Game day
I awoke after a decent night’s sleep and worked on my presentation notes/speech for a couple hours in the morning, making a brief breakfast run to the convenience store downstairs. I headed over to the Congress for the morning sessions, sitting in on a few second language talks and a tone perception talk. A slight touch of nerves for my impending presentation led me to have a rather abbreviated lunch break–a quick egg salad/avocado sandwich at Deli France near the convention centre. I’ve decided that I do thoroughly enjoy my new iPad, as it allows for fairly flexible surfing options, and it’s light enough that I can tuck it in my purse. So I somewhat pensively surfed while waiting in the room in which I’d be presenting, and people eventually started trickling in.
As I was the second presenter, I sat through the first talk before I was called to the stage. It was slightly awkward, as the presenter before me finished a bit early, and we weren’t supposed to start until the bells chimed, so I just awkwardly waited on stage. I’d discovered the day before that the PowerPoint presenter view wasn’t working, so I’d prepared my talking notes on the iPad, which actually worked quite well as a presenting tool. I thought it might be awkward to hold while also operating the powerpoint presentation, but it was just fine. All in all, I think it went fairly well–my goal was to slow it down and avoid talking too quickly and finishing in 10 minutes (thus leaving 10 minutes for questions). And I was pretty close to my goal, finishing a minute or two early. The questions were, for the most part, just fine, and I was soon off the stage, to my relief.
I spent the next couple hours meeting and chatting with new folk. I was grateful for the many kind comments I received, even from some well-respected names in the field. In the end, I felt I had a fairly productive afternoon of making new and re-visiting old connections. I made a quick pit-stop at the hotel, changing into a t-shirt and shorts as I had hoped to perhaps take the ferry across the bay to see the city skyline at night. I swung by the Congress to see if any folk were interested in partaking in ferry-riding. However, I ended up getting somewhat side-tracked by talk of dinner plans. The fatigue of the day started to sink in, and I decided to forego the ferry and simply have some dinner with a bunch of folk from the conference at New Shanghai restaurant in the convention centre. It looked to be a very classy sort of joint (which made me feel all the more under-dressed having gone back to the hotel to change). We had a Mandarin-speaker among us who did the ordering. We ended up with quite a tasty meal, with good dumplings and pork buns, a tasty eggplant dish, even deep-fried wheat gluten (which I forewent). We ambled back to our hotel, and I was asleep within a half an hour.
