Dublin WSAVA conference

Fiddle dee dee Potatoes. In late August we made our way to the Emerald Isle for the 2008 World Small Animal Veterinary Association or WSAVA in Dublin. We are required to go to conferences and education each year so it gives you a good chance to learn more (if that were even possible) and travel to exotic far away places or Ireland.

We were meeting up with Liv and Downy too for the conference and planned to have a few beverages and maybe a guiness too. We stayed at Avalon House hotel/Hostel. It was quite expensive about 80€ a night and boy was it crap. We discovered very soon afterwards that Dublin is an expensive place to stay but this place was shite even by Paris standards. With flooding showers, and itchy uncomfortable beds, bunks etc it really was a bit dumpy. We caught a bus each day to our conference and learned more than we could imagine. A conference full of specialists and nerds really can make you feel inadequate so off course we were all looking forward to the brilliant food you get at a conference! But, and but i say it was not that good. We got lunch bags which had some alright sangers a bit of fruit (poison) and a chocolate and a drink, sometimes water (possibly posionous.) It wasn’t really the buffet Prawn pasta and roast meat that we were looking forward too. Even worse was the fact that the unorganisers of the conference couldn’t even count how many people had paid there 600€ and forgot to order enough lunches. so there were a lot of hungry people on the first day and a lot of stressed unorganisers running around.

Many of the talks were good though and we did really learn. We had our nights out on the town and even met a nice young lass from Perth who we hung out with. We drank far too much Guiness and had a few Irish stews too. We visited the Guiness store house which unfortunately again we found to be crap. I hate to be negative but it really was. I know how to make beer gold or brown and i dont need to pay 16€ to be told whilst slowly climbing up 7 levels of a big building.

The conference finished Sunday and corinne and i flew to Athens monday. Liv and Downy spent another week in Ireland and then flew off to Europe.

Overall i feel we enjoyed the nightlife of Dublin but found the place expensive in every way, more so than the UK and many parts of Europe.

Me and Downy discussing the advantages of phaeco-emulsification over older techniques of cataract removal.

The Shite that 80€ gets you in Dublin

A hot pair of men walking down the main shopping bit of Dublin, note our cool conference bags.

A cool yellow pub

Laughing at how bad the Guiness tastes after drinking too many Guinesses on previous nights.

The woman of questionable intelligence who failed to see me taking a photo from about 20cm away.

Studying hard