Niagara

[shermarama]

Conference over, and I'm writing this on a New York Trailways (not Greyhound) bus back to New York. Top tip if you're travelling round here by land; go by train instead. The train was $55, had a reasonable snack car and vastly roomy seats, and the bus was only a bit less at $44 and is somewhat cramped and overheated. And the only food is what you can pick up quickly during the rest stops, so we just had McDonalds for tea. 

 

I think the conference went fairly well. I was glad to get my presentation out of the way on Monday, and after that it was a case of rediscovering the art of sitting there for hours on end, half-listening to everything and properly listening when anything good came past. Good things included someone talking about very practical design work being done at the PSA in Almeria, and a fluorescent dye that can be simultaneously broken down and excited by UV light. The emission wavelength is somewhere 300nm away in the red, so you can look for a red emission without any interference from the excitation source or even a coloured substrate. Nifty. 

 

On the social side, I got recognised straight away by someone from the UK SPC network who's in Aberdeen, and she's Irish, and somehow we picked up another Irish girl and a Mexican from Germany, and that formed the basis of a bunch of people to sit in the bar and get drunk with. The hotel was directly across the street from the conference centre (even if its name is The Conference Center, and I'm getting into the swing of referring to rest rooms, and pints that are only 16 floz, and ramp meaning multi-storey car park and all the rest of it, I'm going to spell that right) and the hotel's bar was also the restaurant, and also where several locals seemed to go to watch the football on giant screens, so a bit less grim than your average hotel bar. I had a burger there one night that claimed to have blue cheese in it; having seen the dire selection of rubbery cheese-style-foods available everywhere else, I wasn't optimistic, but it genuinely did have real blue cheese in it and that was good. There must be some Canadian influence stealing over the border after all. Chris went to Toronto for a couple of days and reported many cheese shops, as well as a good market, lots of fabric shops, four proper ale breweries and many other civilised things. 

 

Niagara Falls itself was, to put it mildly, tacky. There's nothing of any real note to the towns, on either side of the bridge. Another top tip if you're travelling round there; it's free to take the footbridge to the Canadian side, but you have to pay 50 cents to get back to the USA. Bastards. It doesn't matter that all the amenities are tacky, however, because there's this big spectacular waterfall there to look at. We got soaked in several different ways, including going to walkways alongside all three parts of the falls and going right up the front on the Maid of the Mist. If I could fit it in four words I'd add 'paying money to get soaked in cold water' to my interests list. We spent quite a lot of Thursday afternoon wandering round in the disposable sandals they give you, disposable bright yellow plastic macs and trousers rolled up to our knees, feeling like proper British tourists having a bracing seaside holiday.

 

The other tacky thing we did while there was go to the Seneca Niagara Casino. Now, if I've got this straight, you're allowed to run a casino on Native American land because they have sovereignty there and so normal gambling laws don't apply. There are other laws which don't apply there, and it was quite weird to be back somewhere indoors where smoking is allowed. We had gone for an excellent steak dinner at a restaurant upstairs (with chunky great steak knives that Crocodile Dundee would have been happy with) and wandered down to the casino thinking it would be fun to effectively stick a quarter in something, pull the big arm and see what happened. Oh, what innocents we are... First, you can't put anything less than $5 in the machines, which foxed us for a while because we were only trying to play the 1c stake machines and surely that means sitting there forever? Well, no, because you can cash out at any time, and that means you get a ticket with bar code on it to represent your credit, which you can then stick in another slot machine or a thing that gives you real cash back, and anyway it's quite hard work to spend only one cent at a time. You can pick multiple lines across the reels, most of which aren't straight lines, which with up to five reels means up to thirty possible lines (or more usually twenty on the four-reel ones) looking like a tube map overlaid on the reels, and then you can bet more than one of your stake units on each line. Some of the machines didn't even have an option to bet only one unit on one line, and generally the default unless you'd worked it out was to spend 200 units per spin of the reels, which is two dollars on the 1c machines and fifty dollars on the 25c machines. Which is quite a lot of money to be spending on one press of a button on a machine that says its stakes are 25 cents. We pottered around feeling like idiiots, anyway, finding some half-cent machines that were more like our level, and some old school machines with three actual physical reels, and a vaguely interesting one that had a five by five grid of tiles rather than reels, but really, without getting into the proper table games which were $10 minimum stake, all the acres of minimally-different slot machines seemed pretty boring. And a way to spend much more money than you were realising for the privilege of being bored. Everyone sat there with their loyalty cards tied between machine and belt with a plastic spiral thing, hitting max bet every time without apparently stopping except perhaps to light up another cigarette, looked pretty bored. Hmm.

 

 

 

 

Comments

[tenthmedieval.wordpress.com (from livejournal.com)]

And a way to spend much more money than you were realising for the privilege of being bored. Everyone sat there with their loyalty cards tied between machine and belt with a plastic spiral thing, hitting max bet every time without apparently stopping except perhaps to light up another cigarette, looked pretty bored. Hmm.

Have you ever played Solitaire on a Windows machine, to Vegas rules, clicking 'deal again' over and over until the money evens out? And then some more? Or is it just a habit that I'm rediscovering when there are lectures to be written?