hi dragon96.

MOP was amazing. I have no idea what I'm going to do for the rest of summer now, darn. Darn.

Post 1: Touring the AMC Office
I'm not a big fan of tourism, but this is the AMC headquarters, you know. Alicia, Danielle and I had been there one Saturday, only to find it was closed. I thought the door said open MF at the time (it actually read M-F but we all missed the dying hyphen). Today was the last Monday, and I had agreed to meet up with Alicia there.

Evan o'Dorney was teaching complex numbers that afternoon. At around 3:30PM we were still bashing an IMO problem, and it didn't look like we were finishing anytime soon. At this point I got up to go use the restroom, when I found about half the CGMO team sitting outside waiting for me. Apparently they had been waiting for the whole time, whoops. I thought they'd have gone ahead first... at this point I slip out of the class (I said that I was leaving, mind you) and head off with the girls. I think Cynthia, Danielle, Jingyi and Alicia ended up coming along; Victoria went off to the rec center or somewhere.

At the front door there was now a sign that asked to enter through the side. At the side door there was another sign that said to ring the doorbell first. We did so, and someone came out and asked what we needed. At this point the girls just burst out laughing. I told them that we were from MOP, and that ``you can't possibly expect us to come to UNL and not pay a visit''. We were welcomed in.

Rachelle sees us at this point and gives us a tour of the office. It's really quite small; at the moment, the staff are preparing winner pins to send out to schools, and we get to see the room where all the tests come in to and are graded. They have a storage room where the tests are stored during the year; currently there are USAMO's and TST's stored inside. I think Jingyi asks whether they have the 2012 TSTST in there. Evidently not.

Yeah, it's pretty amazing how much they get done in that little building.

There's a bulletin board where there's a lot of pictures of past IMO teams, CGMO teams, and MOP group photos. Sure enough, there's the mega-MOP of 2002, where Bob the picture man had to stand on a ladder of sorts to get everyone in the photo. David Yang appears multiple times. It's also pretty amusing to see the pictures of the graders and instructors back when they were high schoolers.

There's also a bookshelf near the front filled with contest reports from the years, and pamphlets with ancient USAMO's. The clocks in there all have the old AMC logo and have the words ``AJHSME, AHSME, AIME, USAMO'' written on them; this would imply they're quite old. There's little Rubik's cubes from various IMO's as well, among other souvenirs. I don't remember what other books there were; there was an old copy of Geometry Revisited near the bottom though.

Apparently the AMC office closes at 4PM, so around now we thank Rachelle and depart. Cynthia, Danielle and Jingyi all go off, and Alicia accompanies me to the Blue classroom to see whether Evan ever finished that complex bash. The moment we're in Nebraska, all of Blue MOP shows up out of nowhere to ``greet'' us. Apparently they had been running around the second floor of Nebraska when they saw us coming.

Blue (plus Alicia) drops by the Black classroom and writes ``madeyoulook'' all over the boards before we leave. I wonder if they ever saw it.