I definitely wanted to see Melbourne during my stay in Australia, so when the opportunity arose to get a trip mostly paid for, I took it, even though it meant attending a conference for a week right in the midst of having to do a bunch of stuff before I leave Oz.
[A bridge over the Yarra River, Melbourne.]The conference was good. Nothing spectacular, but the talks weren't bad. The thing about me is that I'm not great at learning through presentation. Give me a book, a desk, and a few hours in a quiet room, and I'm golden. Put me in the audience of a presentation and my mind starts to wander to strange and disturbing places, even if the speaker is engaging. I never feel like I get the same value out of listening to a lecture, even a good lecture, as other people do.
Another thing is that I don't love my work the way many people at the conference seemingly do. I like my work. It's fine. It's a decent way to make a living, but I rarely do it for fun. All things being equal, I'd usually rather do something else. As an indicator, I get more excited when I get a crossword puzzle accepted in the NY Times, than I do when I get an academic paper accepted in a journal.
[A street performer in Federation Square, Melbourne. I wanted to give him some money, but didn't have any small bills or coins.]But, the beauty of these conferences is that when I start to lose interest in the talks I can always take interest in the people, and the people are usually very interesting. Operations research (which is basically what I do now) is a hodgepodge of many fields like math, computer science, engineering, and business. As a result, you get a veritable plethora of different types of people at international OR conferences. For example, at this conference I saw business suits, math nerds, yuppies, hippies, Africans, Latinos, a woman in a burqa, a bloke in high heels, and the Asian Quentin Tarantino. (This guy, an Asian man, with a strange resemblance to the famous (non-Asian) director, stood in the back of a talk with his head down and shook the change in his pocket. He started doing it so vigorously that everybody started to stare at him. He didn't notice. The second the speaker stopped he left the room, not sticking around for the short Q & A that follows.)
I also saw that guy who looks like he could climb a mountain at the drop of a hat. You know who I'm talking about. He's always wearing some sort of long sleeve Gortex shirt-jacket, pants that zip into shorts, and those hybrid hiking boot / tennis shoes things. He carries a backpack covered with all sorts of lanyards and carabiners, even though it just has papers in it. That guy was there.
[Some art somewhere in Melbourne.]Another great thing about the conference is that I got to see Melbourne, and see Melbourne I did. I can report that Melbourne is wonderful and wonderfully expensive. Pints of beer were around $8 for the cheap shit and $10 for the good stuff (amazingly that didn't stop me from drinking quite a few). The museum was $35 for the main attraction (a cool looking traveling exhibit on King Tut) and $8.50 for a 3D movie on Egypt... that was 15 minutes long! (In a stroke of good luck, some random guy gave me a free ticket to see it.) The art gallery was $30. Everywhere I went it seemed like things were about 20% more expensive than Sydney, which is already about 20% more than I think they should be. But, I managed to have a great time nonetheless.
[The Eiffel Tower]
[Big Ben]I got to attend an AFL game which was cool. The Collingwood Magpies beat North Melbourne Kangaroos 147-30. It was the biggest ass whupping I've ever seen in professional sports, and it rained a lot. The game was still fun though. I had a pie and few Carlton draughts -- standard footy fare.
[Footy at the Melbourne Cricket Grounds]I spent most nights at the pubs and bars. Aussies like to drink and when visitors are in town, even better. Tuesday H, T, and I sampled all six beers from a local brewery, and by "sampled", I mean "drank a pint of". The next night we ate dinner at a local brew house. But, I took it easy that night. I had a chance to order a Kangaroo steak, but didn't. I'm not exactly sure why.
As we were walking back to the hotel after dinner, we were talking about how it's sometimes difficult to understand the non-native English speakers at the conference, and one of the guys there, who's Korean, went on a mini-rant, "You rucky Austrarians and New Zearanders. You rucky Amelicans. You only have to know goddamn Engrish. You don't have to know any other ranguage." It was funny to see a 5' 5" Korean dude, whose face was completely red from drinking ("Asian Glow"), getting worked up.
[This picture epitomizes Melbourne during the winter: beautiful, gloomy, and wet.]Thursday night was particularly fun (and brutal the next morning). The conference sponsored a (very nice) dinner, and el vino did flow. Eventually, we were kicked out of the banquet hall, so we moved on to the hotel bar. Eventually, we were kicked out of there (asshole workers, how dare they just want to go home for the night), so we moved on to the casino bar down the river. By this time our group of about 15 had dwindled to seven: myself, two well-known and well-respected professors, a woman I occasionally work with, some middle-aged guy with a hoop earring from South Africa, a pudgy quiet guy who was apparently an industry bigwig, and a man who dressed like a woman and went by "she" at night (she disappeared once we got to the casino).
We drank and talked and laughed and it was a great time. At some point, we stumbled back to the hotel and went our separate ways. Actually, I know what point that was. It was 4:45 in the morning. I remember looking at the clock in my room. I didn't make the morning sessions, but nothing on the program looked that exciting anyway.
And that was Melbourne.
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