On the plane, going home :'(

I am on the plane on my way home from Amsterdam now. I am going to write this and then pass out (perhaps with the assistance of some gravol), so I can get back into the right sleep patterns for Eastern Standard Time.

The rest of the conference went well and was very interesting. There was one paper on video game adaptations that was especially astute. The author argued that the abiliy of the user in "World of Warcraft" to film, edit and replay the player's actions within the game functions as a sort of adaptation from video game to film. Very interesting! I never realized how up and coming video game studies are. Or how interesting they can be!

We decided to go out last night to a club called Paradiso, which was converted from an old church. The D.J set his equiptment up where the altar would have been. Iconoclastic, nice! Moral of this story: I am too old for clubbing. Jenna and I spent 18 euro on cover, and we ended up leaving early and sitting on a patio near a canal and talking about life. Much better than the club!

We also had dinner at a very nice restaurant to commemorate our last night here. It was in the Red Light District, which I thought was unusual, since the area is not know for it's food... I found it especially unusual since we had to walk down a dark, graffittied alley to get to it. When we arrived at the door, three men in suits, presumably restaurant patrons, though we'll never know for sure, said "Hello, ladies," increasing our trepidation about entering. There was a blue curtain shielding the door which we had to pass through to enter. It you know anything about the cultural significance of architectural apertures and curtains in Amsterdam, you'll understand why our trepidation was increased further at this point. Jenna, being a braver soul than I, walked through the curtain first and I followed. The restaurant was beautiful. Haha, you thought that was going somewhere else didn't you? Nope. Just a nice restaurant.

We were seated immediately and provided with menus. Jenna had found this place in her guide book but did not check to see what the symbol €€€€€ meant. It turns out that all restaurants in the book are rated for price out of a possible 5 €, and this one was at the top. The waiter returned after we almost had a coronary upon seeing the menu, and provided us with a narrative for each of the entrees, telling us how the meat had been raised, how the dish would be seasoned, even down to the plating. All of it was explained. I thought about how interesting it is that when you inscribe something with a narrative, it automatically gains more cultural value than it initially had. (I'm not a literary scholar or anything, pfft....). The food was delicious and the wine was the best I've ever had. Although the dinner was (very) costly, the experience was worth the price. The chef even has a michelin star, which is apparently a very big deal in the culinary world. It's almost like winning a Fulbright Award, but for a chef!

I guess it's out of the world of fancy dinners and interesting conferences and back to the world of OGS and SSHRC...