Its so good to be home in Vancouver. Its not nearly as hot as it was in Boston, but I can handle that.
So Boston was good. My conference was excellent, albeit scary. This was the first time I had attended the Cryptococcus conference, and for obvious reasons, it was incredibly relevant to my work. And many of the 250+ delegates were good contacts to make. These are all the people who authored the publications I spend far too much of my time reading, and it was nice to put faces to the names. My PhD supervisor was also at the conference, the first time I had seen him since I left Sydney 2 years ago. It was very interesting to see him interact with his peers. That's all I'm going to say about that.
Something that got me down over the course of the conference, however, was that many of the presenters considered that the Vancouver Island Cryptococcus outbreak (i.e. my work), such a hot topic, that they mentioned it in their presentations. The degree of mentioning my work ranged from a passing comment, to an all-out review of my work, past and present (and not necessarily mentioning my name where appropriate). I would have been ok with this (assuming proper acknowledgement of my work), but I also had to talk about my work, and I was scheduled to talk last, after everyone had hashed and rehashed my work. So by the time my chance to present rolled around I was feeling like I had nothing new to offer. This caused me several sleepness nights, where I worried about how I was going to present my work in a way that wouldn't be repeating what was already presented. So I spent quite a bit of time reworking my slides and my planned speech and decided to rebut the inaccuracies that had been presented by others, regarding my work.
I was dog tired on the morning of my presentation, having had a mere 45 minutes sleep the night before. I was last to speak in my session on the last day of the conference. I was incredibly nervous, ridiculously tired and cold. So I shivered all the way through the session, getting more and more worried about how my talk would be received, and hoping I wouldn't be asked questions - I was in no state of mind for using my brain and putting an answer together. Luckily my talk was so well practiced that it ran like clockwork, and nobody asked me difficult questions. My supervisors and many others told me afterwards that my talk was excellent (phew!), and you couldn't tell that I was actually sleepwalking at the time. I don't actually remember anything more than that, so I am keenly awaiting the DVD they made of every presentation, so that I may refresh my memory.
I also liked Boston. It was a nice city, although we spent our time almost exclusively in the harbour area, with a quick trip out to Harvard one evening. We didn't have a lot of time for sightseeing, but we covered the major points:
Travelling home from Boston did not go as planned. We left for the airport shortly after I had finished my presentation. I could have flown to Sydney in less time than it took to travel from Boston to Vancouver. My supervisor and I were meant to by flying home via Montreal. But when we checked in we were told that the Montreal flight was running late and we would miss our connection if we waited for that flight. So we were rerouted though Toronto. I was ok with this, it meant I would be home about an hour later than originally planned, but it wasn't a huge delay compared to some that I have had flying Sydney to London. However, the Toronto flight was also significantly delayed. It turns out that Toronto airport was closed down due to a freak storm, so Air Canada was not flying in or out of Toronto for several hours. Thus there were no Air Canada aircraft in Boston to deliver us to Toronto until several hours after we were originally scheduled to leave. We finally got to Toronto, but we only had 7 minutes spare to transfer terminals and board our flight to Vancouver. It takes at least 15 minutes to change terminals in Toronto, and they refused to hold the plane for us. Air Canada put us up in a hotel overnight, and gave us a free meal. By now I was too tired to give a damn about missing the connection, and the thought of going to bed was utterly delicious, even if it was in the wrong city. Too be optimistic for a moment (now that I've slept), I did get to see a tiny bit of Ontario as we were shuttled from the airport to our hotel in Mississauga! Oh how you Canadians will laugh at me for saying that.
I got 6 hours of blissful sleep in the Mississauga Sheraton before we had to head back to the airport and take the first flight to Vancouver. Finally I arrived home just after noon, 14 hours after my scheduled arrival home. And oh how I wish I could have gone straight to bed, but I had to join a conference call at 2 pm, and speak intelligibly. By this point however, I had become truly skilled at speaking intelligibly without actually being conscious.
It is so good to be home.
Labels: Edumacation, Killer Fungus, Science, Travels
