#5: UIUC Conference

WOOOHOO! :D

Had a super groovy time this weekend! A group of the ACM students went to the Reflections-Projections (omg!technologies!) conference in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois. What this means is: a twelve hour car ride. How exciting.

Surprisingly enough, it was fairly fun. On the way to Illinois it was me, hubby, a South Korean transfer student, and a good friend of ours in the car. This resulted in some rather hilarious conversations.

Chris (the good friend) and Dustin (hubby) were having a very in depth conversation regarding theories of teleportation and time-travel. This would be fine, except for I was napping. I sleep like a baby in cars... half an hour in the car and I'm out. So I'm napping, they're debating, and clearly I wasn't really that deep asleep because I started dreaming about time-travel. Not just _about_ time travel, but I was dreaming that I was presenting this time-travel proposal to a bunch of suits. Then the conversation turned to quarks, itty bitty tiny little quarks. In my dream, somewhere in the translation of speech to visual image, quark turned into Root Beer Barrels. Ya know, the candy? Those tiny little hard candies? Yeah. So Chris and Hubby and Jueng (S.Korean kid) are talking about quarks and the flipping of the quarks, and in my Proposal Dream I see root beer barrels. I eventually wake up and I asked them what the hell they were talking about and they started recounting the conversation and it was more or less, excatly like my dream. It was exhausting.

And Jueng, who I believe said he's only been here about a month, was having some difficulty with some of our phrases and sayings. He's got this little computer machine and he can type in English words and it will tell him the South Korean words so he understands. The machine did not know what S.O.L. was. Have you ever tried to explain what s.o.l. means? It's tricky!

The hotel was rather ghetto. Liveable, but not comfortable in the least.

The speakers were really great! There was a guy from SpaceX there talking about commerical space travel, there was a research and development guy from Dreamworks Animation, there were some more technical (read: boring to me) guys, and there was a funny, brilliant British man talking about taking risks.

There was a quick jaunt over to the strip club. THAT was fun!!!!!!!!!

I had me first Mayan Hot Chocolate. (Yes, I realized that I did that in initial caps, much like an important name. Yes, it's that good.) I'm hooked for life. BEST BEVERAGE EVER

Then it was time to come home. We had two different guys in our car for the trip home. They were really nice, but rather geeky. They were back there with their PSPs totally flipping shit over their video games, they sounded like that were playing with action figures they were so rowdy about this game. Very funny.

Then we got home.

The End.