Tuesday, April 11

What an amazing day! It started earlier than normal..about an hour earlier, which meant I was up at the same time the other girls were. I had to leave the apartment by 7:30 though, so I wasn't in their hair the whole time.

My day was going to be spent at McCormick place once again at a convention called Bio 2006, a worldwide Biotechnology trade show/conference thing. I met with Joan at work at 8 and took a big display case in a taxi van to McCormick place. We walked in and registered, complimentary coffees in hand, with no problems and set up our little science fair board thing for Easter Seals. We were around other non-profit organizations (Lupus foundation, diabetes, etc.) and were just looking to get interest from Bio companies interested in possibly partnering with Easter Seals. I got a chance to walk around the exhibit hall with all the tables and exhibits from all over the world: Holland, Spain, India, every state, almost every province, it was nuts. Everyone was there and wanted to showcase what they had been doing with biotechnology. Anything from stem stell research to genetically modified foods and animals, cures for cancer and AIDS and ways to communicate their findings to people across the world. AMAZING conference. I felt so dumb around all those smart scientists. So I walked around and got free stuff, chatted with a few people, but made myself look as smart as possible. I tried to look like I knew what I was doing.

I walked really slowly past the France display so that I could catch the language, and also really slowly past the Canadian displays so I could catch that wonderful accent again. There's something comforting about hearing the word "about" and "sorry" in Canadian.
After walking around and getting as much free booty as I could, I headed back to the ES display right outside of the main exhibit hall. It was then that I looked through a daily agenda and saw that former President Bill Clinton would be speaking around lunch time! In the hall right next to our display! Yes, Bill Clinton!

Joan and I were elated. I'd never really heard him speak before (just those resounding words "I did not have sexual relations with this woman") so I was very interested in what he would say about globalization and the biotech community! (Mind you, going through my head during a lot of his speech was the whole Monica situation and "how could this man be so dirty and immoral when he's so smart?!") Anyway, I took notes on what he had to say, which was very well presented, I might add. He was an amazing speaker. He rarely looked down at a paper and even shared personal stories with us. It was like listening to a friend up there.

He was about 200 meters/metres away from where we were standing so I didn't really see his face, but I could see his head and his movements. He was also up on three big screens so us back people could see him. So that was my encounter with president Clinton. That story will be told for generations to come! :)