Today was a pretty low key day. Both Erika and I weren't feeling to well this morning, so we both overslept; a lot. Rae came knocking on our door at about 11:3o and politelty started yelling at us to get the hell out of bed, and even more nicely opened our curtains to let the light in our room. Rae bought clothes yesterday to wear today on the off chance that we didn't get our bags back; so it was nice to see happy Rae again (although, she will tell you that Happy Rae never disappeared ;))
While Kristen (and what I thought was Erika) were attending a University of Cincinnati luncheon; Rae and I both went to a panel that we wanted to attend. Well, let me tell you... I wish we would have just attended the luncheon and met some people. It was awful. Apparently because the ACJS conference is out of the country this year it has had "quite frankly, a super crappy attendance rate. I have heard from many professors that people didn’t file for their passports in time to get here (which is odd, because I filed for mine a little over 4 weeks before I boarded the plane to come), which means that they can’t get across the border. This has been the second panel that I have attended in which less than half the people presenting bothered to show up. Fortunately, I learned that it isn’t rude to get up and leave if you aren’t interested and want to go to a different panel that sounds inifinitely more interesting than the one that you are currently wasting your time in. I’ve been exercising that right in full force today.
Fortunate for me, the second panel that I decided that could be interesting was amazing. It was all about organized crime inside the United States, and one presenter discussed biker gangs as international crime. I learned a lot about Hells Angles and the Warlords, and some a plethora of other biker gangs and what it takes to be in a gang, and what exactly they were all about. The professor lecturing is currently a biker (wouldn’t tell us if he was affiliated with any certain gang) so he knew his stuff. It was great.
The last panel I attended, I attended solo, and really, isn’t worth mentioning... but that’s probably because I got up and left early. I have a midterm to take tomorrow, so I decided to use that time to go up and actually finish the chapters that I am going to be tested on tomorrow. Rae, Erika and I decided to postpone the Terrorism final until Spring Break because quite frankly, school has been the last thing to cross our jet-lagged, under slept minds.
We all met up later in the evening and went to this Indian restaurant down from the hotel. Indian food really isn’t my thing... but I ate some food anyways. We invited one of the professors from UAA to join us. We had a pretty good time.
After the long windy walk back to the hotel, we hung out at the hotel bar for a while, and chit chatted about random Alaskany (I just made that a word) things to do because T-Payne (our UAA professor) is new to Anchorage. It was good times.
Now, it’s almost 1:30 a.m. and I am super tired, and have to be up early to attend a panel that hopefully is more promising than most of what I have already seen.
If any of my words seem to be super weird, it’s because I’m tired and using a version of Microsoft Word that doesn’t correct my words the way I want them too... It’s in Canadian or some b.s. that I can’t fix. I might edit when I am more coherent. Post more tomorrow! We are going to check out all of the student panels and see what we have to do to get our own thing going next year.
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