any passages that remind me of a nice operatic aria. Just a simple, catchy tune with an easy vocal line. So I was driving to campus and I emerged from the car singing my heart out. As I was singing, someone who apparently had taken some huge lecture classes with me in the past, stopped me and started to talk to me:

Random Person (RP): Hey, I remember you from classes... what are you singing?
Me: It's a song called "Despre Tine" by O-Zone
RP: Is that Filipino? It doesn't sound Korean or Chinese at all and I can't think of any other language you might be able to sing in.
Me: Nope, it's Romanian.
RP: [makes some kind of funny noise and then wanders off]

To me, Romanian sounds like a linear combination of Spanish and Italian with a bit of Russian. Makes perfect sense to me since Romanian has Latin roots but also evolved near Russia... so go figure :P

Take-home lesson: Singing loudly in unexpected languages is fun!