Saturday, January 3, 2009

Aloha

Family- Here is photographic proof that I made it safe and sound:




I shouldn't type this but I will. I'm sitting on my balcony in a tank top, shorts, and no shoes watching the sunset over Waikiki beach. I'm also listening to the water lap the shore and drinking cheap white wine right out of the bottle. But, before you get angry, I did have to work hard to get here: I haven't slept since Thursday, I'm totally doped up on afrin, theraflu, and am planning on taking some more before I go to bed. I sat in front of two kicking screaming children and the woman sitting next to me was a chatty chatty lady.

But Hawaii is pretty great. I'm here for work and have a very busy schedule of meetings and sessions. I'm presenting on the last day and am actually a bit nervous about it since I haven't given an academic presentation since my dissertation hearing two years ago.

In case you're wondering, my presentation is about how you can use the questions that students ask in their museum science classes to focus the teacher on teaching at the kids level. My premise is that kids in museum classes are consumers of education and thus you need to do a better job of teaching to what they're interested in and what they already know about the material or else they won't continue to consume your programs.

Okay you can start reading again. Once I checked in I changed my clothes from winter airplane comfort to beach chic and took a nice long walk down the beach. I then walked up the main drag (which was mostly an outdoor mall flooded with Japanese tourists) and completely forgot what hotel I was staying in. Luckily there were a bunch of obvious academics walking towards what appeared to be my hotel and I just followed them.

The weather here is overcast and a bit rainy so the pictures don't do the beach justice. Actually the beach is just a thin strip in front of the hotels but the water is one of those memorable shades of blue.

Hopefully this post makes sense, I'm going to eat a quick dinner (yum, left over turkey sandwich), take one more swig of wine, and hope into bed.

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