Tuesday, May 9, 2006

This morning we tried to be more constructive in our outings. Today we visited the Indianapolis Zoo. It is a pretty nice zoo. They have an underwater dolphin viewing room.


They also had a mini island full of crazy lemurs. The one is pointing because some fool on the shore is feeding them pretzel. It wasn’t us.




After the zoo we went over to the adjoining gardens. They were beautiful. The first place you start out is the butterfly room. (see above)

Butterflies of every kind were gracefully flying around the room. If you were lucky enough (Bobby and I) and still enough, sometimes the butterflies would land on you. They also had hatcheries in the room where you could see butterflies and moths hatch and dry their wings. It was very cool.


We took several other pictures in the gardens outdoors as well.

At last we waiting for the free city bus to pick us up and take us back to the hotel. We were tired, o.k. I was tired.

Opening Ceremony

The opening ceremony was loud as always. They had a new wave jazz combo with an electric midi violin. They also had an African drum band as well and dancers of all sorts.

As always, one of the favorite parts of the program is the “shout out” from all of the countries (47) who participated. Representatives from each country get to do a video “hello” which they show to all and then they get to amass on stage with their signs. I tried to get a picture, but it’s kind of dark .



The keynote speaker of the opening ceremony was Dr. Mireya Mayor who is a correspondent on the National Geographic series “Ultimate Explorer”. She talked about how she got from where she was, Miami Dolphins Cheerleader” (no joke) to having a doctorate in primatology. Her main focus has been in Madagascar where lemurs are from and her group is credited with finding the smallest primate (a lemur of course) in Madagascar. The lemur is about the size of a small rat and is very cute. She worked with the government of Madagascar to create more area in Madagascar as a National Park to help prevent the extinction of this animal as well as other wildlife found only there.

Monday, May 8, 2006

We got up pretty early, had breakfast and headed out to explore Indianapolis. From outside our hotel room, we could see the Indiana State capitol.



Then we trekked of to the mall, which is attached to the hotel through the convention center in a series of rat mazes. We decided to go outside. It was very nice today; warm low 70’s.







The dinner that night started at 3:30 P.M. (that is 2:30 our time) so we decided to forgo lunch. The kids and Lilly had a blast trading pins with people from all over the nation and world. We found it is helpful to have a cute three year old in tow as people want to give them stuff for free all the time.

Sunday, May 7,2006

Well we arrived in Indianapolis without any problems and we actually had nice hotel rooms. We went over to the exhibit hall to set up our projects around 6:00 P.M. The first thing we noticed was Michele and Janelle’s project was flagged by SRC (meaning it could not be set up). The SRC marked their project because they were unsure how their project differed from Janelle’s project last year. SRC was helpful and we got it cleared up in less than 20 minutes.

So we went back to continue setting up and then we found when Michele L. needed to get her project approved that she also had a problem. So back down to SRC (by the way SRC headquarters were about 2 football lengths away n the convention center, I got lots of exercise) Anyway, it seems that Michelle checked the wrong box on her abstract. This is a definite mental note I will make for next year and we were going to have to wait until the following day to get an appointment with SRC. But one f the nice ladies there just simple went around one of the other lady’s back and unchecked the box and got u set back up with abstracts. She was doubly nice as she didn’t make us go all the way back to the exhibit hall to retrieve the old abstracts; she just allowed us to throw them away. Yeah!

When I got back we found that Michelle and Janelle’s wheel was severely damaged in transport. I don’t have any pictures of it to post, but needless to say it was not functional. But we found out from set-up display safety that they wouldn’t have been allowed to set it up anyway since they would have had to have Plexiglas shielding around it. This is also a mental not for any future engineering projects we send.

We about 2 and half hours after we started at the exhibit hall, we finally made it out with everyone approved. Let’s see what Monday brings.