Oh Canada!

I am returned from the first Joint Congress on Evolutionary Biology held in Ottawa from the 6th to 10th July. It was.... huge. 2500 attendees and 16 separate talk sessions, two poster evenings and one food-less banquet. The highlights? Meeting and making friends with many like-minded people, humble scientific geniuses and putting faces to all the names I've seen in the evolution papers I've read. All the talks I attended were fantastic and of high quality, and the ones I understood even more so (seriously, when there is such a wide variety of fields -within fields - it is pretty hard to understand everyone's research unless you are a scientific jack-of-all-trades).

The lowlight was the banquet: thrusting 1500 people into a - granted, enormous - room and then provide 50 seats, and have the small appetisers - oh sorry, dinner - run out for the evening before you even see the table where they (supposedly) were. Epic. Fail. On the brighter side, MacDonald's has no concept of a "small meal" in Canada, so there were plenty of satisfied customers after the "banquet".

For the Australians, yes, I did see squirrels and chipmunks. No, I did not see a moose. One day, one day....