Conference Life

It can’t be a bad day when breakfast is delivered to your door and eaten in bed. Even if it is cornflakes.

The Inn does basic breakfasts for it’s guests and, because the pub doesn’t actually open until noon, delivers it to your room before you awake. It’s waiting at your door, for no extra charge.

It’s also worth a note that Aberdeen is a strict oil town, the powerhouse, as it were, of Scotland. This means that 1) the harbor is very industrial and 2) most of the workers are weekly imports. They come for the week, when cheap accommodation is almost impossible to find, to work on the rigs and return to their families on the weekend. At the Inn, you can hear the 5 am shift shuffle awake and leave, heading out to the docks.

So the day started with cornflakes, a croissant, a hot shower, and more rehearsing of my paper. Nothing makes me feel more academic and professional than an academic conference. My topic was the effectiveness of ecotourism in Egypt, and I could fit it all in if I read the paper straight. But seeing as I hate that, I didn’t.

And seeing as I didn’t, I went waaaaay over. It was my first conference, so I suppose I should give myself some credit. While I didn’t give the greatest performance of all time, my topic certainly attracted a great deal of interest, especially among the sea of papers on obscure existential topics and complex Dutch theories of education and proposed by some guy back in the 1960s as a reaction to communism. Whatever. At the evening reception, I was quite popular. Jonmikel (who got special permission to come along as my fiancé, making him a celebrity in his own right) and I found a nice table, thinking we would be alone, and found ourselves in the middle of conversation the whole night. The reception included wine and finger foods, so who can beat a free night out?

There was Katie, a postgrad at Aberdeen from Montana; she was so excited to meet other people from Montana who could confirm all her stories about bison in the front yard, elk-hunting from the porch, and tractors and wide open spaces that she called over everyone she ever met. She studied migration patterns, especially among Eastern European women. There was Lindsey from Ottawa who studied Gaelic language preservation and use in modern Scotland and Wales. Ivan, from the Ukraine, studied rural agricultural development; Boris from Russia who was studying oil engineering and worked on an oil rig and had only studied English for like a year and spoke it more or less fluently. Clancy from Kent State (though he wouldn’t admit it, it was too low class for him; he was one of those pretentious philosophers that usually abound at these kinds of things). James, originally from Crete (or something?) but was more or less British in his mannerisms and accent. A girl whose name escapes me from Sweden. Another woman originally from Jamaica who was a US citizen but had lived in Germany for nine years. They came and went all night, and all we had to was sit and relax. It was actually very cool, and made me feel good about my talk, even if it didn’t go as planned.

The night finished up with us meandering back to our Inn to enjoy a couple more drinks, this time in the company of the Aberdeen A Cappella Choir celebrating the 50th birthday of one of their members by drinking heartily and breaking into song until closing time.