Sunday, October 21, 2007

From Montreal after the first workday

Hello there,
I'm writting very early in the morning while Mariana takes her bath. It is sunday morning and the OOPSLA conference starts today. We've been in Montreal for 2 days already and the city is very friendly. Distances between things are quite big although it is not even nearly as crowded as Sao Paulo. Friday we walked a lot and saw the UQAM university and a very nice park filled with squirells. We spent the evening with our hosts chatting, eating and drinking. They cooked a very nice "Fondue chinoise" which has nothing from China from what they told us and we gave them their gifts. Yesterday (Saturday) they took us for a car ride in the city where we could see the Formula 1 circuit and quite some parts of the city.
In the afternoon, we had a very good vietnamese sandwich in the best vietnamese sandwich maker in town according to Vincent. And then, from 15h to 19h, we started our work at OOPSLA at the registration booth with Eduardo, a Brazilian that lives in Waterloo (since 1999), Diana, a local girl that studies at Mcgill university and Bernardo (I guess), a Mexican PhD student. It was pretty cool since there were not so many registration but we could register Dick Gabriel, Linda Rising and Martin Fowler. Dick took some very embarrasing photos of Mariana while she was eating our excelent vietnamese sandwich. I will have to ask for them later. :)
We left after that with a couple of Mexican students from Monterey University (Juan and Ramiro) and other Brazilians (friends of Eduardo, also known as Dudu) and a polish PhD student from Waterloo called Mihau (don't know if this is correctly spelled). We went to a nice classical bar called Saint Sulpice which is in Rue Saint-Denis. That's an amazing thing about the city, all bars areas are close to the biggest unversity. Rue Saint-Denis is close to UQAM (Université de Québec À Montréal) and there are other streets filled with bars close to the McGill university and another close to Columbia.
We left the bar around 23:30 and went to sleep just arriving at home. I'll continue for today later on. This is only for now but I'll update more later.

Bye bye

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