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NOLA, Day 1
Day 1 of New Orleans down. The main news is that Lauren did a great job with her presentation on performance-based assessments in the physics classroom (in short, it's finding ways to grade students other than written tests, ways that hopefully are more authentic and practical tests of their understanding). I also got to hear half of a presentation by Bill Nye (the Science Guy!) and Neil deGrasse Tyson. The hour that I saw before I left for Lauren's presentation didn't seem like a very focused presentation, but it was an interesting sort of standup-comedy-meets-state-of-science-and-science-education talk.
Outside of science convention stuff, the main points of interest have all had to do with food. For instance, we've been quite happy with our hotel--Staybridge Suites, near the convention center--largely for culinery reasons. First, their free breakfast is pretty nice--besides the usual continental fare of cereals, bagels, muffins, and fruit, they offered hot scrambled eggs, hard-boiled eggs, sauages, and--the start of the show--a make-your-own waffle station. Two of them, in fact, to cut down on waiting. So good. Lots of teas available, several fruit juices, and a couple different coffees as well (though I wasn't really paying attention to that last). Then, on most weekdays, the hotel offers free dinner from 5-7. Granted, guests don't have a lot of choices: for instance, tonight we were only given red beans and rice, a selection of chips, and salad fixings. But it's worth noting that they also offer free beer and wine during those hours.
For lunch--the meal we actually had to pay for today!--we went to The Creole Skillet (200 Julia St, 504-304-6318), just a couple blocks from the convention center, and very much enjoyed our meal there. Today's special was "Tour of New Orleans," which was some bread with cups of red beans & rice, crawfish etoufee, and gumbo (Lauren preferred them in that order, I preferred them in the reverse order, which I think says something good about them), and we also split a "Bayou Burrito," which was quite tasty. An oddity of the restaurant was that they did not offer dessert during lunch hours. Fortunately, just down the street was The Kupcake Factory, offering a variety of gourmet cupcakes. Honestly, I wasn't that impressed by the Reese's Pieces cupcake (seemed a little dry), but they did have an interesting variety and, to be fair, we only had the one. We liked the "Pupcake" they offered, a sugar-free cupcake made with banana and had peanut butter frosting with a dog biscuit on top for your pup. We wanted to take one back to our pup, but probably it will be tough logistically to get it safely back through two flights. The real find here was quite possibly the best, most authentic gelato I've had this side of the Atlantic.