Scintillation, day one

[landingtree]

Splitting this up into several entries since it's taking a while to write:

I set off for the dim sum gathering at the start of Scintillation by tree-lined backroads I hadn't explored before, in the sun, with a new piece of street art on every second corner. In the last two days I'd occasionally thought, "Why did I come here?" but now all my nervousness was burnt up into joy.

I'd allowed myself plenty of time to get to dim sum, assuming I knew where it was. I didn't. The mall I went into was worth seeing on its own -- a fountain of luminous orange water shooting up what my yarning memory claims was two floors, with a sort of sculptured thunderhead over the top of it -- but since it wasn't the mall the dim sum was at, and I emerged from it two streets over from where I'd gone in, I was twenty minutes late. I failed to clearly communicate with the person at the restaurant door, and sat down in a fluster at a large table which seemed likely to be one of the convention's, between two people already talking with each other, one of whom turned out to be nineweaving. There was a lot of very tasty food. Some of it was close by and a subset of that I knew how to eat with chopsticks. Still flustered, I made wooden small talk in a voice too soft to be easily heard, and lurked. This made me receding-introvert sad, as it will, but the crowd was so cheerful, and nineweaving and Jo Walton seemed so generally welcoming, that it was a sadness shot through with light. Nevertheless, by the time we'd made our way to the hotel lobby and I looked at the gathering crowd I sat down and read a book for a while. Another nice quality of Scintillation is that there seemed next to no chance anyone would mind this.

(Oh yes, I'd barely slept the night before, because my otherwise-lovely host watched tv in the lounge past midnight).

Then there was an hour or so -- I checked in, and luxuriated briefly in the contrast between my Airbnb room and my hotel room -- before the walk to the gardens. The original guide was for some reason not there, and the replacement seemed cheerful in his slight uncertainty as to what was going on. I found this relaxing. A smallish group of people accumulated by the koi pond, and we set off to discover how the metro's ticketing worked. Zippy train! Walking up from the station we had a view of an Olympic stadium which looks more impressive than any building I've ever seen in a New Zealand city, and doesn't work. We circled the greenhouses for a while, and then dispersed into the lantern gardens when they opened. I walked tiredly and happily through the twilight among glowing fishing people and giant koi.

Back to the hotel In full dark. I thanked miscellaneous gods the LARP I'd signed up to at 8 had been cancelled, even though I was disappointed when that happened. I wouldn't have had the brain just then. Instead, went to the second half of the Time Travel and Teens panel, which was fun and which I remember … let me see … almost nothing from. Drat. But Kari Maaren was on it, and the book I'd been reading in the lobby was her Weave a Circle Round, which I finished over the course of the convention and like very much. So that was nice. And afterward I bought my one permitted book from the book table, Pamela Dean's Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary.*

Then I wandered down to the reading room, where singing was programmed. There was no singing, one of the most musical people not having arrived yet, but there was a fascinating conversation about linguistics and disaster response services in progress (unless I'm conflating conversations? There were so many). And then two people I hadn't met, Esti and Jacob, were heading off to find dinner, so I joined them, thus getting further evidence for two major features of Scintillation's wonderfulness: all the food was good, and all the people were fascinating. I could probably have eaten badly if I'd really tried, Montreal must have McDonalds somewhere; finding boring people to talk with would have been harder. At the point in any given talk with strangers where one might expect to be having to hunt for another thing to say, someone would start discoursing on the history of their great study and passion, whelk genetics. Well, it was never actually whelk genetics. But it was epidemiology, tiny car racing, linguistics several times, the French fantastique tradition, anthropology of zombie belief, the Quebecois voting system from a structural engineering point of view... Such cool things! Such excitement about such cool things!

After dinner, back at the hotel, singing was actually happening, and I sat listening, gathering songs to look up later, (I started us singing Ripple, too, but it turns out my family version of that has mutated sufficiently that it's no good for trying to sing along with the Grateful Dead), and then wandered off to the bar, where epidemiology was being discussed... And then it was approaching midnight. Happily to sleep.






*_{Since the convention I have been in New York. My one permitted book policy did not survive impact with the Strand.}

Comments

[seahearth]

I must listen to the original Ripple sometime and see what it’s like. I mean, I don’t know if I care, but I still want to know.