All play and no work makes Anna a boring girl...

(This is a post that I wrote a little while ago, and didn't quite get around to posting.  We were both sick when we got back to Germany from the US, and since then, we've just been laying low and trying to get caught up on work, so I'll spend some time getting caught up telling you about previous adventures).

Or maybe that's not how that saying goes. In any case, I'm interrupting the narrative flow of my jealousy-inducing trip to France to prove to you that we do actually do some work now and again here in Europe. I spent the 9-16 of October in Heidelberg for a pair of conferences hosted by the european molecular biology organization (EMBO).  One conference was on non-coding RNA and the second was about "New approaches and concepts in microbiology". 

Heidelberg has a fabulous castle.  Sasha came to visit on the weekend and we played a (very easy) game of find the castle, including the tour of the inside parts.  The castle is big and a major focus of any tourist visit to Heidelberg, which in turn is a major stop on most tourist itineraries for Germany.  It's a nice city, don't get me wrong, but I'm glad we're in Marburg, which has a similar amount of culture and history and beautiful architecture, but is really just a university town and not a university and tourist town.

OK, the conferences were pretty good (the second more than the first) but I just realized that my audience is so varied I don't know how to describe the science so it doesn't bore or lose all of you.  So I guess I'll limit myself to a few pictures.

I presented a poster, the same at both meetings.

Don't I look knowledgeable? Nobody was interested in my poster, but I thought it was pretty cool!

The conference center is cool; the posters go up these helical spirals, sort of representing DNA (but not accurately)

And inexplicably, there were sheep outside the conference center.

Do they do the lab work after everyone goes home, or are they just fuzzy lawn mowers?

There, see? Europe isn't just one long vacation, I do work, too!