Weekend Adventures

This weekend was bound to be a good one. Too bad Friday afternoon's schedule prevented me from looking forward to it. I gave a seminar to a group of clinicians at the Peter MacGellum Cancer Research Institute in Melbourne on Friday afternoon. I didn't find out about it until the Monday before. Needless to say, much frantic presentation preparation occured last week. The seminar went really well. No one in there had ever heard of nanoshells before and they all seemed really excited about it. They also asked a lot of questions which I had not thought about before and had a lot of good ideas. Most of these people were oncologists and they are so knowledgable in the field of cancer in both the disease itself and treatment options. They brought a much bigger-picture perspective to the conversation than academic researchers would. I gleaned lots of interesting ideas from the experience. 1 seminar down....4 to go!



Friday night, Jeanette and I met Al at the Corner Hotel pub in the formerly-run-down-but-now-trendy Richmond neighborhood for dinner and the watch the footy. It was a semi-final game so the place was pretty crazy. It was fun to be in a buzzing sports atmosphere where I really don't care about the outcome of the game. It's nice to be able to observe without my blood pressure going through the roof. Then we went downstairs to see The Fumes and The Vasco Era perform. Wow. Amazing. The Fumes is made of 2 guys: a guitar player and a drummer. The guitar player has long hair and a beard a la 1976. The music is basically Australia meets Southern rock. Sweet. We then went to a couple of more bars in the area. One of which included a live 80s cover band. College flashback. Whoa. Since the trains had stopped running by the time we went home, we took a taxi. My first taxi experience ever. I am so deprived...

Saturday night Carol invited me to a friend's house for dinner. They grilled pork sausage (better than the sausage you get in America), pork chops, and lamb steaks. MMMMMMMMMM. The big "barbecue" side dish here is roast potatoes, which always induce salivation. I was about to explode after dessert thinking the dinner was over. Then they brought out the cheese platter. Apparently that's the way meals are concluded here. Fancy cheese and crackers. Next time I know to leave room for not only dessert but also for cheese! I experienced another first that night. A cat sat on my lap. I have never allowed this to happen in my life. I've never been a huge fan of cats, but I figured since David likes cats, I'd better learn to tolerate them :) I guess the 6-month old cat sensed that I was at least willing to form a truce that it crawled over on my lap and curled up. That was most definitely a first.




Next weekend: The footy Grand Final. The pubs will be hoppin and the barbies will be hot!

Interesting Australia fact of the day: All Americans are known as "Yanks." When the bouncer for one of the pubs asked for my ID, I showed him my Texas drivers license and he smiles and says "oh, you're a yank?" I smiled sweetly and said "no, I am a Southerner" :)

Listening to: Counting Crows