Apart from that
Jul. 23rd, 2011 08:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livI actually had a really great time last week; I feel a little guilty for posting about the one annoying incident so that it eclipsed everything else.
I joined forces with a colleague, SL, which meant for a much less boring journey as well as being able to afford rather luxurious accommodation; an expenses allowance of £60 per night for a single room doesn't go very far in Edinburgh in season, but £120 per night for a twin room is much more plausible. There's a rather convenient direct train from Crewe to Edinburgh (I still haven't got over living in the Midlands with decent train connections), which takes you through the Lake District, and then across the Scottish lowlands.
Even with landscapes that beautiful, I don't want to spend 3 hours looking out of the window; happily SL had thought to bring DVDs, so we watched Mr and Mrs Smith. I enjoyed it a lot more than I expected to; it's a dumb action comedy, but the chemistry between Pitt and Jolie and the genuinely funny script really elevated it above the forgettable. In fact the train was diverted via Glasgow due to a freight train colliding with a herd of cows on the line between Carlisle and Edinburgh; this is not actually hilarious (poor cows!) but surreal enough to make us laugh.
We checked in to our gorgeous B&B, 53 Fredrick Street. I had been a little dubious about the fact that the accommodation is rooms above the bar, but for one thing it's a really classy bar, and for another the bedrooms are several floors up, in a solidly built, classic Edinburgh stone house, so noise isn't at all an issue. The only other place I've stayed that was as well-appointed was Gianna's in Florence. More than worth the minor embarrassment of sharing a room with a work colleague, that's all I can say.
To recuperate from the rather gruelling journey (ended up being nearly 5 hours including the diversion and the slightly awkward change at Glasgow), we decided to investigate the bar, Rick's. We picked up a drinks menu at the bar and were promptly overwhelmed by options paralysis. Happily the barman came to our rescue; he offered to make us bespoke cocktails, which was an amazing favour. This is how I ended up drinking an apricot and basil daiquiri, and SL an elderflower and gooseberry gin fizz, both rather amazing. That gave us the energy for a long-ish walk to the southern side of the city, the part where the touristy Royal Mile area blends into the student and immigrant quarter. The reason for the long walk was to return to one of my favourite restaurants in the UK, the veggie Indian Ann Purna. Ann Purna was just as lovely, though not quite as cheap, as I remembered it.
The conference itself was in the seriously magnificient Royal College of Physicians Edinburgh. The college, however beautiful, is not really adequate for a conference of this size, so quite a part of the event was frustrating, with too many people crammed into tiny rooms or even stuck in the narrow corridors getting in the way of other people who wanted to move between tiny rooms. This was exacerbated because of a quirk of organization of this particular conference. The thing about the ASME meeting is that most doctors can get funding to attend on the precondition that they present some research, and therefore ASME makes a big effort to give just about everybody a chance to present. One of the ways they do this is by having lots of 10-minute talks, with 6 or 8 going on at a time, and only five minute to move between talks. This really didn't work well in an overcrowded building.
Also, well, some people apparently think that it's appropriate to stick a thrown-together quiz on SurveyMonkey, run some very basic stats and present it at a professional conference as "research". By no means all of it was like that, but even so, medical education is a rather odd little speciality. It contains a mix of serious social scientists, and people who are basically clinicians and who have drifted into MedEd almost by accident, which is to say that if they have a research background at all, it's fairly limited and entirely natural sciences based. A few of my colleagues who, like me, come from a bioscience background, commented that the conference was refreshing compared to biology conferences, because people tended to be supportive and friendly, rather than tearing eachother to pieces. Honestly, I think some of the research could benefit from a bit of tearing to pieces, and I personally feel more comfortable in the sort of environment where the data is the dominant thing, than in this situation where it was much more about networking and jockeying for social position.
That said, being new to this area of study I learned a lot of new stuff and there was plenty going on that I found really interesting. Besides which I always enjoy exchanging ideas about teaching with people who are seriously dedicated to it, whether or not they are academically rigorous about how they describe what they do. I went to a really great workshop on "unexplained symptoms", for example. This is a technical term, it doesn't mean diseases whose exact cause is unknown, because that's large swathes of all of medicine, it means patients who are in pain or have problems with normal functioning, but there's no physical or biochemical test that can identify anything wrong with them. Part of the issue with this area is that unexplained symptoms could be psychosomatic, or they could be entirely physiological in origin, but caused by something that we don't yet know how to test for.
