The Landa Kongreso: Saturday

When I was in Europe, I spent quite some time at Esperanto events. But I had never been to one in my own country... till last weekend.

My Esperantist friend and roommate Andy has been away for the summer, but we met up at the Jacksonville airport on Saturday. I took a bus there; Andy flew from Fort Lauderdale. From Jacksonville we flew to Baltimore, where Andy's dad met us and drove us to the site of Esperanto-USA's national convention, a hotel in Bethesda, Maryland, near Washington, DC.

Andy and I arrived during one of the excursions to Washington, so not a lot of people were around. We registered on-site (not much planning had gone into this trip) and hung around, waiting for people to come back. The person I most looked forward to seeing was Darcy Ross, who had started an Esperanto club at the University of Illinois around the same time that Andy and I started one at the University of Florida. I wanted to know the secret to her success; while our club had virtually no members, Darcy had brought some of her many club members to the convention for the second year in a row.

Fortunately for Andy, there was a piano in the hotel, so we spent a lot of time hanging around there as Andy played. Some other Esperantists who were milling around conversed with us. I had seen in the program that there was an "official" cafe that was giving a discount to convention participants, so Andy and I decided to check it out. It was a Caribou Coffee located a short walk down the street from the hotel. It seemed exactly like a Starbucks, except it was decorated more like a lodge and less like a generic coffee place.

A little while later, it was getting to be dinnertime. Andy and I decided not to go to the banquet, which would have cost us around $40 per plate. Instead, we went to dinner with Andy's dad and his dad's friends, who lived nearby and let us stay at their house. We ended up having dinner at a Lebanese restaurant that was a short distance away from the hotel. By the time we were ready to leave the restaurant, it was getting late, but Andy and I decided to go back to the hotel instead of going to the house where we had planned on staying.

At the hotel, we finally met the famous Darcy Ross, who was very surprised to see us there. (To be fair, I was surprised to see us there too, since we had decided to go less than two weeks before.) Darcy had her friends from her Esperanto club with her—we called them her sheep—and there were a few people from other universities as well. They all (including Andy) wanted to go out to a club, and I, having woken up very early that morning, didn't. So they went out, and they let me sleep on the floor in one of their hotel rooms.

Stay tuned for the rest, because it gets more interesting.

One of those lists again: the Top 5 Unluckiest People Who Ever Lived. (Via The Presurfer)

This may be a repost, but I like it. Book-A-Minute is a collection of extremely condensed versions of classic books.

You know how you always hear about people who are in the hospital in critical condition or stable condition or something like that? They just expect you to know what each one means. Wikipedia explains the whole scale of medical states.