Conference in Pittsburgh - Day 3 (25th November 2013)

Decided to get out today since I needed to head to Macy's to get a pair of gloves before my fingers started to drop off one by one. And since Macy's opened at 10am, I woke up at 5am as usual but only left the hotel at about 8:45am. I reached Macy's at about 9am and made use of the hour to walk around teh surrounding few streets, taking photographs of the old government buildings in the process. There was also a CVS Pharmacy nearby and I popped in to get some candy canes and some gun magazines that I would never be able to purchase in Singapore. Soon, Macy's was open and I quickly went in to get a pair of gloves. In the end, I settled for a thin pair of gloves made with the 3M Thinsulate material. My fingers were still cold even with the gloves on, but at least it wasn't freezing cold anymore and I could use my phone and iPad with the gloves on.

After getting the gloves, I quickly headed towards the convention center and since it was the break time of the conference, I popped into a nearby cafe for a hearty breakfast. The cafe, Hanlon's cafe, is an old-school american diner, complete with the famous red sofas and bar counter that you often see in movies and TV shows of american diners. Breakfast was a big meal filled with three sunny-side-up eggs, hashbrowns, three sausages, two english muffins and two pancakes with butter and syrup, plus an additional mug of hot chocolate. It was really filling and I was so happy to be able to have authentic american breakfast finally, this being my second time in america but the first time in having an american breakfast here. The staff was really friendly and the food really delicious and filling.

After breakfast, it was time to enter the conference hall, where I sat in the room that was giving presentations on droplet impacts. As usual, most of the conference presentations were pretty abstract and required a high level of understanding. And as such, I learnt more from the photographs and tables presented than from what the presenters said.

Since I had such a hearty breakfast, I skipped lunch and spent the time wandering around in the main hall. It was rather interesting to watch the video submissions for the Gallery of Fluid Dynamics competition and also the other posters pinned up. There were many interesting phenomena being presented and I did learn quite a fair bit from the videos and posters.

After lunch, it was back to the usual presentations, which continued all the way from 1:20pm to 5:20pm. After the presentations were done, I left the conference hall alone and made my way around the shopping district. I had wanted to buy some stuff for my friends back home and so I popped by Pittsburgh Popcorn Company where I bought a huge amount of popcorn. I also headed to Radioshack in order to get a replacement USB cable for my portable charger.

Dinner was a simple affair at Market Street, where I had my dinner at a diner called Prismati Bros. It offers sandwiches only but the hype about this diner chain is that their sandwiches contain fries and coleslaw too! With all these stuffings, the sandwiches were rather huge at about 4inches thick and took up an area about the size of both of my hands combined. It was so huge that I actually could not finish the entire sandwich and had to leave behind some coleslaw and fries that spilled out. And yet again, I had another cup of hot chocolate.

After dinner, while carrying the bags of popcorn, I actually took a wrong turn while walking towards my hotel and started to walk further and further away. Just when I realised that I was in the wrong direction, I saw a huge christmas tree nearby and to my surprise, there was a skating rink around that huge christmas tree! It was rather surreal and I was really amazed and kind of overwhelmed by the entire sight. It felt like one of those christmas scenes that I often watch on TV, where there are many skaters skating around a christmas tree while snow slowly falls to the ground. After taking some photographs and checking google maps on my phone, I headed towards my hotel. It took about 30 minutes for me to finally reach the warm and cosy hotel room.