Bertinoro - Arrival & Day 1

Finally I got hold of a stable Internet connection so I can post about my experience in Bertinoro di Romagna so far.

I took the train yesterday at 17.00 and I arrived in Bologna at 18.42, on time (that is rare for Trenitalia). There I found the EGF people and some of the course members, and we took a small van to Bertinoro. It’s far from Bologna, much more than I imagined: the whole trip took about one hour. Then we got assigned to our rooms, and given a keycard. This opens all doors of the university center (save the main door for me, and I don’t know why) and my own room. I’m sharing it with a nice guy from Cameroon that’s studying in the Netherlands.

Dinner was a buffet of cold stuff (I just got some fruid and a piece of cake) and I talked a bit with also two other Italian girls (one is studying in my same PhD program). I was terribly tired, so then I just went to my room (but I spent a while trying to make the wireless connection work).

I woke up at 6.30 - ick - and had breakfast around 7.30 in the dining hall of the Center. Then, I moved towards the Rook where the courses would have taken place. There were immediately some difficulties with a projector, so the starting lecture was delayed by 30 minutes (and we had it in the computer room). We had overall five talks today the first were a general introduction followed by a still general talk on the applications and uses of sequence analysis, and a  very hard to follow talk on gene prediction.

We then had lunch break in the Center’s main canteen (quite nice) then thirty minutes off before the next round of talks. I took the time to get a network cable here so I could use my laptop (that’s where I’m writing from now).

The afternoon talks were about protein-protein interaction, and a devastatingly long dissertation on statistical methods for bioinformatics. I came back an hour ago and I’m very tired. I have plans to go with the Italian people, my roommate and two of his colleagues somewhere to eat, I have a € 15 coupon to use for food in local restaurants.

I took some photos, but they’ll have to wait until I come back. Overall, this looks interesting. I wonder how the next days willl be…