July 7, 2009

Got up at 6, showered, ironed and looked at my lecture materials. Mark and I met for breakfast at 6:40, but it wasn’t open until 7…when we were supposed to leave. Our driver waited and we ate anyway. This did not put us behind, since we were the first to arrive by a solid 20 minutes. This was not surprising for the day after a holiday.

It was a good sized class. We have about 30 students. The morning lectures went fine. Both Mark and I talk fast, and we are understanding about 75% of what is said to us, so we need to be careful to speak slowly so we can be understood. It is kind of funny to have a language barrier but not be able to blame it on the language. Everyone speaks English as their first language, but Caribbean vs American dialects are about as distinct as English can be. One of the IT guys joked that we should get a translator to go from our English to real English.

I was looking forward to the workshop in the afternoon. The first workshop tends to be when the class bonds and the course picks up momentum. Things started out fine. The students seemed to be getting it. But then one step in the middle of the workshop simply didn’t work on ~1/3rd of the machines. It was a lab permissions issue. It turns out the same caution that kept the lab nice was preventing a third of our students from doing using the software. Because it wasn’t our program, we were not very successful at trouble shooting the problem. Not a good start. This turned out to be because several of the computers were on a domain server, whatever that means, and was eventually fixed by the IT guy.

After the class, several of the University students took us to their research watershed. They showed us what data they are collecting and asked if there was a way they could use it to compute a ‘runoff coefficient.’ After significant discussion, we decided that it was likely that they could use our software to get at the losses they were interested in but that the analytical approach would probably not work.

Then our driver took us back to the hotel, we did some e-mail and then headed out exploring. We walked 4 or 5 blocks to a place called Buddy’s that had been recommended. But that was closer than we had thought, so we looped around several blocks before dinner. It was dark by the time we finished. Walking through the residential neighborhoods did not seem threatening. The main thing I worried about was not getting hit by cars. There were no sidewalks on most of the roads.

Buddy’s turned out to be a Chinese restaurant. While the two major ethnic groups here are of African and South Asian (Indian) descent there apparently was a substantial Chinese immigration to work the cane fields at one point. So there are many Chinese restaurants. The undisputed highlight of this meal was the egg rolls. Both Mark and I ordered shrimp egg rolls. When they came out, we realized the description was much more literal than we had expected.

They were essentially little shrimp omelets.

I got a seafood pineapple, which is exactly what it sounds like, and Mark got the house lo mein. This reopened my little conundrum about how lo mein on the east coast is called chow mein on the west coast. Apparently Guyana fits more with its east coast location.

We got home around 8:30 and did the next workshop, then went to our respective rooms to prep our lectures. Around 10, there was a knock on the door. It was Mark who proposed we restructure the next day and a half of class. I agreed and continued to prep until 11:30. At 11:30 I got online to leave my wife a little facebook note, but found her online, so we IM’d for about 45 minutes.