Having an early morning tutorial session (or anything for that matter, as long as it’s useful) is a good thing - atleast it made me wake up way before my normal rise time. Days Inn taught me, again, that judging a book by cover wasn’t right. From previous stays at similarly named hotels (i.e., Inn), I had assumed that this one too would provide its guests with breakfast - Right and Wrong — these do provide it but charge a hefty amount for things that I cannot eat (can’t blame anyone else for it, though). I found just enough time to find another good place to eat, take some pictures and run to the Spintronics Tutorial. Unlike last years’ four semi-boring ones, this years’ three were well planned, topics properly organized so that even a first timer like me had something to take home! First one gave a broad overview of the field, dealing generally with what and why type of questions and specifically with biological applications. Latter two built up on the first tutorial and dealt mostly with mathematical formulations, etc. In a nutshell, getting up early on a Sunday morning turned out to be very fruitful.

Next couple hours were spent walking around different downtown streets, talking to a Downtown Safety Guard (Trinidad-born American) and serveral other police officers about taking pictures (I didn’t want to piss off anybody and more importantly, didn’t want to be questioned). So, every picture posted here were taken with prior permission. Next thing on my mind, quite naturally, was to get something to eat - having little energy or motivation to search for another desi hotel, I had some pretty good Thai food in an Inner Harbor food court. Walking along and taking more pictures, I found myself at the top of Federal Hill, a place that offers very nice (though cloudy/hazy weather played spoilsport) view of downtown area. With no apriori information, I had worn a greenish shirt and it coincided with 50th anniversary celebrations of St. Patrick’s Day Parade (for those of you who don’t know what St. Patrick’s Day is — for those who don’t drink to get drunk, it’s an Irish tradition honoring St. Patrick for driving all snakes away from an island; people dress up, for reasons unknown to me, in green. For those who do do that, it’s just another Friday with a valid reason to get drunk ) The parade was about three hours long - once it became a bit monotonous, I went for a Water Taxi ride in the Inner Harbor for about 45 minutes and returned to watch the remainder of the parade. This was a neat opportunity for me to interact with fellow APSites (some from England and some from within US), some pro-photographers, and Mr. Tracy (person who paid a dollar when I thought I ran out of cash at Smoothie corner - particularly embarassing because I found lot more $$$ with me, just in a different invisible section of my vallet), with yours-truly being the beneficiary of all such interactions.

It’s a bit surprising for me to see the flowers along the sidewalks and skywalks around this time of the year, and some of them were very pretty. Hunger reminded and brought me back to reality as I was lost in appreciating those intricate flowers and trying to digitally capure some of them, via my recently-bought powerful macro lenses & filters. Following the driving directions while walking wasn’t fun, for the second consecutive day - I went around a block or two, to realize that my destination was just few steps away. Food at the restaurant (Banjara, 1017, S Charles St.) was good and so were the people running the show. Anil, Uma, Mani (Bharadwaj) and Arathi joined soon and dinner discussions spanned a wide area. I thought of, upon returning to Days Inn, editing (post-processing) my pictures and uploading them to dirac (so named with a hope that it will work well quietly), my server, but long walks through out the day (close to 10 miles) just let me do one last thing — yeah, you guessed it right — sleep, and sleep well