Amsterdam

I'm not sure this blog is the right place for comments about work but here goes anyway. Last Friday I attended a one day conference in Amsterdam on pulmonary hypertension (my area of research). Despite having to catch the train out of Brussels at 6:18 am (ugh), to arrive in Amsterdam around 9:15 am, it was a great meeting and they took me out to a fine Indonesian dinner afterwards. Since the Dutch colonized Indonesia, there are many immigrants in the Netherlands and some even cook! Also, in the morning before my train back to my ailing family (more on that elsewhere) I visited the Rijksmuseum, which is sort of the National Museum of the Netherlands/Holland (don't ask me the difference). Lots of Rembrandt, Vermeer and some interesting porcelain, inlaid woodwork, etc. Next time I'll visit the Van Gogh exhibit but I actually thought Josephine might enjoy that one so I saved it for a family trip.

Also, I got to see many coffeehouses that aren't! Pot is free and legal as I'm sure you all know and apparently the place to get it is the coffeehouse. If you're not into smoking, they have lots of "edibles" and I even saw some pot-cookies for sale in a pharmacy window!

Amsterdam is definitely a cyclist's dream. Everyone bikes -- typical occupancy is 1.5 people/per bike -- and the bicycle parking structure at the train structure was a sight to behold.

Anyway, back to work. One happy outcome of the trip to Amsterdam was that my travelling companion on the way to the meeting invited me to work with him this spring. This is excellent for a few reasons. First, he is highly respected in the field. Second, he is based in Brussels, which means I could have a place to work that is not Gent (and not so far away). Third, his research is very clinically oriented, which is a good direction for my work goes in. So, I'm excited! To start, he gave me a bunch of data to analyze and a paper to reference. He also invited Dan and me over to dinner in a week or so. Hopefully, dinner will not start at 10 pm, which is apparently the European tradition!