Pittsburgh and Beyond 2023

Hello everyone! This is where T and I will be posting our memories for the most exciting trip we’ve taken together yet! We’re going to Pittsburgh, etc, and we will be away for almost the entire month of August.

I flew into Pittsburgh this morning at a comfortable hour. The flight was pretty uneventful and I went straight to the David Lawrence Convention Center to meet T with my gigantic pink suitcase that I got from TJMaxx a couple of nights before. The awkwardness of my luggage went unnoticed in the vast sea of people I had to wade through. This was the biggest cubing competition I have ever been to — 10x larger than the local competitions, and also someone said it is also the biggest cubing competition that’s ever been hosted. There were thousands of people, sitting at tables, on the floors, crowding around tables, at a scale I haven’t seen.

T had already been there since Wednesday afternoon, and was sitting at the data entry table with some of his friends. I am happy to report that T was extremely productive, making sure the next round gets called and dealing with “incidents”. I was overjoyed to see all of his hard work over the past several of months pay off. The competition was running very smoothly!

Speaking of “incidents”, there were a few notable ones that I am at liberty of to start rumors on.

One: four cubers got stuck in an elevator in the afternoon. The four boys were in a glass elevator, and it got stuck between floors. When I passed by, it appeared to me that they stayed calm, while facilities were called.

Two: we were at dinner with T’s uncle, Art, his wife Kim, Jackson an aspiring competitor, and T’s cousin Kate, when T got notified that his staff had left one of the rooms without putting away the equipment. The room was supposed to be vacated for the next day, and T urgently had to leave to clean up. When I came over a little later to see what T was up to, he was anxiously running around the exhibit hall. The results for Fewest Moves Round 3 (a pile of graded worksheets) were missing! One of the staff had hidden the result or taken it back to their room without notifying T, and this was the most important item to be had. It was a very tense 45 minutes of frantic messaging, until someone had pinpointed one of the 20 staff members that could have had it. Around the same time, I serendipitously found the results in the box under one of the tables. Phew. Then, we went back to the hotel room to enter the stack of worksheets into the website. How romantic. (Truly?)

Anyway, Day 3 was great! I really loved meeting more of T’s people :). I also saw Cubing Celebrity Max Park. Also, Pittsburgh was scenic and industrial-cool. Please check out the pictures of the event!