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What did you do with your holiday?
Brendan Maher
Wednesday, 20 August 2008 19:58 UTC
Mixing business and pleasure doesn’t have to be a bad thing. I often hear of scientists putting their vacation time to good use, learning about new areas of research or just getting out into the field. Journalists, too, have been known to sneak away from a vacation for a few days of reporting. Two news features in Nature this week remind me that summer is coming to a close, so we best use our vacations wisely. One speaks of researchers returning to a former brothel in Chile to catch and dissect squid in the service of neuroscience. In another, a reporter recounts his trip to Krakatau to see what kind of research can be done on a 3-kilometre-square patch of active volcano
— apparently, quite a lot.
How do you best use your time off from the regular grind? Share your stories. Or write about your greatest wish for the perfect sabbatical. The more outlandish, the better.
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Replies
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Hi,
Currently I prefer disconnecting to thinking about work during my holidays. I have just come back from a 3 weeks trip around China. I have visited Beijing, Xi´an, Hangzhou, Ningbo, Putuo ireland and Shanghai, and also I have made a three days cruise through the Yangtze river. It has been amazing. I have enjoyed the olympic atmosphere, beautiful landscapes, chinese architechture and, specially, chinese people. They are really friendly. Communication has been difficult (I can´t chinese and most of the people can´t english) but we could finally understand each other thanks a mandarine-english dictionary (really useful!), using our patience and making cartoons (it was like playing pictionary!).
This trip has allowed me to know such a different culture, to understand many of their costums and to open my mind. These are some of the reasons that make travelling a good choice for holidays, in my opinion.
Regards,
Lucia -
Indeed, Lucia, a mental break is a good thing. Many times it helps us come back to our work refreshed and more focused than ever. Other times, though it gives people a chance to do different work or see their own work in a new way. Though a bio-nut, myself, I’m still thinking about the geology I encountered on the big island of Hawaii when I went to a meeting there several weeks back
Still, one of my favourite stories of travel well used is that of John Weisel, a cell biologist and microscopist at University of Pennsylvania, who used part of a sabbatical to travel to Isle Royale in lake Superior and track wolves. The exposure to a completely different kind of science led to his first-ever article in an ecology journal. I reported this several years ago, but the story [subscription required] stuck with me of how a good scientist can do good science anywhere.
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