Ingrid_dragged_me_here.sg

Sentosa

Singapore Botanic Gardens

Spectacular Hong Kong

Dinner for Keynote and Plenary Lecturers

On Thursday, I presented an "invited keynote lecture" in this beautiful and large auditorium. It probably holds 1000 people. There may have been 200-250 in attendance (pretty good, even though visually sparse). I worked hard during the past few weeks to prepare a good lecture and I felt that it went well.

In all, there were 20 keynote lectures (all "mini reviews" of major indoor air topics) and another ten plenary lectures. On Thursday evening, we were all hosted at a dinner in Kowloon, at a restaurant called Towngas Avenue.

Among the attendees were Professor Yi Jiang (L), a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (very distinguished!) and Glenn Morrison (R), one of my former students who is now the president of ISIAQ.

Also attending were Professor Qingyan Chen (L), who is a distinguished professor both in China and at Purdue University, Professor Richard Corsi (M), who chairs the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering at UT Austin, and Prof Pawel Wargocki, from DTU, who is the former president of ISIAQ.

Ingrid sat next to Prof Frank Lee from Hong Kong Polytechnic University. (He studied at Berkeley and took an air pollution class from me). Across from her is Prof Kirk Smith, a highly distinguished scholar for his work on household air pollution from biomass cookstoves.

We celebrated the birthday of Prof Jan Sundell (purple t-shirt), who is currently working at Tsinghua University in China.

The meal was quite nice, including this lovely dessert.

It's a small restaurant, so the 40 of us occupied the whole place.

It was a beautiful evening in Hong Kong, with great views of the city lights!

Dinner in Kowloon

We've been in Hong Kong for four days now and have enjoyed two hosted dinners in Kowloon, which is a short ferry ride north of the island of Hong Kong, where we are staying.

The sunset views of Hong Kong from across the harbor are wonderful.

The first dinner was traditional Cantonese. Twelve courses, either vegetarian (as Ingrid chose) or omnivore (my choice). The strangest dish on the non-vegetarian side was a whelk, "a predatory marine mollusc with a heavy pointed spiral shell, some kinds of which are edible." This one was hosted by the President of the Conference for the board members of the International Society of Indoor Air Quality and Climate

The second dinner was on the date of our anniversary (36 wonderful years). It was hosted by the program manager of the Sloan Foundation's program on the microbiology of the built environment. There were about 25 of us seated at one long banquet table. They took our orders a la carte! We were on the 28th story in a long slender private room with nice views overlooking Kowloon.