Today is monday. Normally, that’s not exactly my favorite day of the
week (CUE: BOOMTOWN RATS, I DON’T LIKE MONDAYS), but of course, when
you’re on holidays (pardon me, on a meeting I was meaning to say), it’s
not all that bad.
Yesterday, Sunday, I was giving my lecture on various approaches to predict transcriptional activation of target genes in silico. All in all, I am very happy with my talk, even though i was a little
more nervous than usual, maybe caused by the jet lag. That made me forget a few things I wanted to mention, which is unfortunate, but on
the positive side, I managed to turn a slide malfunction, as I guess we have to call this now since Janet’s costume malfunction, quickly into a joke. So, at least the nervousness made me a little more alert than usual.
Moreover, it is nice to have one’s talk on the morning of the
first day of the conference. That way, all the pressure is suddenly
gone, and I can enjoy the rest of the conference with peace of mind,
and even fit in some sight-seeing.
Today, I spent the morning at the conference, and over lunch, I went
to Gastown, the turn-of-the-century quarter of Vancouver. So far, I
wasn’t all that impressed, Gastown seemed to me to be quite a tourist
trap. Even though there are some very nice old buildings, each and
every one of them seems to house a souvenir shop or a restaurant. I
selected one of the restaurants that did not look too bad, and had
sushi for lunch. While the food was not exactly top-notch, it was
pretty OK, came with complementary pop-corn tea (I don’t actually know
the real japanese name for this tea, it tastes as if it’s made of
roasted wheat), and costed CAD 16 (including tip and tax) for 7 nigiri
and a california roll. These are the kind of prices you will never ever
find in Basel, not even with take-out sushi.
In the afternoon, I went back for some talks, and some coffee, and
to my great surprise, just when I was heading out for some fresh air, I
heard someone call my name. I say to my surprise, since, even though I
am a speaker at this conference, I have not yet reached scientific pop
star status, with screaming groupies everywhere I go </irony>. I
turned around, and after a moment of “where did I see that face
before”, it dawned on me that this was a Swiss Post-doc I had met over
a year ago in a conference in Memphis. Last time, she was utterly
depressed, having a hard time adjusting to the American Way Of Life TM, in its particular Nashville instantiation. This time, she seems much better, the worst Heimweh
seems to be a thing of the past. So, we went to have a coffee together
(a real one, not the 25-liter-keg brown lukewarm see-through beverage
they serve at the conference).
The weather here today was very very nice, about 25°C, and no wind,
in contrast to what the hotel TV forecast tells me every day (in fact,
it’s probably an anti-forecast, for my day of arrival, Saturday, it
predicted a rain probability of 20%, and it poured all day, whereas we
had a probability of 40% today, and not a single drop.
