Friday, April 29, 2011

Around Phoenix Day 3 & 4

By day 3 we were pros at getting around Phoenix, although there wasn't really too much to see.  The afternoon schedule for our conference did not appeal to us so we ventured out for a little fun.  Our first stop was ASU's downtown campus library.  I mean we are library people so we had to check out a library.  Then we enjoyed a smoothie at a cute cafe on campus.  After the campus visit we made our way to the open air market.  They had tons of local produce and yes homemade tamales.  I had never had a tamale before so Ginny and I split one... SO YUMMY! After filling our tummies we explored some more which is when we found this cute little park next to a church.  Ginny had fun posing with the statues of little children... she fit right in with them.  Day 4 was spent in the conference ALL DAY.  During lunch we sat with this super nice guy from Kentucky who had been in Phoenix for 9 days and he really got the scoop on the local scene.  He told us about some cool record shops we had to check out... so when the conference was finally over (and I won my iPad) we made our way to Stinkweeds Record Shop.  The store was awesome and we found some really unique stuff in there.  The dude who worked there was beyond nice and he told us about the local scene and tons of things to do... unfortunately it was our last night and we weren't able to do anything :(



























Around Phoenix Day 1 & 2

Let me just tell you traveling from NC to AZ makes you exhausted!!!!!  Our flight left at 6:15am from RDU and we got into Phoenix around 12:00 noon (9:00 am NC time).  That first day in Phoenix was seriously the longest day of my life.  We didn't want to go to sleep early because we knew it would mess up our sleep routine for the week. So we wandered around the city forcing ourselves to stay awake.  The second day of the trip was a little better... we had our sleep and we found a great little detailed map of Phoenix.  Ginny was our leader and map guide, I was obviously the photographer, and Michael well he was just Michael.















Lil Wayne invades Phoenix

After a long first day of the COSUGI 2011 conference we decided to hit the streets of Phoenix to see what the place was all about.  Well, we found out that Phoenix really had nothing at all except for some bums on each and every corner.  We stumbled upon a block near the US Airways center where there was a lot of commotion.  We found out that Lil Wayne was having a concert that evening and fans were heading to the coliseum.  Outside of the US Airways Center there were a few radio stations that were set up and it looked like they were having several contests going on.  There was a group of kids that appeared to be some type of dance group performing for the fans.  THESE KIDS ROCKED!  We seriously watched them forever.  They also had a "drum off" going down right next to the dancers.  The dancers and the drummers were amazing and were definitely the highlight of our trip.  That's why they get their very own post!














This little girl was just a Lil Weezy fan that was dying to get her picture taken!!