The Good, The Bad, and The Burgh: My Travels to Pittsburgh Part 4

Alright so I've decided that not much happened on Thursday, at least not enough to develop a worthwhile retelling of events, so we skim Thursday, hit the details for Friday, cause Friday, well we got down on Friday.

Almost have been here for 24 hours at this point woo!

Thursday March 24 Recap:
Woke up, watched Kellie a the smallest, yet most expensive meal i have ever seen. $27 for a bagel cream cheese and pot of coffee. We then realized we had a coffee maker in the room the whole time. We then went and listened to Kellie read her paper, it was about a banned book whose title I cannot remember at this point, but the plot revolved around prostitutes in England, and the paper analyzed whether or not virginity really exists. The other papers I believe revolved around Jane Eyre, or Jane Austen, or I could be confusing them with another presentation. I lost the program, so I can't go back for reference. Anyway it as a very good paper, an it gave me the first taste of how this convention works. Here's how it works:
1. Sit in the front of a small conference room of roughly 20 people.
2. 4-5 college students will read their papers in front of a podium, if said room has no podium, substitute a round table that is slightly taller than the table the presenters are sitting at. Most, but not all, papers will have a similar theme.
3. Have the professors in the room ask questions to the students, who most likely do not know what the professor asking the question is talking about.
4. Applaud
So, you know, good times.

For lunch we went with our professor, Dr. MacDiarmid, to a pizza place near by, a fun little hole in the wall run by an Italian family. Their pizza was much better than the pizza I had the night before.

Outside

Later we (Kellie, Kaela, Jennifer (the other girl who made it) and I)  went to dinner at a place called the Primanti Brothers. This is apparently one of the staples of Pittsburgh, so we were eager to try it. We got it and saw that it was pretty much just a sandwich shop, which was fin, because I like sandwiches. We sat at the bar because the restaurant was very narrow. The girls all ordered chicken strips to which the guy behind the bar asked them, "You do realize this is a sandwich shop right?" to which I told him, "I do, give me the steak sandwich." That's how you man up.
A Primanti Brothers sandwich is built like this:
Base: Bread
Tier 1: meat and cheese
Tier 2: Fries (which made me think of Fat Sandwich, this was no Fat Sandwich)
Tier 3: Coleslaw
Top: Bread (or did you already figure that one out?)

Coleslawisacious

Now, I don't like coleslaw, especially when it consumes half of my sandwich, but I was committed to having the full Primanti Brothers experience. Unfortunately, it wasn't a positive one as I felt sick the rest of night.

[SideNote: In addition to the outrageous bar time of 11 p.m. EST, liquor stores in Pittsburgh  apparently close 5 p.m. EST because we saw a guy buy  six pack from the Primanti Brothers at like 6 p.m. saying that's how this city worked.]

This is her

The rest of the night consisted of listening to one of the guest-author's speak to the entire conference, and then heading to bed. The speaker was good, her name Lorene Cary and she wrote a lot of poetry and memoir. She also helped with a prison program an she was a professor. I enjoyed her speech although I'm not sure if I took much away from it. The nice part of these speeches was when the authors would talk with the audience instead of at them when they opened it up for Q&A at the end.

Ok this ended up being kind of short, but I'd like to keep the days in separate posts so I'll stop here and gear up for Friday, because that's when we hit the South Side.