CHI conference was fun. Meeting new people, reminiscing with old friends, attending all those cool paper sessions and talks… Now I’ll finally back in Pittsburgh with that whole pile of work waiting for me to finish. Some of the memorable parts of the trip:

Hookah Bar
Went to a hookah bar for the first time on the last night at Montreal. Our casino plans fell through that night, but the night still worked out pretty well. This was cheaper than alcohol. A few puffs made me light-headed for a while. I don’t like it too much.

Thousand Islands
This is indeed the place where the first Thousand Islands salad dressing was made. We passed by the Thousand Islands skydeck on our way back home. The view was awesome at the top of the deck. Two things I had learnt here. One, there are in fact only 997 islands here. Two, a island is a piece of land which has at least two trees on it.

Original Buffalo Wings
These wings were amazing. We dropped by the Anchor Bar in Buffalo. This was where buffalo wings originated from. We got adventurous and decided to try their Suicidal Wings, the spiciest ones they had there. I almost died. This is definitely a close contender to the Atomic Wings in Quaker Steak and Lube. We bought some for Jason and as usual, it was no sweat for him! Ugh.

It’s funny how everytime I go to a new city, the first thing I look for is food. And that somehow leads to Chinatown! This time it’s the same. We had dim sum at the Chinatown next to the convention center. Not fantastic, but at least there is.

There was this massive Earth Day demonstration! It was the largest one I’ve ever seen. Felt like a parade or something. I think they were trying to oust this politican out of the cabinet.

CHI 2006 Conference is held at Palais des Congrès de Montréal. This convention center has got to be one of the better-looking buildings around here.

I asked for directions to the Notre-Dame Basilica church and this guy gave me the wrong direction! “See that street, go all the way down. It’s about 3 blocks away!” I should have sensed that snigger from his friend.

Went into one of the many churches along the street. This was taken from within the Christ Church Cathedral.

Le Phillips Hotel. This is by far the largest hotel room I’ve ever stayed in. Four people living in a 2-bedroom-suite, it just feels like an apartment, and a very posh one.

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First day of the trip and it was already so much fun. The 12-hour drive from Pittsburgh to Montreal wasn’t as tiring as I expected it to be. I did a fair share of the driving. We practically stopped for breaks an average of 1 per 2 hours. And we never seemed to stop eating and drinking and munching on those perennial supply of Planters nut mix.

Either Jeff’s car has an affinity to bugs or New York State has a lot of bugs. Wham bam! As we were driving on the freeway, we got this occassional splatter of weird-looking sticky substance on our windscreen. I thought it was bird crap at first. Then Jeff told me it was bugs! I was like *speechless*.

One thing I realized from this road trip is that listening to podcasts is one good way to pass time in the car. We were listening to lecture podcasts from various Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders, a weekly seminar series by the Stanford Technology Ventures Program. It’s funny how we always skipped lectures in school and now we are listening to lectures on our road trip!? Anyway Tina Seelig, the executive director of the program gave a very inspiring talk titled “What I wish I knew when I was 20“. She shared about her insights into what people should know before they hit the age of 20. Among those advice I could recall now were “It’s the small things that matter most” and “Try alot of things and keep those that work”. I thought they made a lot of sense. I’ll probably write about them in a separate post. For the interested folks, here’s the podcast.