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January 17, 2008
Dining at Dushanbe
[On location in Boulder, Colorado]
Only one more day of the WRF Tutorial to go. It's been a pretty valuable week for the most part, I think. I actually feel like I learned something even! Walter & I had our third and final practice session using WRF this afternoon, and we think we're getting a decent feel for how it's all put together, from setting up the domains (including some nested domains) to running WRF itself to visualizing/plotting some of the output. I'm kinda eager to see if I can get it running on our cluster over at ARL when I get back, though I fear that it'll be a major pain trying to get it to compile. I think I'm confident enough that I could at least give it a shot myself, before crying uncle and handing it off to the sys admins when I ultimately run into problems with missing libraries or compiler issues. That's something I definitely would've been too timid to try before this week, so that's progress.
At life group last week back in State College when I mentioned I was gonna be spending a week out here, Ryan strongly recommended that I check out the Dushanbe Tea House here in Boulder for dinner sometime. So yesterday when our bus got back to our hotel (the Golden Buff Lodge, where most of the tutorial attendees are staying) I threw out the suggestion to my fellow weather nerds, 
and eight of them were intrigued enough to brave the mile-plus walk in the single digits down to the restaurant (Claus from UW-Madison, Lukas from UC-Berkeley, Xiaoli and Claire from Denmark, and Dave, Thomas, Muhammad and Kathrin from Australia). It was definitely worth the walk! The Dushanbe Tea House is really a unique building, crafted entirely by artisans in Tajikistan before assembling all the pieces here in Boulder. 
The building itself really is a work of art, with awesome carvings, frescoes and paintings covering the whole interior and exterior, even the ceiling. And then the food was awesome too, with quite an eclectic ethnic selection, including Tajik (of course), Indian, Moroccan, Brazilian, Argentine, Spanish, Creole, Greek and other cuisine. I went for the North African Bere-Bere Chicken Kebabs with dried fruit cous-cous, and split it with Muhammad, who got some Tajik lamb kebabs. Mmmmm, soooo good... 
And it was fun to get to know everyone a bit better too, to hear about their research and where they're from too. And after talkin to the Aussies, I'll have to add the University of Melbourne to my list of places (Monash, CSIRO, BoM down in Aus, plus NCAR and NOAA stateside) where I'll go investigating for some sort of a position after I graduate from Penn State. And I'll maybe have a couple more people to try to visit when I go down to Australia in a year and a half now too. My connexions to Australia just keep growing! :-)
This morning Walter & I went up to the NCAR Mesa Lab along with Xiaoli, Claire and Kathrin, to take a few pictures and look around a bit at all their exhibits and demos, which is always fun for a weather nerd. ;-) It was still pretty chilly out, but while it was virtually calm down in Boulder, it was very windy (almost 35mph sustained, with gusts above 40mph!) up on Table Mesa, 600 ft above the city. I don't think I'd ever get tired of looking at the Flatirons if I ever worked/lived here in Boulder!
I'm not looking forward to tomorrow night so much. Well, early Saturday morning to be more precise. In order to make it to DIA (Denver) in time for our 7am flight, we have to catch the Super Shuttle at our motel sometime between 3:30 and 3:50am. Yuck. I hope I can sleep on the 3+ hour flight to Philadelphia! And then our layover in Philly's dump of an airport is long enough that we could drive back to State College from there in less time, argh. Hopefully I'll have enough energy to make it through the PSCG Spring Kickoff that evening, which starts about an hour after I our flight lands in State College. It'll be a long day for sure.
Posted by Jared at January 17, 2008 11:13 PM