Survivor Ellesmere

Internet was not all that plentiful during my stay in Bremen, and aside from borrowing computers to check up on my spectrometer still in Eureka I've been going without. So I have a lot to catch up on, blog-wise.

Firstly, this keyboard is almost the same as Canadian keyboards, except that the z and the y are swapped. Also, all the keys aside from the letters/numbers are messed up. It just took me a minute to find "/". And the quotes. I should stick to letters.

Next, if you missed them in the Star last weekend, check out the articles that got written about us and Eureka. I sound like an idiot. Also, it's Beer's LAW, not Beer's equation. Sigh.

I left Toronto Saturday night and enjoyed an uneventful plane ride to Munich. If you'll allow me one last Air Canada rant, I will pose one question. I fly a lot these days, mostly in Canada, and I've been on plenty of AC planes. Why is it that they use the more comfortable planes on domestic, non-overnight, routes? I had very little leg room, and not even those fancy head rests that fold down. I didn't sleep much, though I probably can't blame all of that on the plane. Anyways, in Munich I transferred to Lufthansa, and I'm flying them back, so no more AC for awhile. Yay. In Bremen I found my hotel with no problems, and tried really hard not to sleep. I lost the battle, and instead took an hour long nap before heading "downtown" to check out the sights. Bremen's not all that big, so I don't know if it qualifies as a downtown. There's a bunch of pretty churches and buildings on and off the main square. Also, everything was closed. I eventually found a donair take-away place. Ahh...Middle Eastern food my first night in Germany. Fitting? No...but tasty. Eventually I wandered all that I could wander and head back to the hotel. I again tried not to fall asleep, but I didn't have the energy to read, and the only English channel I get is CNN. Which starts to repeat pretty quickly. So I lost again. I think it was only 8:30.

But it made it pretty easy to get up in the morning for my conference. I won't bore you non-science folk with the details, but it was easily the best conference ever. San Francisco may have been the best location ever, but content-wise, the Third International DOAS Workshop wins hands down. 95% of the talks and posters were either relevant or highly interesting. They do some cool things with DOAS. My talk went well, and I have loads of new ideas to try when I'm back home. Also, I had to tell everyone about the University of Toronto. They had all heard of York, but not UofT. Many of them had heard of Ted or Jim, but hadn't known where they were. It was odd. Also, there's a guy at York doing DOAS. Who apparently knows someone in Engineering at UofT doing DOAS. We have plans to have a mini-DOAS meeting when we get back home. Oh! The next DOAS meeting may be in China in 2008, timed to coincide with the Olympics. A reason to stay in DOAS, or get into it if you're not!

We ended at 3:30 this afternoon, and Florence (owner of the French version of my instrument) and I went to the Science Centre that we've been passing every day on the way to the meeting. I love science centres. Two things of note: (1) they used to have a leaf cutter ant colony, but it recently died. This is interesting because the Ontario Science Centre (which I visited for the first time since childhood this January) also has a recently deceased ant colony. Creepy. (2) They have a "humans" exhibit that contains a walk-in womb. Meli, I took pictures, but they didn't turn out that well. It as cosy and comforting, as you might expect. They had places to sit on the walls. I sat in a womb today. The last time I did that I was negative age.

I'm off to Copenhagen tomorrow morning, when my real travels will begin. I expect I will miss my private room with my own bathroom and double bed. But, Copenhagen/the rest of Scandinavia will make up for it in other ways.