more museums [HRE]

222-  Sitting in Is and Andy's hotel room, talking to them and Is's mom.  We "helped" Is come up with his final…
1033- Sleeping, quite soundly
1409-Just waking up.  My parents went to get some breakfast, I had them pick me up a chocolate croissant at the place we went to yesterday. 
1540-  We were trying to figure out how to get to the museum.  We knew we needed to take the bus, but which bus and how it would work out since we had to all be back at different times took some planning…

Lunch- had some cookies and cream gilato at the museum, does that count?
Dinner- Beef Teryiaki and rice, some miso soup, 2 pieces of shrimp tempura, and a large piece of potato tempura, with a strawberry smoothie.  We found a food court online, went there, found out it closed at 6 (we got there about 7) and the security guard directed us to a place down the street with like 15 food stands.  Completely amazing

Random Fact- Peter Blake, who is credited with New Zealand's win of the Americas Cup (and the first country to successfully defend their win in the next cup) was killed by pirates while raising awareness of the Amazon rainforest 10 years ago today.  He sounded like a cool guy, really involved in conservation.

I woke up for good when Is called.  We figured out we would meet in about 45 minutes and go to the museum since there was no way to do the ferry and back before his presentation.  The museum was reachable by a short bus ride.  I figured out why my phone was staying on roaming (somehow got switched to CDMA).  Checked in our backpacks then spent about an hour looking at Polynesian art and life in NZ over the last few centuries.  The intricasys of the carving they did were amazing.  Entire houses were built with each board carved with various designs.  It also appears that when the top chief died the entire town was abandoned and rebuilt.  Better hope you had a long lived dude.  I heard my mom's phone ring and discovered there was a CDMA network, I had just assumed it was only GSM and had kept my phone on airplane mode to save battery.  Quite exciting.  Is, Andy, and I left at about 1, grabbed some gilato and watched birds (house sparrows and pigeons mostly).  I realized I've now seen them on all continents but Antarctica.  We then managed to catch the sky city hotel bus, which took us to the conference center for free.  We found his room, then toured the exhibitor hall.  I went to some presentations, including Is's a really cool one on rock wallaby phyogeography, and one on felids disease interface between domestic and wild species.  I also saw a Hemiptera talk which had cool methods, but I couldn't figure out what the actual point was...  Then I met up with Is and Andy, luckily they had my program book I had set down and walked away from.  We talked to the Sirtrek guys for a while, i love how they always remember me.  Then i went to a talk on sugarcane in Brazil and finished it up with a really cool weevil talk.  She was extracting DNA from 200 year old specimens.  Really interesting, even if it was only 150 bp segments of CO1.  Met back up with Is and Andy then walked back to the hotel.  We had been discussing prelims, so I gave them the blow by blow of mine.  I went up to my room, and played online with my parents.  Then we got hungry and decided to find the food court my mom had found online.  After an amazing dinner we went back to the hotel, checking out a few shops along the way.  Finished up the evening skyping with Maria and Eddie, watched the Peter Blake documentary, drank a beer, and now I'm watching lawn bowling.  Yet another strange sport...