I am a very serious researcher

If you take a peek at the comments on my preceding blog, you'll notice that the manager of my wonderful hotel has somehow found the reference to the hotel on my blog, and has made a comment! Thanks, Anton! We haven't met, yet, but I am there until sunday and will certainly find you to say hello in the next couple of days!

So, I was just talking about my day trip, meeting Jennifer, the solo traveller from Toronto, and biking down the peninsula. did I mention it was raining and cold? I can't tell you how grateful I was to find the carafe of hot beverage waiting at the reception of the hotel..." Tea or coffee?" I asked. "Hot chocolate" came the response. "I love you guys" I gushed.

This trip has really reminded me of the pleasure of solo travel. Though I am not technically alone, since many friends/colleagues are also in Cape Town, I am on my own at the hotel, and have certainly had my times eating brekky on my own, enjoying a glass of wine at the bar while waiting for a friend, and the day trips that I took solo. There really are the pros and cons of travelling alone vs. with a friend. I do find myself looking around for Krisi, now and then, and missing her company and tremendous organization skills and forthought (I have no first aid kit, nor chain lock) I'm really enjoying how being on my own is forcing me to be more open and much friendlier. Truly, I think I am my favourite me when I am travelling, and I'm far more excited for my upcoming Cape Town to Addo tour: http://www.capetoaddo.co.za/2008/index.htm, with 9 people I don't know (yet) and for my upcoming day trip to the wine region of Stellenbosch.

so, where was I? Some hot chocolate and a nice hot shower later, and I was on my way down to the hotel bar to meet Barry and Jonathan, two colleagues (and friends) who had come to meet up to go for dinner. We headed out to Willoughby's (a fish restaurant at the V & A waterfront) and enjoyed some great fresh fish and maybe one too many bottles of wine. I had invited jennifer to join us, and she gamely endured our talk of autism, intellectual disabilities, grants, and some highly unprofessional gossip! I initially met both Barry and Jonathan when I began working with the Ontario Association on Developmental Disabilities, Research Special Interest Group. Barry was a bit further ahead in the profession than I was, when i met him, but Jonathan and I have really "grown up" in the field together. We were grad students at the same time, I passed on my role as conference chair of RSIG to him, and eventually my role as committee chair. We won the Academy on Mental Retardation's dissertation award in the same year. And we also both grew up in Montreal. Jonathan will soon begin a position as an Assistant Professor at York university, and we have been chatting about eventually developing long-term research partnerships.

Sort of awkwardly, he's now sitting right beside me as I write about him...he'd like me to mention his skill at bellydancing, but that will have to come in a later entry, as the line for the computers is long, and we have some drinking to do, with Rob and Sean, somewhere in Cape Town. We are very serious researchers.

To be continued.....