ISMB 2008 Toronto

Just came back from the ISMB (Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology) 2008 conference at Toronto! It was a 5-day conference from 19th to 23rd. Due to the 'expensive' registration fee (550 at least for early bird), we chose to just drive from New Haven to save cost. Originally I thought an 8hr or more drive would be very exhausting, but it turned out the road trip was not that bad and was kind of fun. I guess it might not be too much worse than flying considering all the waiting and connecting time. So we (I, Mohamed, Pavi, and ThaiBinh) drove to Toronto on 19th in the morning and arrived at 8:30pm. We stopped by the Niagara Falls on the US side and visited briefly. If it was not raining, we would have spent a longer time and took a boat trip there. But it's not a problem since there is always next time : ) We spent most of our time (relatively) on the conference so we haven't really explored Toronto that much. But as usual, there are always talks that you can skip : ) So in the afternoon before the day we left, I bought a one-day pass and did a super quick sightseeing of Toronto. I took the Metro subway to the Queen's Park, University of Toronto, Royal Ontario Museum, Casa Loma (some sort of castle), and then took the street car to the Lake Ontario and back to our Hotel on King street. My overall experience of Toronto is that people are in general quite nice. The subway is clean and convenient. The city is also quite organized. The bad thing is that the QEW always seems to have traffic and the conference didn't have enough food and water provided, ridiculously. Besides, we were also invited by Meisha to have a get together at her home on Sunday and enjoyed a very nice treat from her whole family. And also we got a chance to meet with Pavi's mum as she is now working in Toronto. Her mum was so nice that even treated us a lunch at the Richtree restaurant : ) On our way back, we visited Rochester (Mohamed's feel-like home) and RIT, and almost tried 'something different' for our dinner. And finally, under the quite severe storm, we safely came back around 2 in the morning!

Photos: http://picasaweb.google.com/hugolam/ISMB2008Toronto