Conference Travel

By the end of yesterday evening, I had memorized the 16 digits of my credit card, plus the three digit code on the back.

Five of the six times I typed it out were to pay for various aspects of a conference in the spring, so I haven’t become some kind of online supershopper (besides, those people wouldn’t be typing in their card number every time).

Rumor has it that our department suddenly has a lot of travel funds this year, so that we will be reimbursed for all of our conference travel, not just part of one conference, which has been the norm in the past. They won’t reimburse my husband’s travel, of course.

I don’t normally register for the conference, book a flight, rent a car, and reserve a room immediately after getting notice that my proposal’s been excepted, but we had problems with the hotel reservation for this conference last year because I waited until the last minute. I think I felt that arranging anything ahead of time would be jinxing the pregnancy (that was my trip at 34 weeks). The registration and hotel booking were also more complicated last year because of the location. (I don’t normally rent a car for a conference either, but there are some special circumstances.)

Mr. Luo needs a hotel with a fitness room to do his physical therapy. In the U.S., this isn’t such a problem, because you can get down to the level of someplace like the Comfort Inn and they’ll have a little room with an exercycle in it. For foreign conferences though, it means we need a fancy, modern hotel. No quaint converted monasteries. Twice we’ve stayed in places overseas without any fitness facilities and it did not work well for Mr. Luo.

On our recent trip, we stayed with his parents when we visited them, and in a fancy hotel when we went to see the other relatives. I don’t think about it much when I stay in a conference hotel, but I felt a bit guilty staying at an expensive hotel for personal travel (and no conference discount). We were in town for a very short time and had an early flight out, so I decided we should just stay by the airport. Due to a scary night in a Howard Johnson at Newark once when Continental stranded me, I decided that I would stay at nicer places for any future airport hotel sojourns. And I figured at some point, we’d be tired and have a tired baby and want to be able to eat in the hotel. So, I had my reasons, and my husband agreed, but it still seemed wasteful. I don’t think any of our parents would have stayed in at this hotel, even with an early flight and a baby. And shouldn’t buying a house make us more frugal?

At this point I am wondering if it would be less boring to write about my hair. And yet, I publish…

Fun in Los Angeles

No, I am not currently having fun in L.A. I haven’t been there in years.

My mother is from Los Angeles. I grew up farther south, but we went to L.A. a lot to visit relatives and do fun things.

Clifford’s posts about the re-opening of Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles got me thinking about the things I used to do there with my mother growing up. So, this is for Bitch, Ph.D., who is out there for a year, and to indulge my nostalgia. I always used to think that one of the pleasures of having kids would be having an excuse to go to all the kids museums and so on.

Griffith Observatory was great. We used to hike up to the observatory from the lower section of the park. You can blame any subsequent erosion on us, because for part of the walk, we would go straight up the hill instead of following the road. Aside from the planetarium, the exhibits I remember most clearly are the pendulum and the room full of scales that gave your weight on different planets. My mother got a bunch of postcards there and used them like flash cards to help us learn the names of the nebulas and galaxies. In retrospect, Griffith Observatory probably has a lot to do with my early ambition to become an astronomer. (Not that it is an unusual ambition-Mr. Luo wanted to be an astronomer too. He even started out as a physics major in college. I quit after high school physics, which did not excite me at all.)

The George C. Page Museum and the art museum and tar pits is close to where my grandparents lived. When my mother was a kid, it was just tar pits. One of her classmates was the daughter of the caretaker. We used to go to see the tar pits and visit the L.A. County Art Museum. They built the fancy no-longer-new Page museum when I was a kid, and the art museum is a lot bigger now too. The Page museum is built inside a hill; it is fun to roll down the outside. We used to climb the trees in the park, but you are probably not supposed to do that.

We also used to go to Exposition Park. I remember the Museum of Science and Industry, which is apparently a very different place these days, now named the California Science Center. The old museum had an incubator in the lobby in which baby chicks were always hatching. Inside there was a kind of mathematics room with lots of fun exhibits. Now, I can’t think of a good example, because I am confusing that room in my mind with some of the exhibits at the Sciencenter I volunteered at in Grad School Town. Watch out for the cars in Exposition Park. My brother got hit while running across the street between the museum and the Rose Garden.

