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Sunday night’s dinner drink: a Gibson suitably tropicalized |
Saturday and Sunday, 3 & 4 March,
Mostly Indoors with Mathematicians
The AMS has eight “sectional meetings” per year, and this was the Spring meeting for the Western region of the country. The University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa is about two miles from Waikīkī, and I decided to walk the distance every time, to get myself in shape for the tours we’d be doing later. Since I decided to return to the room at noontime, I figure that I did about ten miles or more on Saturday. The talks I heard were excellent, and rather humbling: the speakers seemed to be amazingly well informed in amazingly many parts of our field of Arithmetic Geometry.
After the talks Saturday, Michelle had organized for the arithmetic geometers a picnic out at Ala Moana State Beach Park, another twenty-minute walk from our hotel. I got there after sunset, though Michelle had set up the picnic for a time when people could see the sight. Mark got there before me, but was shy about joining the crowd, thinking that there would be no one there that he knew. Unbeknownst to him, though, Kathryn Leonard was in attendance. I felt somewhat abashed that I had not alerted him to Kathryn’s likely presence there.
Here’s an update on guanábana. Back home in Pasadena, I bought a little can of guanábana nectar. It was awful, mostly sugar-water. Don’t even think of trying it.
Sunday we got up and had breakfast and again I walked to the university, again getting there late enough to miss the first talk or two. But I stayed through lunch, and walked with Michelle and a bunch of other mathematicians less than half my age to the Mānoa Farmers’ Market, where there are, as you’d expect, all sorts of good things for sale. I saw some soursops for sale. This is Annona muricata, closely related to the cherimoya (A. cherimoia) that you see in the supermarkets these days. But on the basis of having eaten one of each, I proclaim the soursop vastly superior. The fruit I bought was delicious, even if the pulp was so fibrous that I decided that it was best chewed for the juice and then spit out. When I found that the Spanish word for the fruit is “guanábana”, I realized that I had tasted it before, in Costa Rica. But then, I don’t have the best memory for tastes.
Although a bunch of people from the meeting were planning to get together to have dinner at a dim sum restaurant a couple of miles from our hotel, Mark and I decided to go to a restaurant within walking distance of the hotel. We chose Keo’s Thai Cuisine, right next door in the Ambassador Hotel, and were well satisfied. As usual when I’m not drinking wine, I ordered a Gibson, specifying, as one needs to do nowadays, that it should be made with gin. And it arrived wearing a parasol, much to our amusement. That’s it at the top of this page.
After our meal, we went back to our hotel, and did most of the packing necessary for our transfer to Kona, on the Big Island of Hawai‘i, Monday morning.