Athens Day 4: Gaining insight … and another speech!

Friday was the only day, as it turns out, were I didn’t have to do some sort of presentation. I listened to a lot of presentations, and didn’t understand them all, but I did get some interesting new insights.

Friday afternoon we went to the Acropolis museum, which was really nice — I finally had the idea I was in Athens! It was a guided visit, so I learned a lot about the Greek ancient history.

Afterward, we had the official opening of the conference with a keynote speech from Johns Hopkins University. It was about brain matter, so I didn’t understand a lot of it, but I wasn’t the only one! Then we went to the rooftop garden for the reception (including dinner), and I had some very nice conversations with some doctors from the Netherlands and Italy.

Somewhere halfway in the evening, professor Mary Robertson came up to me with a camera (she took a lot of pictures of me during the dinner yesterday as well!) and wanted us to be in a picture together, which is nice, because I really wanted that too! It’s on her camera, though, so I don’t have it yet. Then she took me to introduce me to a few big people of the world of Tourette, including the keynote speaker of before. And she took pictures as well!

She’s just so much fun — I really like her!

Then the big news of the day: As I said before, they were trying to get my speech into the conference again, and I got a defined go! I don’t know what time it will be, yet, it’s either at the end, like I said before, or — hold on to your heads — right before the keynote speaker!!

Keynote speakers are always the BIG people and everyone (about 250 people) tends to come to the keynote, even if they miss other presentations. Usually the keynote is in between breaks, because it’s so important, but now they’ve suggested that they’ll cut the break by ten minutes, so I can do my speech and right after me, the keynote will come!

Of course, it’s not sure yet — they are going to ask the keynote speaker if he’s OK with it, but if he is, I’ll probably have an audience of about 200 people! So that’s, well … nerve-wracking doesn’t even cover it!

Now I’m going to sleep, because it’s late and it’ll be an EARLY morning! More tomorrow!