Well that got your attention! The main social event of the conference was The North Carolina Shag Party. Tuesday evening 6.30-9.30. Eveyone invited to come and enjoy themselves. The conference organisers did advise those with a Western European background (which included NZ and OZ apparently) and those from outside North Carolina that they might misinterpret the title. So we were all keen to turn up.

It didn’t involve sex or seabirds, but featured North Carolina’s ‘top Shag Band’. A few of you might just remember the dance ‘The Shag’ circa 1975. It’s still the rage in North Carolina. The high point of the evening was when the singer shouted ‘This a real shaggy song, so all you shaggers get down here’. At which someone nearby, from Ralegh in North Carolina, turned round and said ‘I love this. My husband taught me to shag’. Why do I feel when I’m writing about North Carolina that I need to say ‘It’s the truth, honestly’.

The conference was very good. two things I learned:
– everyone at School or University will have a laptop soon, or no one will have a laptop (they will be replaced by bulbous things that combine cellphones, laptops and PDAs – and you can now buy them in Beijing)
– Be very scared of seven year old people, particularly if you work in a University. By the time they get to School they are demanding video editing suites. The current teenagers are beginners!

Just a short blog tonight as I have to go off and pack. Tomorrow: Greensboro to Wasington to London.

Oh and the Cosmetology University in the last posting is a University for hairdressing and nail polishing. Only in America!

San Francisco to Charlotte to Greensboro to Winston-Salem with two hours sleep, arriving at the Conference centre to check in to my room, only to find that I’m not expected. Somehwre along the line, someone at Lenovo (an Australian they tell me) forgot to mention me. So there is no room at the Inn and, as it turns out, no big Conference Participant badge waiting for me. Homeless and without purpose or identity, a very nice woman at the Conference Centre gives me two bananas and a plate of fruit and I resolve that, having waited all my life to visit North Carolina, I need to sort this out. Evetually I find ‘Big Tim’ as he’s called, and he gives me a badge. So all is well.

North Carolina is flat and green with brown tinges. It is fairly manicured and even the steel works is tidy. Devoid of obvious charms, but having many churches, the ride from Greensboro Airport (aka Piedmont Triad – North Carolina’s answer to North Shore City)is humdrum. A moment of excitement as we pass the Cosmetology University (someone look that up on Google please) at which point the R&B Musak (sub-Barry White) CD that the driver is playing – Just Want You To Be My Lady (you know the one, SAlex and Ken) – shifts into five minutes and five miles of aural soft porn moaning and groaning, which whiles away the time.

As we get nearer to the Conference Centre, however, the green trees that have lined the road for 20 miles turn into a ‘leafy’ place – you know, when all the tress look scrubbed and arranged, and you know there are some very rich people hiding behind them. The Conference Centre is behind these leafs and was originally built for the Reynolds family (they made cigarettes) and is wonderful. Designed in the ‘Early 20th century Every Room is a different European Century and Country’ style that was popular in the US in the 1920s, it is in great condition and a lovely place to stay, once I persuade them that I am allowed to stay there. Having checked in I am taken by Mr Parker (the butler sort of person) in a 1950s London Taxi to Wake Forest University (you don’t really belive me, do you)

You may noy have heard of Wake Forest University but it was established six years before the Treaty of Waitangi and is so rich that it has a need-blind policy, ie any one who is good enough can go there, and if you don’t have the money, they give it to you. It has one of those beautiful campuses that appear occasionally in Hollywood movies. Even the students are manicured and scrubbed and neatly arranged on the grass lawns.

I’m there for Lenovo’s Think Tank 2008. Lenovo make ThinkPad laptops and run a ThinkPad University, so I think the three days are about thinking. Thinking of which.. (Enough!: Ed). Lenovo bought out IBM Personal Computers a few years ago and I always think that it was one of the turning points of the early 21st century – who would ever have thought that the Chinese Government would own 21.7% of the great iconoic 20th Century American Company. Talking to some of the Lenovo technical staff who were taken over – all good Bush supporting North Carolinans – they tell me that it was a really good thing. The new managers are excellent and innovative while IBM had beome a creaky bureaucratic giant.

The conference is really about innovation in teaching and learning and so there are some nice toys to play with and some interesting people to meet. I meet someone who runs 77 Catholic Schools in some part of Australia (and who is giving the keynote speech) and, after chatting for an hour, he says ‘That’s really interesting Rob’ pulls out a camera, tells me to talk for two minutes about my views on learning and teaching, and then posts a video of me onto his blog site for all the world to see. All in five minutes.

Clearly two hours of sleep and too much thinking are making me tired … zzzzzzzzzz

One thing I missed from the earlier blog. The guide was showing us one of the Victorian houses and was saying that in the early days most of the trees in the area were from Australia and New Zealand because of San Francisco’s ‘Mediterranean Climate’. Over there he said is a good example, a New Zealand Christmas Tree. Two voices pipe up – It’s a Pohutukawa! One was me; the other was a woman who lives at Hauraki Corner (just outside Devonport for all you non-NZ’ers). A town planner for the Auckland Regional Council. I can’t escape that small world.

