Conference in Paris

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.

Easter Break in Poland

Over Easter break I had the pleasure of being invited to attend a wedding near Krakow, in Poland. I had never been to Poland, and since we got two days off from work it seemed like the perfect opportunity to go. My friend Joanna planned her wedding for the evening of Easter Sunday (because in Catholicism you're not allowed to celebrate on the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter Sunday), and since she was swamped with wedding preparations she set me up with her friends in the center of Krakow for two days of sightseeing. I also helped the Polish economy by doing a [cough] bit of shopping.

The first thing I was surprised about was that the Krakow airport had only a handful of gates and a total of one baggage carousel.  The second thing I was surprised about was the currency. Poland joined the EU in 2004 and has 38 million people, so I sort of assumed they had accepted the euro shortly after joining. It turned out that they still use the złoty (meaning golden), which dates back to the Middle Ages. The exhange rate to the US dollar while I was there was something around 3 to 1, so an item that cost 30 zloty equaled $10. Poland was still a cheap country by European standards, with beers costing around $3.00, main courses in a restaurant around $10-15, and 1 hr spa services $40.
Krakow managed to survive WWII unscathed, so the buildings are old and quaint, and the feel of the city is very bohemian and artsy. You can even still see some of the ancient wall that used to surround Krakow. The Main Market Square dates back to the 13th century, and at 430,000 ft² is the largest medieval town square in Europe. It is surrounded by historical townhouses, palaces and churches including the 10th century Church of St. Wojciech and St. Mary's Basilica, where a trumpet player stands at the window and re-enacts a scene from history, playing a solemn tune every hour on the hour, until the song ends abruptly halfway through when the trumpet player gets "shot."

Krakow had its fun and quirky traits, such as the hostel named Goodbye Lenin and the bar named Oldsmobile. I was awed by both the big and small - elaborate churches literally on every corner, a fresh fruit stand down a tiny alley, a clean white wedding dress in a store window of a black sooty building. Clergymen walking around in their long black robes, one with a leather jacket over his Cossack.

At the castle we saw the tomb of the late president tomb Lech Kaczynski and his wife Maria, who died in the tragic plane crash in April 2010. But Ula said that in Poland he wasn't really respected very much until he died tragically, and then he was touted as the greatest leader ever. The crash was eventually ruled as an accident, and no fault was blamed on any one person because no one actually insisted that they land.


After walking around the center with Ula and Karolina, we headed to the Jewish quarter. German authorities created the Jewish ghetto in Krakow under the Nazi occupation in early 1941 as a compulsory dwelling place for the city's Jews. Over two years of its existence several thousand residents of the Jewish ghetto in Krakow were either killed or died of hunger. Then the Nazis emptied Krakow's ghetto systematically in three waves, into the concentration camps Belzec, Plaszow, and Auschwitz. Steven Spielberg's famous film, Schindler's List, is based on the tragedy of the Jewish ghetto in Krakow.

On Sunday morning Ula picked me up and we headed for a small town an hour and a half outside of Krakow where the wedding was taking place. I asked, "Should I expect lots of vodka?" and was told, "Yes, at weddings there is always a lot of vodka." The roads and infrastructure in Poland are terrible, which I didn't believe until I saw it with my own eyes, so a drive of 200 km can take 5 hours. The main problems are that they have never invested in a freeway system throughout the country, so most of the roads are two-lane country roads, and that these roads that do exist are pitted with pot holes. Big, gaping potholes that threaten to crack the belly of the car.Apparently even the train system isn't good because they are not fast trains.

When we arrived at Joanna's house I got to help her finish getting ready and participate in the pre-wedding rituals. First, the groom and his family arrived at the bride's house and had to "buy her" out. The asking price was a good man, a good driver, and a case of vodka. The selling price was a good man and half a case of vodka. After some religious ceremonies between the two families at the house, everyone piled into cars and began the procession to the church caravan-style. Apparently when a wedding goes on like this, the local teenagers have unspoken permission to play pranks on the wedding party to make them late, so after a few blocks our wedding caravan was stopped by a roadblock of a broken down car blocking our path. The lead drive got out and bargained with the teenagers, who I heard received two bottles of vodka in exchange for moving the car out of the way.

