Lake Placid and Ducktown

Conference updates yay! Now that my presentation is over i get to blog about the conference, yay! Well, to get the nasty things out of the way, the presentation went ok. The conference location is in this amazing place called Lake Placid (photos below). Yeah I wish I could say more but I guess that all I can mutter (it is 12 am for me by singapore time) is UNFUCKINGBELIEVABLE. It is a mountain resort, not the rugged-no-vegetation-on-peaks kind that I love, but rather a mellow (the highest peak is about 2500m), lake-y region. Full of tourists and polite people. So many people have been nice and kind (again volunteering random info) that I am almost afraid that your usual american psycho will jump out of the conference rest room and gun us all to death.

The conference room shares a wall with a US Army Recruitment camp & conference. What can I say, their talks are more common sense I guess but also much louder. Hell! at one point they even had a britteney (how do you spell her name) spears soundtrack on some of their (I hope) educational movies. My mom has been roaming the resort while I go to the conference. Tomorrow we'll have a short day (until 12 only) and thus afterwards we will go hiking. Friday we'll also go hiking and then we are off to New York on Saturday (this is a whole-day trip by bus). This would leave us two more days in New York and then off to Singapore (hopefully swine-flu free).

The skies are dramatic but in a harmless sort of way (so far).




This is the place we are staying:


And this is the lake:



Our inn is right on one of the shores of Lake Placid so we get great views of the lake. Also, the duck population seems to fancy us and thus we get a lot of them when we go sit on the chairs by the lake. Below are some results of the photo session with the people of Ducktown.