The Farmers Market was also close to my grandparents’ house, I think. My mother and aunts had jobs there as teenagers. At first glance, it is completely touristy, but as an adult, I’ve been there with a friend to get actual meat and vegetables. We always ate at either the spaghetti place or the fried chicken place, but I can’t figure out from the website if either of them are still there.

Olvera Street. Also completely touristy on the surface, but actually very interesting-it is the site of the original Los Angeles settlement. Behind the knickknack stands there are historic adobe homes. There are weddings and quincañeras across the street at the church that overflow into the plaza. We once ran into a guerrilla theater piece on Central America (done by CISPES, I think). We used to eat at La Luz del Día on the end near the gazeba. As little kids, we loved to sit on the stairs and watch the old ladies making tortillas by hand. (I wouldn’t eat much there, though; they had to get me a hard-shelled taco from somewhere else )
We also used to go to the Huntington Library and Botanical Gardens in Pasadena, near where other relatives lived. It was strange in graduate school to see announcements in the PMLA for fellowships to work at the same Huntington Library that I knew as a place to browse the exhibits and run around the grounds. I am sorry to say that I once had a print of Pinkie on my wall at home.

Those are my favorite memories of places to go in L.A., not counting the houses of people I know of course.

Of course, there is always Disneyland, but I might need a whole other post to describe what Disneyland is like when it is not a place you dream about going someday but rather a place you’ve gone at least once a year, spanning family trips, marching band performances (I’ve been behind the scenes, where Mickey and the other characters walk around with the head part of the costume off), the teenage years (we were so cool, we got off and switched carts in the middle of the rides, wow), and the time we convinced our A.P. Calculus teacher that we should take a field trip to Disneyland after the A.P. Test was over.

I will just say that the first time I saw fireflies back East, and the first time I saw a turquoise Caribbean sea in person, I thought, “oh my, they really do look just like the fake ones at Disneyland.” I had never realized the ocean could really be that color and thought Disney had just gone a little wild with the dye.

Also, I am of the generation to whom “E-ticket ride” means something.

Edited because I can never spell Caribbean.

Say a Little Prayer for You

I’m not a strict atheist. When I go to a Catholic church as a tourist, I light a candle for my Catholic grandparents. When I see an accident or roadkill, I say “om mani padme hum.”  I love the hymm “Amazing Grace,” *especially* with bagpipes. I celebrate Christmas, and play the Messiah as much as I can without driving Mr. Luo crazy. That kind of thing.

So today at the ceremony led by Nobel Prize Winner and Religious Leader I said a little Om Mani Padme Hum for all the women I read about who are cycling or waiting or in limbo right now. And then I visualized Julie’s Big List and the CycleSista page, and sent it out to all of you.*  So for what my  prayers are worth (my guess is, at least as good as sending out my normal secular “thinking of you” and who knows, maybe more), you’ve got them.

*This was the part of the ceremony when 500 people were muttering the mantra while NPWRL was doing preparatory ceremonial things, not the part when I was supposed to be listening to him talk, or the part when we were supposed to be visualizing other things.

On the Lighter Side

So as not to leave my anxieties on top, and in honor of Karen at Chookooloonks, in Trinidad and Karen at The Naked Ovary, who’s received her Travel Authorization for China, I give you a Trinidadian-Chinese travel story.

When I was working in Old Colony, I had this exchange with a friend and colleague from from Trinidad and Tobago:
Trini Friend: When you go to China, everyone has pictures of you on their walls.

Me: But that’s because your parents are from China, and when you go there you are visiting relatives. When I go to China, nobody has pictures of me on their walls.

Before I moved back to the United States, I took one last short trip to China, with this friend. One day, we went to visit a former student of mine who lived in StoneTiger City. And there was a photo of me on the wall.