The ceremony itself was very normal, a typical Catholic service (but all in Polish - I was mostly lost). Afterwards, the reception was held in a giant guesthouse nearby, with dinner for 120 people and accomodation overnight for around 20 of us. As we all sat down Joanna's father rolled out a cart of vodka cases and placed vodka bottles on each table, approximately one bottle for every 4 people. The vodka even had its own special glass, a sort of miniature champagne flute. Each table also had many pitchers full of different kinds of juices to help temper the vodka. Another tradition I learned was that at weddings the first dish is always chicken broth soup so that your stomach gets coated with a layer of fat before the vodka starts. Then they alternate drinking and eating, but always with heavy fatty food so that they can drink more. We had a full 3 course meal (chicken soup, chicken kiev with potatoes, and panna cotta) and immediately after that the waiters brought out huge platters of appetizers consisting of bread, cold cuts, and pastries for people to snack on. An hour later all the lights were turned off and a cart was wheeled out with sparklers shooting flames out of a large round object. I assumed it was cake time, but it turned out to be pork roast (at 11pm!). Sometime around midnight it was actually cake time. I went to bed close to 2am, but I heard the party continued until nearly 5am. We danced a lot, to a wide mix of songs including Polish circle dances, the can can, YMCA, the chicken dance, and Michael Jackson's Billie Jean.

On Monday afternoon Joanna and I headed to Warsaw, where she lived and where I was going to do work for two days before going back to Switzerland. In contrast to Krakow, Warsaw saw war. It was utterly devastated during WWII, with 90% of all buildings completely destroyed by the Nazis. The Polish rebuilt the whole city, including their churches and palaces, to look as they did before the war. However, the city has an eeriness to it because of this, with smooth painted concrete walls that are 50 years old trying to pretend that they are really 300 years old. Warsaw still had its own charm, though, especially the Old Town, with its brightly lit restaurants and fountains. We had the best duck I've ever had in my life at an outdoor cafe in the center of the Old Town.

The whole experience of Poland was surreal, like going backwards in time, especially when we were driving through the countryside watching farmers and their wives take a stroll through town, looking like they just stepped out of a 1940s photograph. Poland is definitely on its way up in the world, but still has a long way to go.

 

Meetings in Paris

My second work trip occurred a couple weeks after the Rome trip, and this time we were in Paris for  internal meetings because many people were already there for a conference and just stayed an extra day or two. From Switzerland we have the option of either flying to Paris or taking the train, and I always prefer the train. It's only about 4 hours, which is basically the same amount of time as flying when you count total travel time. On the train I have a beautiful view of the Suisse/French countryside, and I can take any number of bags and any size bottles of liquid I like.

As I dropped my bag off at the hotel and grabbed a taxi to go meet my team for dinner, I immediately noticed that my fashion, in which I usually feel pretty snazzy in Switzerland, just didn't cut it in Paris. The girl in jeans and a Tshirt walking by outside was more fashionable than my expensive suit. I made a mental note to try to do something about that. (shop every time I'm abroad?)

My hotel was located in the center of the city, just off of Boulevard Saint-Germain. From the website it sounded really fancy, but in actuality it was just sort of average. The price was super inflated because of the location, and was chosen because it was near where our meetings were being held. My favorite part of the hotel description was the gym, which said "The fitness area contains cardiovascular equipment and exercise bench. The focal point of this room is the mosaic wall complete with aquarium, where guests can watch the fish swimming while on the treadmill." I just had to see this, and sure enough, in the tiny room crammed with half a dozen exercise machines there was a giant fish tank that took up almost an entire wall, but you would have had to crain your neck a good 90 degrees to the left to actually watch the fish while jogging.

The weather during my stay was the best I've ever experienced in Paris. Normally when I'm there it's rainy and cold, or just cold. This time was warm, sunny, bright, and gave the city a totally different ambiance. I never seem to experience the French being mean the way other foreigners do - one evening after the meeting I decided to walk back to my hotel instead of hunt for a taxi, and when I asked the subway ticket counter guy for directions he spent a good 10 minutes on careful research, pulled up routes on his computer, printed out 5 pages of maps, numbered them, stapled them together, and drew me a line through the maze from one page to the next to show me where I should go. It was only about a 25 minute walk, so it really hadn't need 5 pages to get me there, but his effort was so sweet and sincere that I didn't care.

