I am at the University of Warwick in a dorm called "Bluebell." U Warwick is in Coventry, sort of. Mostly it is outside the city by 4 miles and there are trees and countryside surrounding the sprawling campus.
Observations:
1. Unlike London, there are no food shops inside or outside the station. It left me no option but to trust that there would be something to eat at the other end on the campus.
2. It is incredibly easy to identify the other people on their way to the IFTR conference. Because they are the gawky Europeans with sheaves of papers who keep asking the bus driver the same question every two minutes. They laugh when the bus's jolting knocks them around and over their rollaboard suitcases.
3. It seems that IFTR is sharing the campus with a national teen football (meaning soccer) camp this week. Our registration did not involve a queue of parents and teenage boys snaking all the way around the center hall of the student union in a spiral. Thank goodness.
4. I met a Finn. We were looking for the bus at the same time and ended up walking together from the wrong bus stop (with the right bus declaring "via Univ of Watwick" on its destination) to the right bus stop, then ran into each other again getting off the bus (also with the aforementioned French people who, by virtue of having a working smart phone, I ended up leading in a sort of ragtag procession from the bus at the correct stop then into the registration building). Then again I saw him at conference (as opposed to accommodation) registration, so that by the time he walked out of the balcony of the campus pub where I was waiting for my dinner, it seemed the time to say, hello, why don't you sit down here. I did that, then almost immediately realised how complicated this would be: he turned out to be Finnish, and although we had made eye contact with each other innumerable times over the previous hour and even spoke, he lived up to our joking notions of the Finns as incredibly taciturn. It was awkward, even if we were disposed to be friendly. Frankly I could mostly not even hear him when he did speak, which slowed down our conversations considerably. He seemed to warm up a bit over time, but I did feel a bit angsty about having forced both of us to make friendly for so long and I excused myself with my unwritten conference paper as the reason when I'd finished eating. Oh Finns!
5. There is much much more, but not now.
