Craig and Ross in Europe / UK

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Thursday August 26, 2010

Episode 2 (by Craig)

Bonjour, mon petits fromages....
No, thats not right. Lets try again....
Bonjour à tous, nous sommes maintenant dans le beau pays de France....
Hello everyone, we are now in the beautiful country of France.
After a weekend in London recovering from jetlag, we flew to Tours, 230km South West of Paris (on RyanAir - the European version of Tiger; but with puke-inducing canary yellow throughout the cabin). Tours is where the conference was being held. Tours (pronounced Toor) is a very pretty provincial French City. It was generally OK; The conference ended today. Ross sat in on my talk, which he said was excellent, and he wanted to stand up at the end of it and shout out : That was my fella ! It was the first time he had ever heard me speak at a conference and was very proud of me.

As an accompanying person, Ross has been able to join me at the various social functions at the meeting. On one late afternoon, a wine and cheese tasting event was held in the grounds of a magnificent old cathedral, with beautiful gardens and a 200 year old cedar tree. The late afternoon sun shining across the church and grounds was sublime. Well
, anyway, Ross decided that we should visit each and every one of the wine tasting tents - 14 in all.
After and hour and a half of this activity, we were somewhat more than tipsy. We eventually stumbled off and had al fresco pizza later that night - very nice thin crust pizza that was light-years better than the thick doey cheese-laden fatty shit that passes for pizza in Oz (well, in my opinion)

And aside for my lab colleagues: there were some useful talks on making Sertoli cell lines from embryos, and avian PGCs and transgenics, but also some less useful talks;, such as: " The effect of crowding on libido in males ostriches", and " Development of the liver in chicken embryos involves gene expression." Really? I though livers arise spontaneously from a spec of fairy dust. ?
So the meeting ended today and tomorrow my annual leave officially starts. We are catching the TGV (train)
to Paris.
Some random observations:
- the young people here are cool and stylish and show genuine respect for each other- much more so than in Austr (or UK or USA)
- It is a national duty that every man, woman and child in France must carry a baguette with them each day, no matter what they are doing or where they are going; to do otherwise is simply unpatriotic.
- smoking is still very widespread here- even among the young. And speaking of which; Ross has not smoked for over 6 weeks; since he did the acupuncture in QLD in July. He has had no desire to smoke: Hooray
bye for now
Craig and Ross

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