Skip to main content

Europe in April: Part 1, Italy

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!

Comments

  1. 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. :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Oh my f'ing god, GORGEOUS!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Can You Cross Your Toes?

Katie and I had a heated discussion the night before last. We were sitting on the couch watching Jon Stewart when she noticed a large, apparently cancerous growth sticking out of the bottom of my foot. She asked what the big lump in my sock was. "That's my toe," I responded, nonplussed. I had crossed my first and second toes, causing a lump to protrude from the bottom of my sock. Katie was quite alarmed. "You can cross your toes?" "Sure, can't you? Everyone can cross their toes!" "Of course I can't cross my toes. Who can cross their toes?" And I confirmed that Katie could not, in fact, cross her toes. Even manipulating her toes with my fingers, I could not get her toes to stay crossed. She just has very short toes. That led, of course, into a discussion of who was the freak. Were my long, crossable toes abnormal, or were her stubby, uncrossable phalanges the outliers? In case you're confused, here are some pictures. First, of my v...

Max the Model

Katie sometimes talks to Max about all the things he can grow up to be. "Will you grow up to be a scientist like Daddy, or a lawyer like Mommy?" she will query. In recent days, though, we think Max might aspire to be a model. He LOVES the camera. Point it in his direction, and he is mesmerized by the big lens, giving it a big smile. He will sit for long series of photographs, changing his expressions constantly so we'll be sure to get a good one. This is Katie's recent favorite series (mostly because she thinks he looks so cute in the outfit): This is my favorite series, based purely on the dynamic range of emotions that Max is capable of. I am especially fond of the last picture. So cute!

A Little Night Music

I've been in Boston this week at a scientific conference. I've spent nearly all of my time at the conference, but was able to get away a couple of times to see friends. One night off I went out for pizza with Ekrem and Leanne (and their adorable kids). We went to Stone Hearth Pizza , whose head chef is the brother of Bob, one of my labmates in Minneapolis. (He wasn't at the restaurant the night we went, sadly.) Ekrem and Leanne are moving to their new house in a week, and I helped them out by consuming the remainder of a bottle of scotch that they keep at their house for me. I felt very proud of myself for accomplishing this noble task. Last night I went to see Andrea perform in Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music , one of my favorite musicals. Beforehand, I had dinner with fraternity friends Jan, Jeannie, David, Emily, and Ian. Dinner conversation was wonderful in that MIT-nerdy way that I greatly miss sometimes. At the end of the meal, for example, my fortune coo...