Thursday, June 11, 2009

Final Conference Notes - Part One

The Conference dinner was pretty good with great company, beautiful food and a disappointing guest speaker. At times, the conference has been a bit earnest with not enough celebration and humour. The dinner was when we should have had such a speaker. The band was great and a group of us danced most of the night.

My presentation was in the final slot on the final day and it went down very well. Lots came up afterwards to ask questions and to get my business card (which I later found had an error on it!). I was the invited to be part of a panel at the final conference session to answer questions from Howard Zehr on our thoughts of the conference. That was OK, but some of the academics on the panel pissed me off as they rambled on using long words. I mentioned that when I could get a word in!

That night the New Zealanders, and Aussie Glenn, went to a Japanese restaurant to plan our hosting of the conference in 2011. The food was outstanding and the conversation great.

The next morning I jumped on the hop on hop off bus and began a tour of the city. The tour was quite disappointing and I got off at the ferry terminal and cruised across the harbour to North Vancouver and boarded a bus for the 20 minute ride to Grouse Mountain. It was a very hot day - about 32 degrees (in fact the whole week has been great weather).

I enjoyed a cramped gondola ride up the mountain and discovered myself surrounded by large patches of snow. I spotted a bear in its cage then caught the ski lift to the summit. The views were outstanding and I was disappointed I didn't buy a ticket for the massive flying fox ride that looked quite terrifying.

After a nice coffee and some souvenir buying I headed down in the gondola, back on the bus and then over on the ferry again.

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