On an ordinary meeting day I will gather my paper and pencils, put the kettle on, pop to the loo, make a cup of tea, and travel no more than 4 floors from my desk to join my colleagues.<\/p>\n
Yesterday’s meeting was on Granville Island, not an actual island but a small piece of reclaimed industrial land that is now a landscaped tourist attraction, complete with public market, nice stores, kayak rentals, etc. My office is only about 3 km away, so as I was only going to the afternoon session of an all-day meeting, I decided to walk down there on my lunch break.<\/p>\n
During my postdoc years, a group of us would sometimes escape the lab early and bike or walk down to Granville Island for a beer, occasionally stopping to play a game of football. This experience has left me with some insider knowledge about the very cool shortcut I took yesterday, camera phone in hand.<\/p>\n
This pleasant, leafy walkway is actually suspended over a main road.<\/p>\n
You can hear the traffic, but can’t see it, unless you climb up a small embankment towards a gap in the vegetation.<\/p>\n Once over the road, I continued through a park, complete with ponds and ducks, towards False Creek (“False” because it’s actually an inlet of the ocean).<\/p>\n Yup, I had a nice sea-side stroll on the way to my meeting!<\/p>\n I was tempted to keep going – the path continues through more parks and several beaches – but dutifully turned right and went to my meeting.<\/p>\n I never got a cup of tea though.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Meetings. Either an exhilarating exchange of ideas that will revolutionise science as we know it, or a bunch of bored people sitting in a room, listening to droning bigwigs. I don’t have half as many meetings as I did in … Continue reading ![\"\"](\"http:\/\/1.bp.blogspot.com\/_Xjsb8ObOj0k\/STVJvkg3f4I\/AAAAAAAAAqo\/pYZNwhLSzcA\/s1600-h\/photo%282%29.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>I turned up happy and relaxed, and grabbed a left-over sandwich and cookie from the morning session. The meeting was small, and focused more on the politics of science than the actual science, but it was interesting.<\/p>\n