The Best of What's Around

Prior to my trip to Barcelona this spring, I had previously visited this city in March 2000. It was strange and fun to come back to the city. There were a number of times where I would suddenly come upon a street and a memory from when I was 19 years old would come rushing back.

So having visited the city before, I didn't feel the need to be a hard core tourist. I felt that I could enjoy the conference, go visit some of my favourite sites and, most importantly, gorge on sangria and tapas. Glorious.

So the main reason that I went to Spain was to go to the European Meeting of Psychosocial Aspects of Genetics, which was apart of the European Society of Human Genetics Conference. It was a pretty decent conference and it was really interesting to see how the genetics services in other countries compare to those Canada/US. The main reason that I went to this conference was to present my poster for my Masters project.

Yes, I totally matched it on purpose. I planned my outfit weeks in advance. I am a planner.

There was also a congress party that was organized by the conference. It was fun - the food was great and the drinks were free-poured. It isn't easy getting up for 8:30 am talks after a night of half-cup malibus the night before.

"Hey" you say. "Who is that blond girl?" Well, that is Meghan and she is a GC out of Halifax. We arranged to be roommates via email before having met each other. Luckily, we got along quite well (which is thankful considering our twin beds were pushed together every night that we returned to our hotel room). We got along fabulously and had similar senses of humor, as illustrated in the pic below.

Yes, we are doing the shopping cart and yes, we are looking at our cans. Honestly, I do not believe that the photo was choreographed. I would like to think that she is (almost) as dorky as I am!

This photo doesn't quite capture the awesomeness that is a hundreds of geneticists (researchers, MDs), grad students, genetic counsellors and other famous people dancing to the best Spanish Cover band singing songs from the 80s. I have never quite seen people rock out like they did there. It was too awesome to describe. So I won't.


So that was the conference. Three cheers for learning! I will follow-up with another post detailing the fantastic-ness of Barcelona in general.

"Hani Hani, come and dance for me, underneath the moonlight. Hani Hani come and dance for me"- DMB

Labels: conference, rachel, trip