Hello from Orlando! Yes, amidst a beautiful fall weekend in San Francisco (and Jacques' birthday on Saturday), I've flown here to the humid oven that is Orlando, FL to cover a convention.
I can't imagine that it wasn't that long ago when Orlando used to mean this to me:
(Photos courtesy to various sources on the internet, i.e. I forgot where I got them from)
Squeezing to get a front seat on Main Street to watch the parade under a sky lit up by firework, sticking out a finger "E.T.-Phone-Home style" flying over a plastic full moon on the nostalgic E.T. ride, visiting "Future World" in Epcot Center where you watch "families in the 21st century" eat spaghetti with state-of-the-art nuclear-powered sporks. Those were the days when coming to Orlando meant having a silly good time.
Well, coming to Orlando has taken on a different meaning since I've begun my career in the pharmaceutical industry. Orlando, home of one of the largest convention centers in the country, hosts a variety of medical conventions throughout the year. My job would be to attend one of these conventions to cover the latest and greatest in my therapeutic area.
In this case, I'm attending the ginormous American Heart Association Annual Scientific Session. Cutting-edge science in cardiology is being reported left and right for 4 full days, and it's attended by almost 30,000 physicians and researchers and pharmaceutical folks from all around the world. It was quite an eye-opening experience when you're here for the first time. This is my 4th year here.
My day pretty much consists of getting up, going to the convention center, attending breakfast meetings, lunch meetings, dinner meetings, after-dinner meetings, heading back to the hotel, do some more work on the computer, take an Ambien, go to sleep.
OK, once in a while, my coworkers and I do fun stuff like sneaking out to the nearby outlet mall and engage in some retail therapy in between meetings. But we don't do that often enough.
So, here's an updated picture of what Orlando means to me these days:
(Photos courtesy to my Sony Ericsson Walkman W580i cell phone)
Left: Walking until your feet become one bloody blistery mess in the 40+ acres (yes, I said ACRES) of convention space
Right: Catching up on e-mails and reading reviews about the day's studies reported on sites like www.theheart.org till my eyelids fail to operate
I'm ready to go home.
