gan 7 - Ants Marching

[gan]

Greetings from Dubai where I am 6hrs in to an 8hr layover. Ugh.

Not much to report from the week. GAL score = average (2 x yoga + trivia with colleagues). Looks like work will be sending me to Canada at the end of August. Also a really promising post-grad dropped out of the sky during the week to ask if I would support her post-doc scholarship thingy. It will be really good if she gets it! No, Jim I’ve not yet got the titles for those papers yet – they are a ways off given where we are at in the research.

Still trying to wrap my head around the flight just past. I sat next to a guy who works at another university to me (different discipline). After exchanging pleasantries we chatted a while, then a bit longer, then pretty much the whole flight actually except a couple of movies and nap here and there. It’s a 14 hr flight, people! At one point I noticed him looking at my hand to see if I was wearing a ring…then eventually he referred to the fact that I wasn’t. By this point I’d noticed that he *was* wearing a ring and eventually he talked about his wife and kids. Seems happily married enough. Eventually I got into a little of my story. But there were plenty of references to me being pretty, romantic gestures, and stuff I wouldn’t usually discuss with total strangers. He asked what I was going to do with my long layover and then pointed out there was a hotel in the airport (!?) Later I asked what he was going to do with his layover, to which he responded he was going to ask me for coffee. So we grabbed a drink in Dubai and went our separate ways. I am so out of the whole dating/romance thing I really couldn’t tell if this was a benign conversation or not. Certainly it’s not my usual long haul experience! Did I mention he was French?

And of course…no word from H.