”Red Bull, we’re going to need lots of Red Bull”

Jason waking up to his evil alarm clock at 7am this morning. At least that’s how it was supposed to go in theory. Eh, getting a full 8 hours of sleep is overrated anyway. Having stayed up most of the previous night moving boxes from one place to another with the board and stuffing those sweet goodie bags you got this morning with registration overnight rest was few and far between.





In fact you can usually guess who is on staff at these conferences just by looking for the dark bags under their eyes. That and the frantic running. Anywho, expedient traveling behind us (one interesting part involving a Segway, Dean Kamen’s anti-climax) we rushed past the sign up table

and made it to the workshops.

3PM-4:15PM’ish: Hoang Sa/Troung Sa- South China Seizure and the New Generation of Student Protests

For those of you not in the know, the Hoang Sa/Troung Sa (or Spratley and Parcel Islands if you want to be like that) are the McGuffins in a three-to-five way tug of war among China/Taiwan, the Philippines, Vietnam, and to a lesser extent Malaysia and Brunei. All countries involved lay claim over the chain of islands as a historical right. Unrest in the area has been going on for hundreds of years and at times make the similar dispute over the Liancourt Rocks between Korea and Japan (a subject I’m a little more familiar with) look rather silly by comparison. Despite this the reasoning for the territory disputes in reality are rarely about history and more about the highly lucritive fishing rights to the area. Anyway, that’s was my interpritation of the events after the workshop visuals (where would Powerpoint presentations be today without Google Earth?). One espicially cool part was when the presenters actually got a student in Vietnam who works with the Hoang Sa/Troung Sa dispute via Skype. Now normally I would have to edit the dialoge to save the privacy of the interviewed student but lucky me, I had no idea what was being said anyway since the whole thing was being spoken in Vietlish. Here I am spending 2 hours trying to connect to the Georgetown Wireless and she’s Skyping with Saigon…I really need a Mac. After that we went into a short Q&A section, ranging from the Summer Olympics in China and the ensuing torch relay to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations or ASEAN (proof that an affinity for acronims isn’t just for college asian organizations). Below are a YouTube vid that illustrates the subject further (apparently Hans Zimmer did the soundtrack) and links to websites that give further background.

Truong Sa-Hoang Sa-Ta La Mot-Vietnamese are one

360.yahoo.com/tuoitrevadanchu

www.vietwill.com

4:15PM’ish-5:45PM: grab a quick bite to eat at the Subway in the student center

5:45PM-6:15PM: Icebreaker

Video to come

6:15PM-6:30PM: VASCON MIC prep