I took a European vacation in April after being invited to a couple of scientific conferences, on in Italy and one in France. The first conference was on obsessive-compulsive disorder (which absorbs probably 2% of my professional effort), and the second was on Huntington's disease (20% of my effort, with the rest going to spinocerebellar ataxia type 1). I was gone for ten days. The OCD conference was the first weekend, followed by the HD meeting, leaving me the rest of the week and the next weekend to travel to five additional cities in four additional countries. This included three new countries toward my life goal of visiting 25 countries.
The OCD conference is financed by a relatively well-off medical charity, and they splurge a bit on their annual meeting. We stayed in a fancy hotel overlooking Lake Como in Northern Italy (near the Swiss border).
This is Lake Como, where I am waiting to take the water taxi to the hotel:
It's a beautiful lake, with mountains rising straight up off the lake. This is the view from my room at the hotel:
This is the fanciest hotel I've ever stayed at.
Since marrying Katie, I pay special attention to architectural details such as the molding around the ceiling:
The OCD conference was through here, right in back of the hotel:
It was a productive conference, and the project has made great strides as I have worked the contacts I made at the meeting. I have 40 DNA samples from a large OCD family that need to be genotyping. Lacking funding myself, I got someone else excited about the project who agreed to genotype the DNA samples and do the analyses. Very exciting to get this project moving again after lying dormant for some time.
Sadly, all that productivity came at the expense of doing any sightseeing in Italy. I figured the first part of the trip would be much more focused on science. I caught up later on. Stay tuned!
The OCD conference is financed by a relatively well-off medical charity, and they splurge a bit on their annual meeting. We stayed in a fancy hotel overlooking Lake Como in Northern Italy (near the Swiss border).
This is Lake Como, where I am waiting to take the water taxi to the hotel:
It's a beautiful lake, with mountains rising straight up off the lake. This is the view from my room at the hotel:
This is the fanciest hotel I've ever stayed at.
Since marrying Katie, I pay special attention to architectural details such as the molding around the ceiling:
The OCD conference was through here, right in back of the hotel:
It was a productive conference, and the project has made great strides as I have worked the contacts I made at the meeting. I have 40 DNA samples from a large OCD family that need to be genotyping. Lacking funding myself, I got someone else excited about the project who agreed to genotype the DNA samples and do the analyses. Very exciting to get this project moving again after lying dormant for some time.
Sadly, all that productivity came at the expense of doing any sightseeing in Italy. I figured the first part of the trip would be much more focused on science. I caught up later on. Stay tuned!
Great photos! I am happy to see that you are still doing at least SOME blogging about your life, and not just confining new posts to those that relate to the prognostication quiz. :)
ReplyDeleteOh my f'ing god, GORGEOUS!
ReplyDelete