in which Manhattan is large, and so is the ATA conference

So far I'm in favor of the Megabus, which has wifi, which distracts me from the seats being uncomfortable after four hours. I am not so much in favor of an 18-block walk with suitcase between Penn Station and Times Square at rush hour, but that's my fault for getting driving directions. It might take five minutes in a car in the middle of the night, but it takes about half an hour on foot at 6:00.

I forgot, since I haven't been to this conference in a while, that between the end of breakfast and the start of the first panel is about three hours of dead space. Unless you're a voting member (I'm not), in which case you can spend it voting for next year's officers. I wish there had been somewhere to sit down on one of the four floors of the hotel which the ATA is occupying, but there wasn't, so I merfed around in the exhibitors' hall and sat on the floor reading the program. Everything I want to go to conflicts with something else I want to go to, but it wouldn't be a conference if that didn't happen. I picked the right one for this morning, at least.

Tomorrow afternoon I'm going to sneak off and be a tourist.

who needs eardrums?

I went to a "speed networking" event, which was like speed dating only for translation. It was in a very large room with bad acoustics, so it was very very loud. But it worked, in that in half an hour I met:

An Arabic>English court interpreter
A Portuguese & Spanish>English translator
A project manager to whom I have to send a resume
An English>Spanish literary translator
A Spanish & Italian>English financial translator
An English>Greek translator who has friends looking for French>English translations
A Spanish>English technical translator currently at Kent State
A Spanish>English court interpreter
An English>Japanese internationalizer
An English>Argentinian Spanish translator
A Spanish<>English translator
An English>Japanese financial translator

(Oh, and guess what, Christine Lavin fans? There really is a phone booth on the corner of 49th and 3rd.)