My flight from Amman arrived in San Francisco in the afternoon of Wednesday November 16, and I got to the conference hotel in the city center in plenty of time for the opening reception of the annual meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research.
The next morning, Thursday November 17, I attended the meeting of the editorial board of the journal Near Eastern Archaeology and then the Jordan Dig Directors’ meeting, before attending academic sessions for the rest of the day. On Friday, November 18, I attended further academic sessions and gave a presentation about the Madaba Archaeological Park excavations that I am writing the final report for. I also went to the reception of the Madaba Plains Project; in the distant future I may work on the publication of the Byzantine period volume of the Hesban excavations. In the afternoon I shifted to a less expensive hotel, ASOR having paid for the first two nights because I was on the editorial board of Near Eastern Archaeology.
I had not ever been in San Francisco before, so in the afternoon of Saturday November 19 I walked around and went to the Asian Art Museum, after attending conference sessions in the morning. In recent weeks I have been watching a number of video podcasts of public lectures about art and architecture in India posted by the Museum, so I was especially interested in seeing the exhibits there. That evening I had dinner in Chinatown with the other Humayma project members in attendance at the ASOR meetings, including John Oleson, the project director during my involvement in the 1990s, and his wife Martha, along with Barbara Reeves and Sherry Hardin.
After dinner I headed to the airport for my midnight flight to Hong Kong. I was very impressed by the San Francisco airport, not least because of the free wireless internet. Free wireless access is fairly common at airports in the Middle East, but not in the USA or Europe.
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