Downtown Phoenix in 1 word: boring; Downtown Phoenix in 2 words: very boring

I was at a conference held in the convention center in downtown Phoenix since last Saturday. In general, the conference sucked, full of sh#tty researches (I'll talk about that later), though not very surprising to me. What bothered me most was the BORING dowtown area of Phoenix. There are a couple of high-rises, but most of them are just hotels and others all have names of some banks/companies over the top.

I arrived on Saturday and Monday was a holiday. It seemed to be a DESERTED area in those couple of days: you hardly saw any local people.: For three days, all the small diner-like places were CLOSED! No kidding. We checked out 4 closed restaurants (1 Japanese, 1 Thai, 1 breakfast-&-lunch place, and 1 Italian) before finally had lunch at an Irish bar on Sunday. In a word, there is not a single decent restaurant within walking distance. Okay, maybe one, 'My Big Fat Greek Restaurant'. The food was decent, though my PI still had a lot of complaints. You can eat on a outdoor patio facing small fountain and small waterfalls. There were heaters in the ceiling to keep you warm and sometimes they even lit some tiki torches as well. However, it is still a weird restaurant. We first went there on Monday evening. It was a pleasant dinner (other than they sold out the wine and beer we really wanted) until the waitress came over to say "Good night" for the third time and it was not even 9:30pm yet. The night after, when I was hanging out with some friends from one of my committee members' lab (not expected him to be there as well), two other PIs joined us and started to complain about the restaurant: the restaurant turned off the ceiling heaters to drive away the customers. One of the PIs (I think it was LC, not sure after a mojitos and a martini) had a great comment on it," They are not used to having customers".



P.S. A couple of other small things.

You hardly saw any local folks downtown after working-hour, yet there is a BIG AMC theater.

There are NO convenience store within walking distance to get cheap bottled water but like 20 Starbucks in the area. (When you drug yourself enough, you don't feel dehydrated?!)

Sun lost (not much) to Lakers on Wednesday. Never a fan of Sun, but never even like Lakers at all. Sun really needs to work on their defense.

Last year the same conference was in downtown Dever, CO and everyone complained a lot. I never thought that I would miss it one day.