Louisville Day Two

I am a little behind on these updates, but I will write these as if I kept up to date. A and I woke up at our leisure on Thursday and registered for the conference. We met a student from the University of Louisville and quickly struck a conversation. Since we were still early for any of the sessions, we walked the downtown area with our new buddy to find some food and see the area. Like most of America, this downtown had been through a recession during the 80s and 90s and just recently started to revitalize the area. Being the preservationists we are, we critiqued the manner in which certain buildings utilized adaptive reuse. (adaptive reuse= using older buildings in such a manner as to retain the historical elements but update the interior to use for modern purposes.) For the most part they were really successful, but there was one huge exception to this. They had a one block area that they call Fourth Street Live that is has a bunch of restaurants, retails, etc and at night they block off the road to traffic so people can walk between the venues without being hit by cars. To keep people from being rained on they put this ugly modern structure over the block. This hid the beautiful exterior of one building and looked completely out of place with the buildings underneath. The only good thing was that the structure appeared to be removable without hurting the exterior of the historic buildings.
After walking around, we ate at this amazing Mediterranean cafe where I got a vegetarian Falafel. It was fantastic. The people at the restaurant were surly though. Then we attended a few sessions of the conference. I attended one on historic cemeteries that discussed not only some of the ways in which you can get community involvement, but also how to identify unmarked graves and sources to post the names you find to allow people to find their ancestors. A and I also attended a session about the importance of archaeology. Being that we are both non-digging archaeologists, we already knew how cool they were, but they spoke about public archaeology which I knew little about.
That evening we had a get together with all the current students and the alums in celebration of our co-directors retirement this summer. We had a great time and the food was also good. It was nice to get to meet some of the alums of the program, but I really enjoyed hanging out with my fellow students who I don't often get to be casual with because I am so busy that I can't attend social get togethers.