more spring time yay!

About 1.5 weeks after I messed up my back I was going to the AERA conference in New York City which was my first time being at the AERA.
The back was fine but the youth hostel I was staying at had put me in a room right next to the shared bathroom haha. So I slept like maybe 1 or 2 hours that first night. Next morning I asked for a single room which was not adjacent to a shared bathroom and fortunately they could accommodate me. Only weird thing in this 2nd room was that the heating was on most of the time and there was no control panel with which I could turn it off. Oh well, just slept with the window open and in my birthday suit :-D

The conference was actually better than I expected so that's always a good thing. Since it's the biggest Educational Research conference in the US there were thousands of participants and they used four big ass hotels in Manhattan to be able to host all the parallel sessions.
I had a presentation on Thursday morning in a session with all professors. It's always fun to be the odd ball out, people take notice and wonder what my position is. Presentation went well and after making a joke about my wicked beard people even dared to ask some questions!

Ran into Sarah again whom I had met at the EARLI conference last year in Budapest. She went into hyper job searching mode on day 2 haha. I'm sure she'll find a good job.
Since I'm officially only allowed to do 2 conferences per year and I'm doing 3 this year (AERA, ICLS, CogSci) I was keeping costs down as much as possible. That explains why I was staying in a youth hostel in the upper West side.
Oh, on Tuesday night I wanted to take the subway back to my hostel but apparently the line I wanted to take had stopped running at 10pm. That's rather early for NYC, no?!?!
Anyway, I walked back to my hostel (about 50 or 60 blocks) in about 40 minutes and my beard protected me from the night vipers to approach me.

The conference ended on Friday and since my flight back to Pittsburgh was scheduled for Sunday I finally had some time to check out the Big Apple. Went to Ground Zero, the Virgin Megastore (hey music addict for life haha!), the Guggenheim museum and walked back to my hostel through Central Park.
On Sunday I was supposed to be picked up by SuperShuttle and they had even confirmed the pick up twice but failed to actually do so. Ended up taking a cab and made the flight easily. SupperShuttle said they'd give me a refund but as it turns out they didn't give me a refund of the cab costs (what was I thinking?) but 'only' of the original SuperShuttle tickets.
Oh well.

Pics of my NYC trip can be found HERE