an oasis of sound
Oh, Canada. What joy of joys. calgary, in all reality, was a little bit boring. the problem with it being that everything closes down at like 6 p.m. because we were downtown. and there’s just no convincing us that we’re going to spend 2 dollars canadian to get in the cab plus 20 canadian cents per every 150 m. We don’t even know what a meter is. We are from America!
Luckily, Bearman and Cara and I are about the perfect travellers because we don’t know what stress means. So we just get there and we do things like take naps and go on walks to random places and eat based on my bizarre demands. and i show up without any money by accident and we get that all worked out. it was awesome. i have some really good stories from the trip though, of course.
first, our plane was super delayed. we got there at 8 and our plane didn’t even leave till 12:10. What assholes. So we end up there really early, after my not getting to bed until four+ because I spent the night with Kyle (not what you think, mostly, it was just a long conversation about our pasts. that’s really a different story, but i’d just like to say that it’s amazing to have a boyfriend who has such a smiliar past as you. it’s nice to not feel like someone is able to hold anything over your head, even if they don’t understand it. so i’m really happy about that). Anyway. I’m exhausted when we get to the airport. Kyle, being such a great guy, sticks around and talks to the three of us for about an hour or two before he has to get his dad his car back. We fly to Chicago and that’s where we meet our first story: The Chinese People.
The Chinese People followed us everywhere we went once we got to Chicago. They followed us onto our plane to Calgary. Then, they followed us to the hotel. Then, they went to the same conference. Then, they followed us back to the airport. The best thing about these people was that the woman one wore really traditional chinese clothes made in american styles. so she had the shirt with the silk embroidery stuff and the silk closures and they were all put on weird quilt fabric that was very american. this didn’t change throughout the conference, either. everytime you saw them, they were in these strangely concocted chinese-american clothes. sheer brilliance.
Next, we went to the conference where we met Tim. Tim is a friend of Bearman’s. He was our moderator and the chair of the History section of the WSSA. He was awesome, but took his work so seriously. He was constantly micromanaging everything in the best of ways. Like, I know that just because he was there we could basically wander around aimlessly and know that if we were supposed to be doing something else, then we’d do it.
My favorite part of the trip was probably the dinner with the history section of the WSSA… in part because it meant being around historians. Dinner started a little bit slow but I got bored of just talking to Bearman and discussion moved to alcohol and travel on the other side of the table so we quickly opened it a whole group discussion. It was mostly awesome. I drank Canadian beer (Alexander Keith’s which was alright) and we took turns telling stories about our travels around the world. I like how comfortably i fit in among historians. it was also really awesome that the whole conference was really open to Cara and I even though we were undergraduates. They treated us no different than someone would treat a colleague or something. I had a great time.