Then an email arrived that said "Amaury Triaud is giving a seminar on Wednesday, discussing Looking for Genesis"; thanks to Star Trek TOS, astrobiologists (me and mine) throw the word "genesis" around to mean "finding life in the universe". This is one of a handful of times that I've been at an institution where someone is giving a talk on *exactly* what I do! It is a very exciting time. It makes you feel like someone cares that you're stuck in a windowless room in the basement, tanning by the light of your laptop screen. They probably don't, but it feels good to pretend.
Instead, it turns out, that Amaury is just a few years older than me, did all the great work that I knew about in grad school, and now was a post-doc at MIT. Some people just have a way of settling the tension in the air. The first meeting I had with him, we geeked out on computational algorithms and statistics. This was going to be good!
The plans for dinner started at a "Chocolate Bar", which is exactly as awesome as it sounds! It helps that my advisor, Andres, in Chile is a super cool dude, who has as much style than smarts. Xavier Dumusque, who discovered an earth sized planet around Alpha Cen B-- the closest star to the Sun-- scientifically named Alpha Cen B b, or "AC Bee-Bee" to her friends. Sidenote about how fun these guys are: they are both pretty tall, especially Xavier who stands about 6'7". So Xavier kept running into ceiling beams, trees, and hanging lights, always comically reacting like he'd been assaulted by the inanimate object.
The dinner ended us up at a bohemian, hipster pizza joint in Barrio Italia near my house. This is exactly the kind of place that I would look for if I was having dinner with friends or a small birthday party. The pizza was great, the conversation was mostly about how weird the Chileans are to the rest of the world, but then also how uptight the Swiss can be too, thanks to our two guests having lived together in Switzerland for a years.
Andres had to leave to meet up with his wife, but kept negotiating for more time. I thought she was home alone with their two kids and he had to go relieve her of duty. It turned out that she was waiting for him to go to an art exhibit instead, but that story comes later. We stuck around for another hour or so, finished our pizzas, and sharing everything while having a great conversation.
After the dinner, Amaury, Xavier, and I wanted to go find a bar to get a drink at. We headed back toward the main area and look a left, walked another kilometer (~ half mile), took another left, walked another kilometer and realised we were literally back at the pizza restaurant we started at. Obviously frustrated with our failure, we saw a bunch of people hanging out outside with drinks in their hands. As we approached, we realised that this was not a bar, but in fact an art showing.... hmmm? Just as we decided to walk in and find the bar (free champagne!), right in the center of the hallway was Andres!
After walking nearly 3 km, just to end up back where we started, we find Andres literally next door to the dinner joint and smiling at us like a confused child. The art was not all that great, but the free champagne was free, and that made up for it. Finding Andres was more than funny, he could actually tell us where a good bar was in the area and how to get there.
Three foreigner walk into a bar, and Xavier into the door frame. We finished off the night at a small, dark bar drinking terremotos and pisco sours-- very chilean cocktails. Starting off the night, expecting to be tiptoeing around scientific conversations, but ending up discussing international politics over tasty alcohol with 2 new friends was really great way to start yet another international collaboration.
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