Lady Postdocs in Roscoff

Post date: Nov 04, 2017 7:15:41 PM

In the reoccurring theme of “not all travel is easy luxury” I had quite the start to my trip to Roscoff. Let me set the stage: I spent the whole week before this trip super sick. There were two days where I couldn’t get out of bed. But I needed to get this presentation done for the trip to Roscoff, so I propped myself up in bed and got the work done. It was a struggle.

I had booked the train to the plane to Paris, overnight in Paris and then a train to Roscoff, months ahead of time so I plowed forward even though I still wasn’t feeling 100%. Morning flight means an early morning train ride.

I get on the train at 5am in Halle, and am surprisingly feeling alert. So I’m working away on my laptop when all of a sudden a huge bang comes from one side of the train. Then there are sparks, then another bang. And finally, the train comes shuddering to a stop. It’s 6am, and still pitch black outside.

The train conductor comes down the aisle and tells us that the train has broken down, and it’ll be 10-15 hours before we get out. Which is absurd. I imagine that this is impossible and could not be true. After an hour the same conductor comes down the aisle and lets us know that the entire German train system has shut down. After 3 hours it becomes apparent I will not be making it to my plane in Berlin.

So I call the airline, to see if I can get another flight out. Nothing. AirFrance is shockingly unhelpful.

So I email my boss, and he impresses on me the importance of getting to this meeting come hell or high water.

After another 2 hours, a train is backed up in front of our train (WHY COULDN’T THEY HAVE DONE THIS 4 HOURS AGO) and we walk through the ditch and the mud to get to the new train. It takes us 10 minutes down the road to Lutherstadt-Wittenburg and we get on the last train running to Berlin. My flight is long gone (in fact has already landed in Paris), so I get on Kayak and drop too much money on a last minute flight to Paris. I get in at 9pm, approximately 9 hours after I was scheduled to be there. I’m exhausted, noticeably poorer, but I made it!

So this croissant was not in Paris, but in the Berlin airport, hours after schedule.

BUT I did make it, slept well and took a long walk to the train station the next morning. Appropriately, I passed The Marie Curie building, which made me feel good about being a woman in science!

I also had enough time to sit and drink tea in the Jardin de Luxembourg, one of my favorite spots in Paris. It was crisp but lovely weather.

And upon arriving in Roscoff, before the science even started, I recognized the trip had been worth is. My hotel was on the beach, and it was REALLY nice. When I travel for work, I travel CHEAP! But the room was included in the price of the conference and I didn’t choose where I was staying. It was so nice, I walked back down to the reception to see if I had been given the wrong room. I was not.

Above is the view at sunset, when I decided to go for a walk before the work started. It was prettier in real life.

But additionally, the town was really cute! It was small, and clearly set up for tourists (no grocery store, but a few “gourmet” stores for tourists to buy stuff (like canned fish… which is weird)).

It was a 10 minute walk from the hotel to the conference center, and this was the view every morning. Sometimes in the evening it was nicer…

By far the best part of the conference (including the science) was the ratio of ladies to guys. It was more than 50% ladies, the majority of speakers were ladies, and all the section chairs were ladies. I was unaware that this was the case when I signed up to attend, but it was so very refreshing. To be able to discuss science or life without having to compete with young male scientists’ egos was so very VERY nice.

Above you’ll see my new bff Natalie. The postdocs were all housed together, so not only was I surrounded by a ton of lady scientists, but I was surrounded by a ton of lady postdocs. People who understand what I’m going through, because they are going through the same thing. It was… so refreshing.

Even in the evening, Roscoff was breathtakingly beautiful. Almost all the food was included in the conference registration, but one night we were on our own. So we headed out into town in search of crepes.

The neat thing about Brittany is that the crepes are different. They are made with buckwheat, and are always savory. My friend Thibault has made me Brittany styled crepes a few times. I refuse to feed his ego, so I will refrain from confirming or denying which is better.

Also, unlike the rest of France, Brittany doesn’t really make or drink wine. They are cider people and they drink them from this little tea cup thingy called a boulle, (I think I talked about this when I went to Nice). The cider was so delicious it deserved its own photo.

During a coffee break, Alyssa (one of the other fabulous lady postdocs, and a passionate marine ecologist) took me walking in the tidal flat. We found snails, and sea glass, and generally got in some fresh ocean air.

Did I mention we were on the water? In the background of the below picture you can see the conference venue. It was more than a little distracting, as through the giant window behind the presentation screen you could not only watch the tide role in and out, but you could see colorful little sailboats passing by.

And because postdocs are adults (kind of) we took an afternoon off to wander around town and walk to the end of this very long pier. Which made for a good walk about, great people watching and…

... excellent photos of Roscoff.