I also went to a workshop on gender and sexual diversity, which was somewhat mixed. It was run by a rather intense LGBT activist, who started out by saying that we were "safe" to ask any questions we wanted, nothing was stupid or politically incorrect, and then bit people's heads off for asking questions that could be perceived as unfair to LGBT students, or effectively told us to just effing Google it, and in only slightly more polite terms. Still, some really good discussion, and when I mentioned to her intense activist after the workshop finished that she was framing things as if assuming nobody present in the group could possibly be Queer she was very receptive.
Other themes that emerged: there's a huge problem with Asian medical students performing much worse (on average, it's by no means universal) than white students. Nobody knows why, and everybody is worried about it. It's not helped by the fact that "Asian" is a really vague ethnic group, and since everybody uses the census categories, you can break it down no further than Indian, Pakistani, Chinese and "other".
Medical training, both as a student and the ordeals that newly qualified doctors go through, basically makes people really jaded, in a measurable way. Perhaps not unrelatedly, medical students typically don't want any kind of pastoral support or help with coping, they want coaching for exams and advice that will help them get ahead in their careers.
I did quite a lot of wandering around Edinburgh New Town, mainly in order to give myself a break from the fairly intense programme and the stuffy, airless rooms. I kept feeling intensely melancholy about how lovely Edinburgh is and how much I wish I still lived in Scotland. I mean, it's a bit grim in the middle of festival when you can't move for tourists, and it's very grim in winter when you don't get nearly enough daylight but rarely (in the southern half of the country, anyway) get decent snow in compensation. But the landscape and the quality of the light and the accent and cities which are clean and spacious and attractive but still lively and exciting. I miss lots of other things about Scotland too which are not immediately perceptible by just walking round cities, but I was reminded of them by being there.
SL and I made several return trips to Rick's to try more of the exciting cocktails, though we learned from experience and sat down with the menu for 10 minutes before trying to order. I had a raspberry Moscow Mule (vodka with raspberry and lime), and a Tropical Storm tall rum thing, which was rather spoiled by using poor quality ginger beer that tasted of artificial sweeteners. We also enjoyed a range of breakfasts there; they were included in our accommodation, and since conferences generally tend to feed you at every possible opportunity, I was much happier with single portions of really tasty food than the usual unlimited but mediocre fry-up you get in typical B&Bs. A really gorgeous buttered kipper one day, a veggie fried breakfast another (which was good but they tried to pass a hash brown off as a potato scone), and a waffle with maple syrup and berries the third day. And a sizeable group of colleagues ended up there again for a rather boozy and generally luxurious evening meal. We also had a meal out at Stac Polly, which was pleasant but honestly not that exciting for veggies. Going out with a bunch of doctors means spending more than I usually would, which I don't mind at for a one-off occasion and Edinburgh has some really great choices, and also listening to gruesome medical anecdotes.
I had tried to arrange a visit to my old community in Dundee while I was in the area. This sort of worked, but they were a bit disorganized about actually confirming arrangements, so I ended up going there for Friday night (rather than Saturday as I'd hoped). It was lovely to see the shul again and catch up with old friends, though nobody had quite got their act together about going out for a meal or drinks after the service, so I just went straight back to Edinburgh. Although I'm pretty sure it was pure disorganization and not a personal insult, I still felt a bit hurt about being sent home again almost straight after arriving. Anywayjack arrived late that evening, and joined me in a rather less plush B&B, Craigmoss. Craigmoss is a very average sort of place, perfectly pleasant but just your typical over-floral, slightly out of town B&B.
