Everybody lies

I had to go to a scientific conference today. Sounds fancy? It isn’t, really.

But then again, what do I know, this was only the second one I have been to in my life. The first one was back when I was still a student and I have quite fond memories of it, because my friends and me were involved in the organization of it, which was a lot of fun. The workshops and presentations themselves I don’t remember at all anymore.

Now this one I was more or less forced to go to. And not only today, tomorrow as well. Because our professor told us to do a write-up of one of the presentations. Which wouldn’t be all that bad, if it wasn’t for the fact that the topic of this particular conference is “cytomics and immunology”. And yes, that is exactly as incomprehensible and, in fact, a lot more boring than it sounds. The, what I thought before, only redeeming fact of it all is that the presentations are held in english instead of german.

Oh boy, was I wrong to look forward to that! I think, there is not one native english speaker among the whole bunch of scientists at this thing. Most of them are german, one woman is scottish (an accent I usually love, but she was mumbling so bad I couldn’t make out a damn word she said), others are spanish, portuguese or god knows what else. There was a very young czech guy, who was so nervous and was talking in fits and bursts, that not only wasn’t I able to catch what in hell he was talking about, but I also was afraid all the time that he would just collapse any moment. (And, honestly, that was the most excitement I had all day.)

But the worst, the absolute unbelievably gruesome rock-bottom awful ones were the germans. They literally made my ears bleed with their wretched pronounciation and this dreadful german accent. *blech* Not funny. (And I pray to all the gods I don’t believe in that I don’t sound anything like this when I talk english!)

Besides all that it was absolutely boring, because I haven’t got the faintest idea what they were talking about in the first place. My knowledge of immunology is rudimentary, to say the least, and my interest in it is even less well developed. And those presentations are from specialists for other specialists. They are so detailed and specialized that they could have talked chinese for all I cared.

One good thing, though: the food was pretty good.

On the other hand: today was my birthday and this crap completely ruined it.