The beautiful few days in Paris really nailed home the feeling that I've had since I started working: this is the life I dreamed of and now I have it. Working outside the United States, in an industry that's really interesting, in a position that's stimulating, for a company that's growing rapidly, and traveling every other week. I'm still blown away that the pieces all landed this way, and I feel extremely lucky to be where I am professionally and personally.

Conference in Rome, Italy

For the first weekend after I started work my boss recommended that I attend a conference titled "Blood Cancer in the Elderly" in Rome, Italy. I left work on Friday afternoon to catch the train directly from Neuchatel to the Geneva Airport for my Fly Baboo (operated by Alitalia) flight. I arrived an hour and a half early and stepped into the terminal only to discover that my flight had been canceled. I immediately jumped immediately in line at the ticket counter because there was one more flight that night, but after being sent to 3 different desks and wasting an hour standing in various lines, I ended up back at the origial ticket counter speaking to the same man I had seen before. After I explained that I had been there an hour before, and had been told there weren’t any seats left when in fact there were, I think he felt guilty for having sent me all around the airport. He did insist on his story that although one system showed seats still left it probably only meant that the airline was purposely overselling the flight, however he offered to put me on standby for the flight, which was currently showing as oversold by 9 seats.

So with a wispy voucher from him I had to join the real check in counter, which luckily wasn’t too packed, got a boarding pass with no seat assignment, and ran to join the security queue because by this point the flight was leaving in less than an hour. Since it was a Friday night in Geneva and all the businesspeople who come in for the week were going home for the weekend, the security line was 200 peple long. It took 30 minutes just to get through it, another 10 mintues to get down to the gate, and by the time I got there almost all the passengers were already on board. I said hello to two other standby travelers I’d made friends with, who had been behind me in the line at the checkin counter, and informed the gate agent that I was waiting for standby. She immediately asked for my passport, flipped through a stack of boarding passes she had behind the counter, typed a few things into her computer, and handed me back a ticket for 25B. After I jumped for joy and ran onto the plane I realized that 25B was the middle seat in the very last row of the plane, and that I had most likely gotten the very last seat available on that flight.

It was my first time on an Alitalia flight, which is the Italian national airline, and apparently the pilots fly the same way the drivers drive, meaning aggressively and very fast. He rounded the curve to the takeoff runway and without pausing gunned the engines straight into the takeoff. The flight itself was nothing out of the ordinary, but on the landing we bounced once before settling onto the ground and slowed down, but never achieved standard taxi speed. As we turned off the runway I was surprised to find myself thrown left into the person next to me as the centrifical force took effect. As I peered out the window I realized that we were practically racing across the tarmac as if the pilot couldn't wait to get us to the gate, and I was positive I'd never traveled that fast in a taxiing airplane before.
 
There was a shuttle service waiting to get me at the airport and I arrived at the hotel just after 9:00. The hotel was 8 miles from the center of Rome (one of those huge conference center hotels), so I had dinner with coworkers before heading up to bed around midnight, exhausted.

The conference was called Blood Cancer in the Elderly, organized by eCancermedicalscience and partially sponsored by my company. There were 1000 participants, of which 75% were hematologists and the rest were made up of nurses, physician’s assistants, and sponsoring companies.  I struggled to understand the detailed scientific terminology and to understand the significance of various test results they had found in their research, but I assumed that eventually it would all make sense.

On Saturday evening after the presentations ended a few coworkers and I managed to sneak into Rome city center for a couple of hours before the fancy organized dinner that night. We did a "walk and snap" tour of the city in the cool evening spring air, and I realized how enchanting Rome really is. The dinner was impressive, a 4 course sit-down meal held under huge clear tents, with good wine and good food (for 1000 people!).

On Sunday there were more presentations, but I had to leave early in the afternoon to allow enough time to get to the airport. Although it was a short trip and quite a whirlwind, I was glad my boss had suggested I go, because I learned a lot, got to meet a lot of people, and got to know my coworkers better.