We had a pretty leisurely day on Saturday, visiting the Scottish Parliament (where we sheltered from some really impressive rain) but otherwise just enjoying the city without feeling pressured to do lots of tourist stuff. Since the weather was very mixed, we spent a lot of the day eating and sitting indoors, and stuck to the city centre rather than any of the lovely Edinburgh parks and hills. We had lunch in Ann Purna, visited Gladstone's Land, a historic house on the Royal Mile, and ended up in Henderson's back in the New Town (thanks for the rec,khalinche!) where we had tea and cake. And since the café closed at 6, too early to move straight on to dinner when we'd had a late and substantial lunch, I dragged jack back to Rick's in order to try some more cocktails. He picked a rainbow one which was pink with Skittles, and a thing called a ménage à trois which had vodka, brandy and port with lemon peel and chocolate bitters. jack found it a little overwhelming but I was quite taken with it, definitely my second favourite after the bespoke daiquiri! Then we returned to the restaurant part of Henderson's for a pleasant if slightly hippy dinner (it's a bit like the Rainbow Café in Cambridge, I'd say).
Sunday we checked out of the B&B and spent the morning at the Royal Yacht Britannia. The yacht is very cool, but the tour is set up for Americans who think that British Royalty is really fascinating, I was hoping for more geeky stuff about how the ship ran and less carefully crafted snippets of royal gossip. They put a great deal of emphasis on the fact that the Duke of Edinburgh is more masculine than the Queen, which seemed something of a low bar for machismo!
I'd kind of miscalculated how far it would be to walk to the waterfront from our B&B on the edge of Leith, and since the tour was based on audio recordings, it took longer than it would have if there had been plaques to read or skim. This meant that we didn't have quite enough time for lunch before my 3 pm train; we managed to get a bus back in to town, and we were discussing what to do about food when a nice lady broke in to our conversation and recced us a pleasant Italian restaurant that was conveniently located. I love how Scottish people aren't embarrassed to offer help to strangers! The restaurant wasn't amazingly memorable (though it did have a traditional clown in it entertaining kids), but it was certainly better than rushing around trying to pick somewhere when we were so pushed for time.
Anyway, that was a lovely, lovely trip in many ways, both relaxing and intellectually stimulating. The only thing is that the melancholy of returning to a place I used to love has made me doubt that I'm making the right choices about my career and my love-life and the balance between them. We'll see.
I joined forces with a colleague, SL, which meant for a much less boring journey as well as being able to afford rather luxurious accommodation; an expenses allowance of £60 per night for a single room doesn't go very far in Edinburgh in season, but £120 per night for a twin room is much more plausible. There's a rather convenient direct train from Crewe to Edinburgh (I still haven't got over living in the Midlands with decent train connections), which takes you through the Lake District, and then across the Scottish lowlands.
Even with landscapes that beautiful, I don't want to spend 3 hours looking out of the window; happily SL had thought to bring DVDs, so we watched Mr and Mrs Smith. I enjoyed it a lot more than I expected to; it's a dumb action comedy, but the chemistry between Pitt and Jolie and the genuinely funny script really elevated it above the forgettable. In fact the train was diverted via Glasgow due to a freight train colliding with a herd of cows on the line between Carlisle and Edinburgh; this is not actually hilarious (poor cows!) but surreal enough to make us laugh.
We checked in to our gorgeous B&B, 53 Fredrick Street. I had been a little dubious about the fact that the accommodation is rooms above the bar, but for one thing it's a really classy bar, and for another the bedrooms are several floors up, in a solidly built, classic Edinburgh stone house, so noise isn't at all an issue. The only other place I've stayed that was as well-appointed was Gianna's in Florence. More than worth the minor embarrassment of sharing a room with a work colleague, that's all I can say.
To recuperate from the rather gruelling journey (ended up being nearly 5 hours including the diversion and the slightly awkward change at Glasgow), we decided to investigate the bar, Rick's. We picked up a drinks menu at the bar and were promptly overwhelmed by options paralysis. Happily the barman came to our rescue; he offered to make us bespoke cocktails, which was an amazing favour. This is how I ended up drinking an apricot and basil daiquiri, and SL an elderflower and gooseberry gin fizz, both rather amazing. That gave us the energy for a long-ish walk to the southern side of the city, the part where the touristy Royal Mile area blends into the student and immigrant quarter. The reason for the long walk was to return to one of my favourite restaurants in the UK, the veggie Indian Ann Purna. Ann Purna was just as lovely, though not quite as cheap, as I remembered it.
