Symposium Day 1

The morning left me a little flustered after a series of comic errors: underestimating how long I’d take to get ready, overestimating my ability to breeze through the bike rental interface when I was flustered by running late, and not knowing that UNESCO has two buildings. I naively had my Uber driver deliver me to the wrong one, and then had to wander a few blocks to find the real place. The headquarters had interesting architecture, like it was trying to represent all of civilization through time with mid-century modern flair. At first it was a little overwhelming to join a meeting already in progress and not know anyone. I tried slipping in the back, but wouldn’t you know the room had circular seating?

Meeting room at UNESCO headquarters.

Every seat had a microphone and a headphone, and along one wall were the translation booths for all the UN languages. Lucky for me, the Symposium was in English. The remarks were interesting, if not always relevant to my work, but as the day went on I started to meet people and found them all to be quite friendly. It was helpful to practice explaining my organization and to see what ideas or wording might resonate with them based on the remarks that day. At the conclusion of the sessions we headed to the top floor for a reception with a stunning view of the Eiffel Tower, and dainty hors d'oeuvres I could barely recognize. I dutifully tried most of them, but they excelled at pastries so that became the balance of my meal. Exhausted from a day of socializing and questioning the choice to wear heels, I eventually used sunset as an excuse to talk with a handful of others waiting on the breezy balcony for the Tower to light up. It was worth the wait!

UNESCO headquarters–the Symposium was in one of these sunken rooms.

View from the rooftop.

Ecole Militaire and the Eiffel Tower

After a few minutes of photographs and admiring the lights, I hobbled downstairs and took a cab back to the hotel, where I stayed up far too late tweaking my presentation. In addition to wanting to make the changes I’d thought of during the day, I also had to pare down the content. Each panelist was given five minutes, and I wanted to respect everyone’s time. The problem is that I wanted to talk about multiple projects, and the day I flew out I did a run-through that clocked in at over eight minutes. I learned that trying to be concise with the same amount of content is hard, but a worthwhile exercise.