One thing I missed from the earlier blog. The guide was showing us one of the Victorian houses and was saying that in the early days most of the trees in the area were from AQustralia and New Zealand because of San Francisco’s mediterranean Climte

This was supposed to be the year of no travelling but I’ve been forced to set off once again and am currently trapped in San Francisco. Lenovo (the Chinese company who bought IBM PC – much more of them later) invited me to go to their annual International Think Tank in Winston-Salem, North Carolina (its about technology and teaching & learning). Given they were paying for most of me, I took up the offer. I then realised that the trip coincided with the bailiffs evicting our tenant in England, and that I should head off there as well and make sure he has finally gone (if you want to know more about that saga, don’t ask Ann!). So I have three weeks away.

I had to stop in San Francisco in order to save AUT many thousands of dollars. If you break the trip for 24 hours, it’s called a round-the-world-trip and costs less. So at great personal cost I have had 36 hours here, and leave at 22.40 for I know not where (well North Carolina, but I couldn’t actually put my finger on it on the map).

We were here a couple of years ago, and so I wasn’t really certain what to do with myself. However, when I woke up it was a beautiful San Francisco summer’s day – ie the sun was out. The hotel I’m staying in has a bar and restaurant on the 36th floor which is called the GrandView (always straightforward the Americans). I had my breakfast looking out at the bay and it is very impressive. It reminds you what a pity it is that, for six months of the year, you probably can’t see it for the fog.

Was intending to revisit the Museum of Asian Art (if you get here, you must go) but found a leaflet advertising a Victorian House walk – no competition. Twenty of us set off with the guide from Union Square upto the Lower Pacific Heights (a Real Estate name: it used to be Japan Town, and it’s not as posh as Pacific Heights belmont would be Lower Devonport). Everything ranging from terraced houses to mansions. A lot of it is gentrified restoration. The 50s and 60s covered all the redwood buildings up with stucco and the 90s and 00s have been uncovering it. So a lot of beautifully restored houses in what is now a conservation area, though you can paint the houses whatever colour you want, and you’re allowed one garage in the ground floor (only in California is that called restoration and conservation!) Very very interesting. As we moved into Pacific Heights proper, the houses got bigger and we learned that Bill Cosby lived there, and Robin Williams lived there (and filmed Mrs Doubtfire there) and Don Johnson lived there (a prize for anyone who can remeber who Don Johnson was).

After a couple of hours we found ourselves in Union Street which is where there are lots of shops and galleries, and which today was holding its annual Street Fayre. The street was closed and was a combination of fairground, wine festival (with beer rather than wine) and arts and crafts fair. I had a Knish for lunch ( a prize for knowing what that is) and bought a couple of things.

I then got a bus back through Chinatown. From my hotel you can see on one side Louis Vuitton, Gucci etc and on the other a sprawl of small scruffy, Chinese shops. It is spookily like the hotel in Shanghai I stayed in last year from which I could see Louis Vuitoon, Gucci etc on one side and a sprawl of small scruffy Chinese shops on the other.

I thought after all the bustle of the Street Fayre and Chinatown, I would head off to the Yerba Buena Gardens. Its a complex of arts centres and gardens and, according to the guide books, has a restful tea cafe in there. Entering the garden I became suspicious as there appeared to be about 10,000 people milling, with lots of tents and stalls. In the background, some sort of middle eastern singing. I saw a t-shirt with ISRAEL IN THE GARDENS and was just getting the idea when the singer stated shouting ‘Where are you from?’ ‘From Israel!’ someone shouted back (Much cheering) ‘And you’re boy scouts!! the singer shouted (more cheering). ‘So we’re safe!!! (Uproar). Retreating swiftly – and reassured by a man outside the gardens with a banner saying ‘Jesus Christ Loves You’ – I headed off for a cafe, avoiding the one with the big sign saying ‘Healthy ‘N Natural Cream Puffs’ and ended up in the Museum of Modern Art cafe. Not particularly excited (on a Sunday) by the current exhibition – ‘Understanding Modernity’, I stuck to the coffee (as they call it in the US) I was genuinely disappointed to find there is a Freda Kahlo exhibition staring in two weeks time. There is also an exhibition of Women Impressionists starting at the de Young Museum in two weeks, so bad timing.

Off back to the hotel again, but go slightly off the beaten track to look for the World’s Largest Book Store (actually the World’s Largest Book Store in San Francisco) and find that thing you sometimes find in cities. You cross a single street and suddenly you’re in a different place. Ann and I noticed this last time we were here – you can move from the luxury hotels to the urban poor very quickly. I find myself on a street that is completely run down. There’s a man lying down on the ground next to his wheelcahir and just as I move to help him, I realise he is lying there eating some peanuts. Somebody else goes across to him and steals the peanuts and an argument starts. The rest of the people on the street are hustling or high and I make yet another hasty retreat.

So an interesting day. Very San Francisco. I can never quite work out whether I like San Francisco. Boston, it’s obvious. Here it’s very interesting and there’s always something going on, but it’s more mixed. I guess I’ll just have to keep coming.

Next stop, Winston Salem and Wake Forest Universty. A prize for anybody who has been to Winston-Salem (no great risk for that one.).