I’m back in the USA for the first time since early March in 2006. I flew into Seattle from Tokyo on Saturday August 5th, 2006. The flight left at about 6pm in Tokyo on Saturday, and arrived in Seattle at about 9am on Saturday. Unfortunately I don’t usually sleep well on airplanes, and didn’t get much sleep at all on the flight over.

Professor Kando was meeting a friend of hers from Singapore who has been living in Seattle for the past few years for lunch, and invited me along. The plan was to go to the best pizzaria in Seattle. We had a bit of a tough time reaching the place due to traffic, since it was SeaFair (some sort of Seattle festival type thing) and some parades shut down the roads to the place. As we drew closer to the place, I became more and more sure that we were going to Tutta Bella Pizza, also said to be the best pizza in Seattle by the Weaver family. So it has been confirmed by two independant sources, the best pizza in Seattle.

The next day I woke up and had the complimentary breakfast at the hotel. The star of the meal was the waffle in one of those rotating auto-timer waffle irons, just like back in the dorms at SMU. Actually, I was really full after that breakfast, and decided to walk to the University of Washington to register for the conference. I got a map from the hotel desk, and struck out for campus. I didn’t know how the map or I was oriented though, and walked for about fifteen minutes in one direction before realizing that I went the wrong way. I went back to the hotel, and tried another direction. About fifteen minutes walking on a nice biking path, I realized that was the wrong direction as well, and turned around. I got it right the last time, and made it to the conference site. After registering for the conference I walked back to the hotel (about half an hour when you know the way) and collapsed on the bed for a few hours before the reception. I also met with Professor Kando briefly and gave a practice talk. I received a lot of good feedback, and a list of changes to make to my slides.

In the evening we took busses to the Boeing Future of Flight center for the welcoming reception. It was really nice. I met many people, and by the time we made it back to the hotel, where I was not tired at all. I stayed up maybe until 5am or something stupid like that.

The first day of the conference was just terrible. I was ready to go to bed at about 3pm, and had a really tough time following the talks. I decided to skip the poster session, went back to the hotel, and fell asleep for about four hours. I then got up and spent four hours working on my slides. I’ll do slide review with Inoue-san from NII today, and probably work on them some more tonight and tomorrow as well.

Since I got a full six hours + 4 hours of sleep yesterday, I hope that the worst of the jet-lag is over. It has been horrible though. It doesn’t seem to be as bad when I go to Japan, but we’ll see what happens on the way back.