San Diego is a peculiar place

I flew there for a quick business trip. I'm working on programming for next year's Mythcon which will be there, and went down so that I and the chair, who's local, could meet with various sites' conference and sales managers and tour their facilities. We learned a lot and made some firm provisional decisions. Logistics comes next, and we should be able to make a site and date announcement within a few weeks.

Some of our sites are on the trolley line, and so was the hotel I was staying at, so I volunteered to be the guinea pig for getting there from the airport. It turned out to be pretty easy, except that there's no signage for the transfer between the from-airport shuttle bus and the downtown trolley station, so it's tough for a stranger to figure out where to walk.

Odd things about the trolley:
*Senior fares start at age 60. Who does that? Not that I'm complaining.
*The trolley doesn't go "clang, clang, clang," it goes "buzz."
*The trolley lines are named for colors, but they don't mean anything. I rode the Green line. The cars on it are red. I did see some green cars, but they were on another line.
*Some of the lines also have sponsors. There is the "UC San Diego Blue Line." This runs from downtown to San Ysidro, which is the Mexican border station. UC San Diego itself is up way north of downtown, nowhere near the Blue line. You don't think this might be confusing?
*The recorded station announcements on the train are in English, immediately followed by the same in Spanish, except that the station names are pronounced as in English, even if they're Spanish words.
*There is only one underground station on the system. Unlike BART, which has lots of underground stations, they haven't figured out how to turn the lights on. It was like a dungeon in there.

I stayed at a generic business hotel, odd only in an elevator call system new to me. Instead of call buttons, there's a touchscreen with a keypad displaying floor numbers. Touch the one you want, the display changes to tell you which elevator in the bank will be yours, and when you get in, the only buttons are open and close door and alarm. Whoosh and off you go.

I did have enough free time to take the city bus up to the Hillcrest/North Park area to visit used-book stores and admire the selection of ethnic restaurants, mostly Asian. Waiting for the first bookstore to open in the morning, I lounged in a nearby Starbucks where I bought a cookie, the first time in over 35 years of acquaintance that I've ever actually bought something in a Starbucks. ("You don't want coffee?" said the clerk in a stunned voice.)

At that bookstore, the one which had more books I wanted to read than I could possibly have hauled home, so I bought three and wrote a lot of titles down, the owner/clerk was commiserating with a customer who was complaining about the slow pace of the Game of Thrones sequels ("You might as well just watch the show"). On fire with the novel I'd just finished reading on my Nook, I said, "You shouldn't be reading that; you should be reading ..." and I'll tell you in my next post.