After a refreshing nap at my hotel, a Holiday Inn Express, I took off for the ExCel. I confess, in choosing to stay at the Holiday Inn Express, I had been susceptible to the heavy television advertisement of this chain. I especially enjoy the ads in which a person sounds very erudite and authoritative when expatiating on something and then is asked whether he is a computer engineer or astrophysicist. “No,” he answers, “but I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express,” as if that lodging choice alone was transformative, conveying great intelligence or special learning. I could only imagine myself talking about the role of apoptosis in the pathogenesis of lupus and, when asked, “Are you an immunologist?” I could answer, “Yes, and I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express.” Trust me, I should have splurged despite the state of the dollar. The Connaught would have been a lot more commodious, even if it didn’t make me smarter.
The ExCel
As Ed Sullivan would have said about EULAR 2011, “We have a big show, a really big show.” The ExCel was absolutely gigantic and was situated at the edge of the harbor where the old cargo derricks, stripped and painted black, stood as a reminder of the area’s history. From the distance, the ExCel looked to me like a bird, with a central core for the body and the flanking areas for the conference rooms and exhibit halls the wings. There are no metaphors to describe structures like the ExCel as they are strictly a modern creation. I could say that the ExCel was as big as a battleship, but it would probably be more accurate to say that ExCel could house the entire Sixth Fleet. The main promenade stretched to the horizon. The ExCel is so long that each end has its own train station from the Docklands Light Rail. I would not have been surprised to hear that Ryanair would soon have cheap flights to travel the distance more quickly from entrance to entrance.
Not satisfied with the coverage by the media big boys, I Googled up a storm with entries like ’volcano flight delays’ and ‘volcano Heathrow schedules.’
Even though the ExCel had a remarkable array of restaurants, serving everything from samosas to Cornish pasties to bacon butties, there were no pubs for imbibing the famous warm British beer (although it is now served pretty cold and comes from the Continent; instead of Watneys Red Barrel, people now drink Stella). I had no alternative but to gather some CME and attend sessions and perambulate along the long rows of posters.