My friend Mary has just started her PhD as a Darwin Fellow in Edinburgh. Not only was this her first poster as a PhD student, this was her first conference! Given that she just started a few weeks ago, putting together a cohesive poster so quickly is very impressive!

Did I mention the food was amazing and included in the cost of the conference? Each meal was three courses and each was more delicious than the last. The best part is if I was paying for it out of pocket, I never would have ordered such lavish and delicious meals (because I’m cheap af). But I surely would have missed out, because they really were beyond description in their deliciousness.

The whole week people who had attended the conference in the past kept telling me, “Wait till the final dinner. It’s really something.” Given that every meal was “really something” I was in a bit of disbelief that this mythical meal could be more “something”. I was wrong, and I feel bad about it.

But not too bad because the starter course is photographed above. This was for 6 people, and we cleared the plate. It was AMAZING. This course was followed by Lobster, which was almost as good as the lobster we get in New England.

And this was the final dessert. Luckily, we did a lot of walking each day to offset the intake of such wonderful food. But boy, each meal was better than the last.

The last morning, while waiting for the bus to the train to Paris, Alyssa and I took some time to walk around on the beach one final time. And we found these awesome natural pools, which if I had known about a few days earlier I would have gone swimming in. Or at least tried to see them during high tide, as they surely would have been submerged.

The best part was the woman in this photo. She went into this tide pool and posed, and then went into another one and posed while her husband remained fully clothed and held all her things while taking photos of her. They were both late 50s, and very French. This is the original “husband of Instagram” edition, and it was adorable.

A view of the stairs into the natural pool. I have to imagine that during the summer it would be heaven.

Alyssa, Natalie and I were all planning an evening stopover in Paris on our way back to our respective postdoc locales, and we made plans to get dinner. As always, I’m cheap af, so I suggested my favorite type of Parisian meal: a picnic. They were both game. We hit up a grocery store, bought all the things and made our way to the Siene. And lo and behold, there were actual picnic tables! We were planning on sidewalk sitting, but got to be classy instead. And it was lovely.

The Eiffel Tower lights up at sunset, and stays lit till midnight (trust me, I’ve been there when it’s shut off). And every hour for 5 minutes it sparkles. Which is bizarre, but gorgeous and truly indescribable. Since we were walking by at 7:45pm, we stopped and waited for the sparkle.

I think it keeps striking me as odd that this is my life. That a Friday night in Paris is normal, and not even the most exciting part of a trip anymore. I was talking to one of the other biologists who was trying to optimize the two days she had in Paris, and wanted to know what she should make time to see. It was strange realizing that I didn’t feel that rush to get everything in on this trip, because I know this isn’t the only time I’m going to be in Paris. I’ll be back, and have more picnics, and more walks along the Siene and more sparkle towers.

So until next time France, au revoir

*Note on my personal history with Roscoff-

When I was applying to my Postdoc I had two criteria: 1) I wanted to live abroad so I only applied to positions overseas and 2) I only applied to positions in towns where the population size was over 100,000. I was done with small college towns in the US for awhile (or permenantly really). There was a job that came up that piqued my research interests in Roscoff. I looked up the town, and noticed it was in France (which is a plus!) and on the ocean (another bonus). I was intrigued and started reading about the research… and then I found the population size. 3000 people live in Roscoff. I am single and there is almost no chance of meeting someone in a town of 3000 (quick math, I’m only interested in men, so assuming equal sex ratio, 1500 people. I don’t really date guys younger than 25, and older than 50 is probably too old for me, and so those in the acceptable age demographic are only 750. The proportion of people who are single in that demographic reduces my number further to 180, and requiring we speak the same language reduces my chances to the single digits. Basically, there is very little to no chance that if I came to Roscoff single that I would leave Roscoff as anything but single.), so Roscoff was crossed off the list of postdocs to apply to. That Friday night, a bunch of people were out drinking and one of the postdocs at Idaho, Thibault (the frenchest French man ever, who happens to hail from Brittany), asked how the application process was going. I mentioned that I had almost applied to the world’s smallest small town, but I couldn’t remember the name. He started making fun of this potential place while I looked up the name of the town. When I told him it was Roscoff, his whole demeanor changed. Apparently in his mind Roscoff is the greatest place that has ever existed in the history of the world. He wants to grow old and die there. He dreams of Roscoff. He longs for Roscoff. So the epic “is Roscoff an acceptable place to live” debate started… and would go on for months. Despite my very solid math (see above) about why Roscoff was an inappropriate place for me to be single, he contended that getting laid at some point in my future was not nearly as important as how beautiful the beaches are in Roscoff.

Having now visited I can say with authority, Roscoff is breathtakingly and bizarrely beautiful. But I stand by my previous decision.