Pre-Conference Slacking

Aahhh, slacking.

[UPDATE: pics here]

Actually, I kept on waking up, Wednesday morning. My clock was still on French time, so I woke up at 2am, 4am, 6am and finally 8am. At 8am I couldn't make my body fall asleep again, so hauled my ass out of bed, showered and dressed, went downstairs for breakfast, then took my laptop down to the lobby (where there was some free internet that everyone was using) and did a bit of blogging.

Around noon, Greg and I got ourselves together, and went downstairs to check out. We were going to spend the rest of our time in Honolulu at the conference hotel, which was two blocks over. We checked into the conference hotel (which was beautiful, if a bit confusing to navigate), grabbed lunch at a conveyor-belt sushi bar, and then headed off into Waikiki to do a bit of shopping. Greg had a bit of souvenir-shopping to do, and I needed to buy swimming trunks and flip-flops (see my failed shopping trip in Paris two days ago).

We quickly discovered that we were not Waikiki's target audience. The roads running along Waikiki were studded with high-end shopping, such as Tiffany, Louis Vuitton, Cartier, Coach, etc. Ironically, the stores were mostly filled with Japanese and Chinese tourists shopping in the same stores they could find in Tokyo or Hong Kong. Either way, there was no way I was going to find cheap flip-flops and swim trunks. Eventually, we returned to the hotel and I went to a nearby ABC store (which has a greater monopoly on convenience stores than Tim Horton's does on donut shops in Canada) to get some flip-flops.

As the day wore on, we ran into various other U of Chicago folks, and eventually our other roommate, Andrew, arrived as well. Sometime along the route, we also bought a case of beer and a bottle of rum to put in our hotel room. That evening, we set off in search of a beachside bar, only to realize that the ban on alcohol on the beach meant that there would be no beachside bar. We eventually settled for a terrace bar overlooking the ocean at our hotel, and had ourselves a few overpriced cocktails. Then, we headed back to our room and started what would become a nightly ritual of drinking beer and rum&cokes on the balcony overlooking the water.