Sleepless in Spain

October 23-25, 2011

The Spanish culture is famous for its late dinners that typically, even on weeknights, begin at 10PM. Due to jet lag the late dinners don’t feel so bad, because it is 4PM in Boston. What has been difficult, though, is dining until 12:30 AM every night, then getting back to the hotel room and checking email until the wee hours of the morning, and being expected to be at the conference promptly at 8:30 AM! It doesn’t help that it is absolutely pitch black outside until around 9AM. It is very disorienting. Despite that, the dinners have been quite nice. The first night they took the speakers to the “Salon Aljibe,” which is an Arabic word for well. The room in which we ate was located over an old well. The floor is transparent. The second night was the conference dinner, which was held at the soccer stadium where the famous team “Real Madrid” plays. The wine and some deadly unnamed liqueur flowed. I took one tiny sip and decided it was not worth drinking, especially after I experienced absinthe J On the last night one of the local geneticists, Marta, took another speaker and I out for a tour of her neighborhood.