Only a few weeks after my first work trip to Paris, I returned to attend a conference along with many other employees. The conference hosted about 2,500 participants in total and was held underneath the Louvre, in a conference hall that I never knew existed. (As you enter the Louvre and head downstairs towards the downward facing pyramid you have the option of doing some shopping at one of many fancy stores, but if you continue to the end of the shops you see signs for the Exhibition Hall.) The conference consisted of speeches by many of the leading hematologists from around the world presenting results from studies they're currently working on.
We were all staying close by, a short 10 minute walk from the Louvre down Rue de Rivoli, across from the Jardin des Tuilleries. The hotel was beautiful, with cute old-fashioned rooms, a dark, plush bar, and an open air courtyard restaurant occupying the interior of the space.
The coolest part of the whole conference by far was the welcome cocktail, held after hours in the Louvre museum. After champagne, hors d'ouevres and a speech, they opened the museum for just the participants, and we got to explore in relative peace what is normally the busiest museum in the world.
And yet again I had an experience where the French went out of their way to be nice to me. On the last full day of speeches I was busy snapping pictures of survival data slides in the dark exhibition hall, and apparently dropped my camera. I didn't realize I was missing it until the next morning, assumed it was probably gone forever, and consoled myself that it is more than 5 years old. Just before I checked out of my hotel I pulled up my personal email account, to discover an email from the organizer of the Myeloma Workshop telling me he had my camera and asking me to call him to get it back. Once I met him, he explained that he had looked through my pictures, found one of me with my nametag on, looked me up in the list of participants, saw who I worked for, and then hit a dead end because the system didn't list my work email. So he google searched my name, found my blog, and got my personal email address from there. (See, social media is a beneficial thing.)
View from my hotel balcony.
Small but cute hotel room.
Open air courtyard, inside the hotel lobby.
Private cocktail after-hours at the Louvre.
Checking out the museum.
