Alley - Vienna style

Yay - see, even in Vienna, I can find a nice alley to blip. As I´m backblipping, I already know that tomorrow´s blip is a nice, coloured, pretty one.

On my own this morning, so I did the tourist thing and mooched around this beautiful city. I don´t quite know why, but I´m not sure what to make of Vienna. It´s the second time I´ve been here and I´ve not really warmed to it either time.

I think part of that is because it´s a romantic city and neither time have I been here in that capacity.

So, I went into Stephansdom and then the Natural History Museum, before heading back to the hotel, to get changed.

Today was the start of the student retreat which is my reason for being here and Stefan picked me up just after two. I learned two lessons from this drive:
1. don´t try and get into a Toyota Landcruiser wearing heels, a fitted knee-length dress and hold-ups. It can be done, but it´s not elegant.

2. Austrian men do stop and look at a map when they get lost in the arse end of nowhere.

The castle is lovely, and my talk which was the first part of the retreat went down well and the students and academics all asked lots of questions.

After dinner, I got roped into participating in a game that the students had devised. I joined a team of academics battling against 2 other teams in which we drew words out of a bag and then had to explain them without using certain words, or mime them or draw them. Easy, you think! Until you know that the words and terms included:
- PCR
- tight junctions
- phagocytosis
- apoptosis

etc., etc.

I impressed everyone by quickly identifying "phagocytosis" as mimed by a fellow team mate. I was impressed by how much cell biology I could remember - especially after a couple of glasses of wine.

Pleased to say that my team won :-)

A fun, but surreal end to the day and the images of a professor acting out the death-throes of a mouse suffering from encaphalitis will stay with me for some time........

More alley-tastic in large