Paris in the early days

I’ve been here three days and I can’t get that Will Smith song out of my head. Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, the main computer vision conference, takes place this week each year. For me, it’s a good chance to get up to speed on the state of the art. This weekend is workshops; the actual conference begins tomorrow. Since what’s happening today is pretty much outside anything I’m likely to do, I have permission to skip it – I slept in, luxuriously, the most since I’ve been on vacation, and I plan on hitting the beach and the pool later. Unfortunately I left my camera in Seattle, along with my electric toothbrush, so these crappy cell phone pics will have to do.

Miami is very strange. It reminds me a lot of southern California – or Newport Beach, where my cousin lives – in that it’s full of large breasted women in small clothes. It’s unbelievably hot, of course. It’s also really expensive. Miami Beach in particular seems to exist as a playground for very rich people, and a place for tourists to go and gawk at rich people. Case in point: our conference hotel, the Fontainebleau. French for blue fountain? But of course it’s spelled all wrong. It is huge; the lobbies are all marble and attractive little seating areas; it seems like there are a zillion staff members dashing about, to help you with anything you need. The pool area contains something like 7 different small pools, surrounding by beach chairs and big circular beach cushions with umbrellas. The latter look incredibly comfortable and fun, but they are $200 a day to rent. There are at least three bars in the pool area, not to mention multiple restaurants in the hotel, a spa, a gym, a hair salon, a club…everything you would need is contained in the hotel, which is good, because it’s in “mid-beach” and not walkable to anything.

I must note how odd this seems as a choice for a computer science conference. There are over 1000 of us, overwhelming male, from all parts of the world, generally pale, unmuscled, and not dressed to impress. It is not very difficult to tell the conference attendees from the regular hotel guests. Moreover, this peculiar American-style hotel, self-contained and requiring a car to go anywhere interesting, is very off-putting to the many Europeans. They complain that there’s no good cafe in walking distance. I haven’t bothered to disappoint them with the news that there’s unlikely to be any good cafe anywhere in south beach.

I have no idea what the hotel rooms are like, since I am paying my own way and am not actually staying at the hotel. Instead, I am five blocks away at Versailles condominiums (French again!), which was probably a very nice hotel in 1950. The lobby is old, the hallway smells funny, only one elevator works, everything needs a new coat of paint. The outside of the building badly needs to be cleaned; drips from the air conditioning units have stained the walls. But my room is fine – a little studio with a Murphy bed, cheerfully painted in bright orange, with a kitchenette, coffee maker, microwave, TV, and even some mystery novels on the bookshelf (and “Law School for Dummies” – what?) To be honest, it’s much bigger than my apartment in Paris, and similarly equipped. Except I don’t have a microwave, TV, or coffee maker. The only problem is the shower, which only has two settings: hot and hot. Better than its fearsome cousin, cold and cold, but it’s tough to enjoy a scalding shower.

My hotel is in the mid range of places; it is also on the beach, like the Fontainebleau. Walking down the boardwalk, you will see very expensive and nice places next to abandoned buildings, boarded up with weeds growing around the remains of the swimming pool. Bizarre and sad. Last night at dinner, we were constantly asked by beggars for money, quite aggressively, as we sat at our table outside. It was in striking contrast to the very expensive stores and restaurants in that section of Miami Beach.

Needless to say, it’s very different from both Seattle and Paris, and not someplace I’d like to live, though I do want to see what a south beach club is like. My Parisien lab mates are counting the days till our return. Six days, by my measure – lots to learn before then, plus a nice brown tan to work on. Going to go read Proust by the pool now.

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