Off to the conference in Rome

Sunday saw us waking up very early in preparation for our flight to Rome. In addition, Ray was flying out as well to go visit his family in the U.S., so he was up even before us at 4am. The rest of us dragged ourselves out of bed at 5am, readied ourselves and then loaded up the car to drive to Stansted airport just north of London - about an hour away. We parked in the vast parkades and took a shuttle bus to the airport, where we checked in with Ryanair, a discount airliner from which we purchased return tickets to Rome for 160$ CA.

After checking our luggage, we basically went through security and then rested at a Starbucks until we went to our gate. With the discount airlines, they don't assign anyone a seat, so it's really a free-for-all to get seats together if you are more than one person flying. Apparently, though, this is the most efficient way to load a plane (i.e. the fastest) and that's why the airline does it that way. I have to say, it did load quite quickly, and then we were off in the air for 2 hours. The Ryanair airplane looked like a budget airline - we were packed in like sardines and everything seemed chinsy on the plane. I guess you can't ask for too much when we paid so little for our flight.

We arrived at the Rome Ciampino airport on time, but had to wait quite awhile for our luggage to show up. We emerged from the airport into hot humid weather, and found the driver our B&B had sent. This driver was quite nice and he really was a safe driver, although he got a little lost getting to our B&B once we were in the small streets. Not that I can really blame him - the roads are tiny, poorly marked and are a maze of one-way streets. In the end, we had to walk back one block to get to our B&B, but that wasn't so bad.

Our B&B was on the 5th and 6th floor of a residential building. There was a small elevator that we sent our luggage up in with my Mom, while the rest of us trekked up the flights. We checked in without a hitch and deposited our stuff in our room before heading out again. We wanted to find my conference ahead of time, since as I mentioned, the streets were confusing. Our B&B was only a few blocks from my conference location, however the streets are not a grid, so it wasn't entirely straightforward to find the place. In fact, it proved even more difficult to find the place than we intended, because it turned out the conference was in the back of a government building that had to signs out front to let us know that's where the conference was. We walked by it the first time none-the-wiser, especially since I hadn't bothered to double check the exact address because conferences ALWAYS HAVE SIGNS OUTSIDE!! And, are usually in hotels or obvious conference centres. Having been unsuccessful finding it, we found an internet cafe and checked the address again. We had been on the right street, so we headed back and looked again. By now, the building had put an attendant at the front door to direct people where to go, so it was clearer now where we should be, but she hadn't been there before when we were lost.

Here is the front courtyard of the conference:And the second courtyard:It was a pretty nice building. I registered with the conference and got my token conference bag and booklet, then I set up my poster in the poster room.Here are some more pictures of the building:Amanda and I in front of the courtyard:The crew left me at the conference and returned to the hotel, with plans to meet me after the first session was complete. Several hours later I met up with them again and we wandered around to find a restaurant for dinner. The restaurant was near our B&B and had decent food, but we didn't linger since we were very tired from our traveling and hit the hay quite early.