Conference Outfits

The one bonus of being a guest at a conference is being able to wear a lot of nice clothes, without the stress of presenting a poster or giving a talk.  My boyfriend was nice enough to get me in to the mixer at the Wave House, and for the speaker's dinner at Casa Guadalajara, and I have also been able to check out some talks of previous supervisors and big names in the capillary chromatography field.

Here is my outfit I wore for the Wave House. 

Dress: FCUK
Necklace: J.Crew
Watch: Gucci
Bracelets: Charlotte Russe
Shoes: Stuart Weitzman

Unknown to me before I got there, the floor is mostly sand, so I ended up walking around barefoot and carrying my heels instead. The sand felt great though (and I ignored the fact that there was probably tons of spilled alcohol and other germs in the sand).

For the speaker's dinner and for attending talks, I decided to go with an outfit a little more business style.

Blazer: JCPenny
Blouse: H&M
Tank Top: Abercrombie and Fitch
Skirt: Talula line at Aritzia
Sunglasses: Coach
Shoes: J.Crew black ballet flats (though you can't see them in this image).

The speaker's dinner was pretty great.  They even handed you a lime margarita on the rocks as soon as you walked in the door!  The mexican food was pretty good, which is what I expected considering how close San Diego is to the Mexico border.

I have decided to do the Anthroholic Shopping Ban Challenge, so I will not be adding any new clothes to my wardrobe for the remainder of May.  Hopefully I will have enough conference clothes for the CSC conference in Montreal (where I will actually be attending the conference as a scientist, not just a guest!).  If not, there's always the beginning of June!  My income is a bit lower this month due to this San Diego trip and Montreal coming up, so hopefully this will help my bank account out a bit.

San Diego!

I have finally found an internet connection I don't have to pay $10 a day for!  As you can tell from the title of this post, I am currently in San Diego.  My boyfriend is presenting at a chemistry conference here, and I decided to tag along because flights with Southwest are super cheap (~$150 round trip) and the hotel stay is covered by a travel grant.  $150 for a 5 day vacation is super awesome, especially because my boss is also at this conference and gave me the okay to be here.

We arrived on Saturday and spent the evening at the hotel pub watching the Vancouver vs Nashville playoff game.  It was a long game (2 overtimes!) and although Vancouver didn't win I'm sure they'll do great at game 3 tonight.  Luongo made a ridiculous amount of saves, so the loss can't be pinned on him.  Anyways, that's enough about hockey.

On Sunday we decided to check out Sea World since the conference didn't start until the late afternoon and I have wanted to go ever since I moved to California.  We arrived at 10am when the park opened, and it was so quiet!  We got to enjoy a lot of the aquariums before the crowds came, and even got to ride on the rapids ride by ourselves!  We also found a great place for lunch: Seaport Marketplace.  It offered some great reasonably priced sandwiches and salads and a large selection of beer.  If you're ever at Sea World in San Diego, I highly recommend it.  We checked out the Believe show (which I found a bit pretentious and didn't have nearly enough whale tricks) and the Sea Lions Live show, which was really cute.  We had a great time, but I ended up with a horrible sunburn on my shoulders (lesson learned: wear a cover up instead of a Lululemon Push UR Limits tank to Sea World).  

Update: I found a stable internet connection outside of the conference center.  Here are some photos from my Sea World adventures: 

Feeding the sea lions.  The birds around this area were very aggressive!

A random encounter with Bert and Ernie.

Photo from the Sea Lions Live show.  They were very talented.

Photo from the Believe show.  Never enough whale tricks.