Holy crap this is a big conference. Ok, not AHA big or anything like that, but well over 100 all older and more official looking people than myself. I spent most of the appetizer and wine tasting looking for people who looked my general age range and hope they'd be grad students. After one of the directors left me with his one-too-many-wine-tastings wife, I managed to escape (under the guise of getting another glass myself) and find some friendly Cal students. The venue is beautiful, the wine and food were amazing, ad I'm now beginning to wonder why I didn't consider Davis for Grad school. Yeah, the town is small, but nicely laid out, cheap, and the campus is manicured, but beautifully designed. The first Keynote was incredible (spoke about freshness and taste), as were the other plenary speakers. I'm feeling a bit like "one of these things is not like the other" in that I'm talking about teaching, not research. Also, these people are like actual food historians... not necessarily world historians... So this venue lacks some of the intimacy of my last conference a year ago. At the same time, people have seemed interested in my talk and at least 2 people said the downloaded my syllabus to use for resources So, I'm back in the hotel room adding a slide of the $1.50 Costco combo meal (I decided to nail home the humor with an image), and waiting to hear from a friendly Cal grad who took pity on dinner-partnerless-me.
That's all for now, I'll update after my talk tomorrow.
K
hehe... I hate those big conferences of strange old historians who have poor interpersonal skills. I had to work the AHA twice for CHNM (Washington DC, Philadelphia) and it was a frustrating experience.
ReplyDeleteDavis: yeah tell me about it. Did I ever tell you they offered me the department fellowship so I wouldn't have to TA. please tell WTF I was thinking...............
Costco meal is totally going to go over well, woohoo :)