Sorry for the delay. Days were so jam-packed in Paris that I didn't go out to find a net cafe, and the net was such a ripoff in Venice...yuk. But my place in Florence has free net (yay!) so here I go again! Apologies in advance for any spelling or punctuation mistakes - these European keyboards have things in different places. But no photos cos this is a communal machine. I'll leave a note where a pic will appear.
In any case, I didn't take many photos between Kensington gardens and going to Paris
so there's not much missing. Work pretty much took up the days in London. I finally got to present my poster at the conference. The poster set up was in my opinion quite bad because it was in a zig-zag formation that meant you could only really have 2 people, 3 max, standing in front of the poster or it would just get too crowded, and the space for all the posters was simply too small - it got so crowded in the poster hall that you could feel the temperature gradient. I simply couldn't stand there too long because it was so hot (not me being slack), but I did get a few comments from people saying that they thought my project was interesting and that they'll keep a lookout for when I publish (eep!).
My poster was placed next to someone from a rival lab from....Sydney. That's right. I flew 23 hours just to be next to Aussies again! But it wasn't so bad - other people from his lab were around and we all had a merry chat about the pros and cons of various techniques, antibodies and exchanged details in case we ever turned up at the same international conferences again.
I then visited a lab at UCL to discuss a technique and try to get insight as to how to get it to work consistently. It turns out they did do some steps differently to us, but the person who did it did confess that making it work was akin to black magic. I had a chat and lunch with some of the PhD students in the lab and was pleased to find that they were all nice and normal.
On the second last day of the conference, I attended a symposium on pannexins - I didn't realise they were so controversial until it looked like several researchers were going to come to blows about what they do. Voices were raised! Hands were gestured! On the very last day of the conference, even though I had a train to catch to Paris, I still attended the very last symposium and was highly unimpressed when a fire alarm went off and the whole thing got held up by 20 minutes! There was a lot of anxious hand wringing from people other than me - I guess we all had planes/trains to catch - but I impatiently sat through the rest of the meeting and then hurried back in time to get to Waterloo station by 2pm to meet Pooey...who was late.
Next blogs - Paris!
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