Day: December 13, 2006

It's just past midnight and I have finally made it back to the hotel. The good news is that I finally found a cashpoint that gave me euro. The bad news is that I have been properly chastised for being late by getting pissed on. It's raining again and my coat is now hanging up to dry. So much for nice weather for the rest of the week. More good news is that I have successfully made it to the center of Antwerp and have scoped out a few shops to investigate for chocolate products.

We had dinner at a restaurant near the square close to the old cathedral. The meal was good, but we were in this outdoorsy terrace place with heating lamps and disco balls. Two of them, even. Belgians are weird people. I had an interesting evening talking with two guys from Warrick who are here for the conference. They kinda sorta just latched onto our group. They were weird as well, especially one of the two. The sort of person I'd not normally hang out with: bit brash, bit full of himself. Still, the other one was really nice and I spent part of the evening talking about the fun problems of bioinformatics and biology in general. It was fun, really, cause his last foray into biology was a-level stuff (and he's in his late 30s right now) so delving into the complexities of combinatorial interactions, protein families, sequence variations, mixed in with a good dose of IT problems made for lively conversation. The look of abject horror on his face at the state of the problems and the lack of solutions was fun :) It reminded me just how much I love science and talking about it and vulgarizing it to people who are interested but never had a clue of the beautiful, elegant complexities of the system.

I would have been ready to head home after dinner, but being without money, map and not relishing having to ask for directions in pseudo-flemish meant that I had to stay with them while they went for a drink. That part was less fun. They went to an outdoor bar that served mulled wine (yetch) and was full of drunken Belgians (who I think i have mentioned are weird) meant that I got really bored really fast (especially when the other dude started talking about his hobby as a pop psychologist and how that helped him pull birds for random shags – a topic he went into with great gusto). That's when I went exploring the square for cash points and chocolate shops. We're going to go there after breakfast tomorrow and then head directly to the conference.

Now that i have a vague idea where I'm going and have funds to get there by myself, I think I'll have a night on my own tomorrow and come back for an early night at the hotel tomorrow night. As much as I like the guys I'm traveling with, I want some quiet time with to call Katy and then I'll read my book and chill at the hotel for a while.

(PS the title of the post was one of the songs that was playing at the outside mulled wine bar. even more yetch…)

For some reason, I keep waking up really early in the morning. I sleep ok, but I just wake up early. Meh, no biggie. Today was good.

I wasn't able to smuggle out pastries for Katy yet cause we didn't find any shops that were open and sold tupperware on our ramblings last night. We might play hookie tomorrow morning, so I might be able to do a spot of shopping and get her some frorm thursday or friday :) I have however, liberated some waffles for her cause they're individually packaged and won't cream the inside of my bag.

The day's sessions were really good. The morning one was all about tips and tricks on how to optimize java for performance and how to investigate bottlenecks. The afternoon session was about Adobe Flex, which is a codebase that lets you write flash applications that are uber sexay. I'm thinking of adding that to my arsenal. I think it might have marketing potential for my CV for future use.

The amount of stuff they give away in the exhibitor hall is truly shocking. Without trying really hard, I walked away with 6 tshirts, a mug, a tuque, a deck of cards and a pair of boxers. I'll see what sort of goodies I can plunder tomorrow :)

The plan for tonight is pretty much like last night, except with better weather. We're all meeting in the hotel lobby at 7 to go for dinner. I'm still euro-less because of the crap banking of last night, but hopefully a guy here will lend me some and I'll pay him back in pounds when we're back in the UK. It's just more annoying than anything else – I have money, I just can't get at it… Note to self for future travel plans, I guess.