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Letter from Boston

Conference in the Big Easy

By MASAKO YAMADA


ビッグ・イージーの会議

今週は、研究室の教授が講義を行なう大きな学会に参加するため、ルイジアナ州ニューオーリンズを訪問中の雅子さん。5日間の学会が始まる前に、一晩だけ観光客気分で街に出ました。バーでカクテルを飲み、大好きなカキも食べ、大満足です。

One of the nice things about working in Gene Stanley's group is that even relatively inexperienced graduate students are given the opportunity to go to conferences and to engage in international collaborations. My adviser is a big believer in exchanging information, as his busy travel schedule shows.

So, I'm now in New Orleans a k a The Big Easy, to attend the national meeting of the American Chemical Society. This is a huge conference involving over 10,000 participants. The conference is supposedly aimed at chemists, but the boundaries between scientific disciplines are fuzzy, so many physicists, including my adviser, are lecturers. I am not giving a talk or presenting a paper, but I am here to learn from the lectures on water that are being given all day every day during the five-day event.

I've never been to the South, barring a couple of trips to touristy bits of Florida, so I have been looking forward to the conference as a cultural trip, as well as an academic one. Since I have only been here a day, the most striking difference I've noticed between New Orleans and Boston is the weather (hot!) and in visual details, such as the architecture and the flora.

Many of the private houses around my bed-and-breakfast have beautiful columns in front of them. These are not the heavy, marble columns that I'm used to seeing in front of university libraries and museums. These columns are skinny. Some are made of plain wood, some are made of simple metal pipes and some are intricately wrought cast iron. True to Southern stereotype, most of these houses have porches, both on the ground floor and the second floor. These houses, along with the tropical flowers and palm trees, make a striking scene.

My full schedule of lectures begins early tomorrow morning, so I decided to visit the tourist mecca of Bourbon Street this evening. Bourbon Street is closed off to traffic in the evening, so there were packs of people on the street. I'm sure it was unusually dense today because of the fun-loving chemists (!?) from out of town.

Bourbon Street was a mix of touristy bars, touristy T-shirt shops and touristy XXX clubs. The shops worked hard at attracting the tourists with neon signs saying "No Cover" or sticking menus in the faces of passersby.

Perhaps because of the hot weather, the most popular drink on the street seemed to be the frozen margarita. Many bars were little more than take-out stands with long rows of huge, rotating blenders filled with rainbow-colored slushy drinks. Most flavors had interesting names, such as "Hurricane" and "Hand Grenade."

I decided to forgo the red, blue, green and orange drinks, and chose a relatively tame frozen "White Russian." Some of the people bought their drinks in "yards," 12-inch-long glasses shaped like aliens or rockets. My drink was in a plastic cup that I could take out onto the street. Public drinking is a no-no in Boston, but all the pedestrians on Bourbon Street seemed to be carrying a drink.

Although it's technically not oyster season, I couldn't resist getting some famous raw oysters. I went to the cheapest place: at $5 (¥550) a dozen, the price was reasonable by any standard. I could tell that the place was aimed at tourists since the band started off with a hearty "Welcome to New Orleans!!" but I had a great time. I sat at the bar and watched the oyster shucker.

Oyster shucking is not glamorous work, but whenever he noticed passersby watching him from the large showcase window, he swung his knife around like a sword and did a little oyster dance, and showed off the oyster meat. When he noticed me fumbling at the condiment bar, he ran over, quickly mixed some sauce and horseradish, plopped the cup on top of my plastic plate of oysters, and threw a handful of crackers (wrapped in plastic) and lemon slices on top of the whole thing. It was pretty rough treatment, but I think he enjoyed playing games with ignorant tourists. The oysters were delicious.

I enjoyed the energy and the kitsch of Bourbon Street, but there wasn't much else to do besides go to bars, so I went back to my b&b after a couple of hours. Besides, I remembered the real reason for my trip.


Shukan ST: Sept. 3, 1999

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