The Russians are Coming!

June 23, 2013

From Copenhagen I flew on Scandinavian Airlines to Marbella to speak at the Fetal Medicine Foundation (FMF) meetings. I have never previously seen such a homogenous group of people on a plane. As it was school vacation time, all of the Danish people were apparently headed to Spain for their holidays. They were tall and blond and their children were even blonder! I happened to sit next to the only other “dark blonde” person who turned out to be a Finnish woman scientist who worked for Perkin Elmer, and who was headed to the same meeting. After landing at Pablo Picasso airport, she had a rental car reserved, and gave me a ride to the conference hotel in Marbella, about 30 minutes west. 

My first impression of Marbella was that a lot of the signs, especially related to real estate, were in Russian.

At restaurants the menus were in Russian and there were signs indicating that guests were allowed to pay in rubles. Definitely a sign of the economic crisis in Europe!