The conference itself was in the seriously magnificient Royal College of Physicians Edinburgh. The college, however beautiful, is not really adequate for a conference of this size, so quite a part of the event was frustrating, with too many people crammed into tiny rooms or even stuck in the narrow corridors getting in the way of other people who wanted to move between tiny rooms. This was exacerbated because of a quirk of organization of this particular conference. The thing about the ASME meeting is that most doctors can get funding to attend on the precondition that they present some research, and therefore ASME makes a big effort to give just about everybody a chance to present. One of the ways they do this is by having lots of 10-minute talks, with 6 or 8 going on at a time, and only five minute to move between talks. This really didn't work well in an overcrowded building.
Also, well, some people apparently think that it's appropriate to stick a thrown-together quiz on SurveyMonkey, run some very basic stats and present it at a professional conference as "research". By no means all of it was like that, but even so, medical education is a rather odd little speciality. It contains a mix of serious social scientists, and people who are basically clinicians and who have drifted into MedEd almost by accident, which is to say that if they have a research background at all, it's fairly limited and entirely natural sciences based. A few of my colleagues who, like me, come from a bioscience background, commented that the conference was refreshing compared to biology conferences, because people tended to be supportive and friendly, rather than tearing eachother to pieces. Honestly, I think some of the research could benefit from a bit of tearing to pieces, and I personally feel more comfortable in the sort of environment where the data is the dominant thing, than in this situation where it was much more about networking and jockeying for social position.
That said, being new to this area of study I learned a lot of new stuff and there was plenty going on that I found really interesting. Besides which I always enjoy exchanging ideas about teaching with people who are seriously dedicated to it, whether or not they are academically rigorous about how they describe what they do. I went to a really great workshop on "unexplained symptoms", for example. This is a technical term, it doesn't mean diseases whose exact cause is unknown, because that's large swathes of all of medicine, it means patients who are in pain or have problems with normal functioning, but there's no physical or biochemical test that can identify anything wrong with them. Part of the issue with this area is that unexplained symptoms could be psychosomatic, or they could be entirely physiological in origin, but caused by something that we don't yet know how to test for.
I also went to a workshop on gender and sexual diversity, which was somewhat mixed. It was run by a rather intense LGBT activist, who started out by saying that we were "safe" to ask any questions we wanted, nothing was stupid or politically incorrect, and then bit people's heads off for asking questions that could be perceived as unfair to LGBT students, or effectively told us to just effing Google it, and in only slightly more polite terms. Still, some really good discussion, and when I mentioned to her intense activist after the workshop finished that she was framing things as if assuming nobody present in the group could possibly be Queer she was very receptive.
Other themes that emerged: there's a huge problem with Asian medical students performing much worse (on average, it's by no means universal) than white students. Nobody knows why, and everybody is worried about it. It's not helped by the fact that "Asian" is a really vague ethnic group, and since everybody uses the census categories, you can break it down no further than Indian, Pakistani, Chinese and "other".
Medical training, both as a student and the ordeals that newly qualified doctors go through, basically makes people really jaded, in a measurable way. Perhaps not unrelatedly, medical students typically don't want any kind of pastoral support or help with coping, they want coaching for exams and advice that will help them get ahead in their careers.
I did quite a lot of wandering around Edinburgh New Town, mainly in order to give myself a break from the fairly intense programme and the stuffy, airless rooms. I kept feeling intensely melancholy about how lovely Edinburgh is and how much I wish I still lived in Scotland. I mean, it's a bit grim in the middle of festival when you can't move for tourists, and it's very grim in winter when you don't get nearly enough daylight but rarely (in the southern half of the country, anyway) get decent snow in compensation. But the landscape and the quality of the light and the accent and cities which are clean and spacious and attractive but still lively and exciting. I miss lots of other things about Scotland too which are not immediately perceptible by just walking round cities, but I was reminded of them by being there.
