annapolis - 23.280907

setting foot on us soil, always a pleasure ... i forgot to fill in the last part of the visiting card, which the fingerprint & webcampicture official pointed out friendly, so i ask 'do you have a pen', 'yes' ... point ... silence ... so i go 'can i use it' pointing to the missing part, 'next time, bring your own', he replies ... no jokes, tom, i thought ... all this after 50 minutes of rowing slowly ... my destination was annapolis, a rather small harbour town, my hotel was on the edge of town, about an hour on foot to the center, which i tried once, including the 'hm, were is the footpath gone' experience ... reason to be here was the int symp on space flight dyn, and international it was ... americans are sometimes over self confident in their presentations (home advantage maybe), russians read from their papers, very inspiring, and japanese start laughing awkwardly if they don't get the question (often the case) ... i liked the french mission with primary goal the search for supermassive black holes, i already heared the draging intro and was back in front of a stage ... and always nice to hear scientist talk about the dark side of the moon ... a strange (town?) habit was to serve beer in plastic cups, after a while, we europeans found a bar with beer in glasses, which had also happy hour after the symp hours, how nice ... friday the greyhound bus to ny, first to baltimore standing ... 'i'm running out of seats' the driver wailed when looking at the row that had to board his bus ... i thought this was the land of the free, not free seats apparently ...