Philadelphia and Orlando, now back to School
Late April, and the finals crunch is here again. Been MIA from this journal for almost two months total now this year, its been hard to keep up with the posts with everything going on. Aside from getting flooded this past weekend, I also got to do some work travel, headed up to Philadelphia and Orlando for a few days. Had a chance to have dinner with my cousin and her husband at a place called Monk’s in downtown Philly, they had a variety of belgian beers, pretty tasty burgers, and a bunch of steamed mussel pots. Have to say that I was pretty impressed with how vibrant the downtown area was even on a weeknight, it kind of seemed like a scene in between NY and DC.
Being that this is the first time I travelled for work in almost 3 years, it was kind of a change of pace, the immediate challenge was figuring out how to keep up with my readings for class and even debating whether to ride the train back to DC for a few classes. As it turned out I only missed one class since the other two were cancelled due to the Pope visiting the school. I ended up doing some online research and reading law review articles from my hotel room. I think there’s truth to familiar surroundings as being conducive to studying, maybe it’s just my nature to need some clutter on my desk otherwise I feel out of place. I had loaded electronic versions of a lot of my research articles on my laptop, but it was hard to read them on a tiny laptop screen. I also noticed that despite being someone that is relatively wired, I definitely preferred reading articles in hard copy.
The trip to Orlando was for a conference, not too bad except it was held on a Saturday, so that means that I was essentially working through the weekend. The plane down was filled with kids going to Epcot Center and Disney World. I had gone straight to the airport from a meeting, so I was still dressed in business attire, something I’ve never done before, that is fly dressed up. Traveling down south you can definitely see the diversity of the country, even along the eastern seaboard. Although I didn’t really see much else from the airport, the hotel and the conference, you get a sense and feel for the place. The humidity and landscape actually reminded me of home.
When I was on break from the conference I walked around the mall that was adjacent to the hotel. During lunch I got a good cuban plate at the food court, it was a no brainer to go there instead of the McDonalds, Panda Express and all the other standard food court fare. Happened to check out a surf shop that had a lot of brands from Hawaii, the kind that I used to check out a lot growing up. After a few minutes walking around I happened to glance at my reflection in one of the mirrors of myself wearing a coat and tie with the surfboards and racks of boardshorts behind me.