SL and I made several return trips to Rick's to try more of the exciting cocktails, though we learned from experience and sat down with the menu for 10 minutes before trying to order. I had a raspberry Moscow Mule (vodka with raspberry and lime), and a Tropical Storm tall rum thing, which was rather spoiled by using poor quality ginger beer that tasted of artificial sweeteners. We also enjoyed a range of breakfasts there; they were included in our accommodation, and since conferences generally tend to feed you at every possible opportunity, I was much happier with single portions of really tasty food than the usual unlimited but mediocre fry-up you get in typical B&Bs. A really gorgeous buttered kipper one day, a veggie fried breakfast another (which was good but they tried to pass a hash brown off as a potato scone), and a waffle with maple syrup and berries the third day. And a sizeable group of colleagues ended up there again for a rather boozy and generally luxurious evening meal. We also had a meal out at Stac Polly, which was pleasant but honestly not that exciting for veggies. Going out with a bunch of doctors means spending more than I usually would, which I don't mind at for a one-off occasion and Edinburgh has some really great choices, and also listening to gruesome medical anecdotes.
I had tried to arrange a visit to my old community in Dundee while I was in the area. This sort of worked, but they were a bit disorganized about actually confirming arrangements, so I ended up going there for Friday night (rather than Saturday as I'd hoped). It was lovely to see the shul again and catch up with old friends, though nobody had quite got their act together about going out for a meal or drinks after the service, so I just went straight back to Edinburgh. Although I'm pretty sure it was pure disorganization and not a personal insult, I still felt a bit hurt about being sent home again almost straight after arriving. Anyway
jack arrived late that evening, and joined me in a rather less plush B&B, Craigmoss. Craigmoss is a very average sort of place, perfectly pleasant but just your typical over-floral, slightly out of town B&B. We had a pretty leisurely day on Saturday, visiting the Scottish Parliament (where we sheltered from some really impressive rain) but otherwise just enjoying the city without feeling pressured to do lots of tourist stuff. Since the weather was very mixed, we spent a lot of the day eating and sitting indoors, and stuck to the city centre rather than any of the lovely Edinburgh parks and hills. We had lunch in Ann Purna, visited Gladstone's Land, a historic house on the Royal Mile, and ended up in Henderson's back in the New Town (thanks for the rec,
khalinche!) where we had tea and cake. And since the café closed at 6, too early to move straight on to dinner when we'd had a late and substantial lunch, I dragged jack back to Rick's in order to try some more cocktails. He picked a rainbow one which was pink with Skittles, and a thing called a ménage à trois which had vodka, brandy and port with lemon peel and chocolate bitters. jack found it a little overwhelming but I was quite taken with it, definitely my second favourite after the bespoke daiquiri! Then we returned to the restaurant part of Henderson's for a pleasant if slightly hippy dinner (it's a bit like the Rainbow Café in Cambridge, I'd say). Sunday we checked out of the B&B and spent the morning at the Royal Yacht Britannia. The yacht is very cool, but the tour is set up for Americans who think that British Royalty is really fascinating, I was hoping for more geeky stuff about how the ship ran and less carefully crafted snippets of royal gossip. They put a great deal of emphasis on the fact that the Duke of Edinburgh is more masculine than the Queen, which seemed something of a low bar for machismo!
I'd kind of miscalculated how far it would be to walk to the waterfront from our B&B on the edge of Leith, and since the tour was based on audio recordings, it took longer than it would have if there had been plaques to read or skim. This meant that we didn't have quite enough time for lunch before my 3 pm train; we managed to get a bus back in to town, and we were discussing what to do about food when a nice lady broke in to our conversation and recced us a pleasant Italian restaurant that was conveniently located. I love how Scottish people aren't embarrassed to offer help to strangers! The restaurant wasn't amazingly memorable (though it did have a traditional clown in it entertaining kids), but it was certainly better than rushing around trying to pick somewhere when we were so pushed for time.
Anyway, that was a lovely, lovely trip in many ways, both relaxing and intellectually stimulating. The only thing is that the melancholy of returning to a place I used to love has made me doubt that I'm making the right choices about my career and my love-life and the balance between them. We'll see.
