Well, the reason we´re on this trip to Spain has come to pass! Thanks to everyone for their thoughts, prayers, and well-wishes. Reporting here from Granada, this statistics conference is packed with professors giving 15 minute presentations on their latest ideas in Time Series, a field which we've learned is broad. So broad that Isaac often finds the classes boring or over his head, but of course we are both glad we came. We've been taking it easy on campus the last couple of days, taking ¨coffee¨ breaks (we eat mini pastries and juice instead), and going to 1.5 hour sessions (Isaac) or 3.5 hour social activities in the evenings.
Isaac CAN take it easy, he says, because his presentation of his poster was on the first evening. He was awesome and I´m so proud of him getting out of his shell to teach, follow-up, and show enthusiasm for his research. I had a blast being a bystander, or actually, pretending that I could understand something of these posters as I had a look around. Some weren't even posters, but power point slides individually tacked up, which surprisingly looked less busy and were easier to understand. We assumed these people, like Isaac, were first asked to make a power point presentation which was last-minute changed to a poster--probably due to the amount of full-professor presenters that already couldn't fit in the tight session parameters.
I was in my element, taking more interest in where the poster was from, than what it was about (see the list of places we've met people from in the picture comments). I spoke for a long time with Oksana, whose poster caught my eye being from the Netherlands, where Isaac's brother Nate is a missionary. Come to find out she is actually Ukrainian and moved away to school (another country for each degree) and finally settled down post-doc when she got a job and married in the Netherlands. She said it was fun at first to go other places and pick up new languages, but now she´ll happily stay so that she doesn't have to switch cultures again and learn ¨yet another new language¨. Wow. She also felt a little overwhelmed by the conference, as many of the topics aren't her field of time series and thus were of little interest or meaning to her.
Everyone seems to agree that it´s a worthwhile conference, though, and the people here are certainly intelligent. It is sooo refreshing that English is the only common language to everyone here and so they have to communicate so I can understand, hehe! It´s also nice to have people who are larger than me (I´m a few heads taller and a few sizes wider than the Spaniards) and who have much more fascinating but similar experiences to me in upbringing, education, and travel.
Here are the
pictures that show more of his poster session. Click on the first photo and scroll through each one with the arrow below. My explanations are top right on your screen.
Adios!
