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.