School, Eye Exam and the German Market

Now what did I do this week? Well it really seems like it's been two weeks since I last wrote on here because I have been just so busy, but I’ll try to keep this short.

School wise it has been an interesting week. My classes covered a wide range of topics from inflammation and the immune system to entropic phenomenon (which is in basic terms a visual sensation that is due to inconsistencies in the fluids and structures of the eye) and even the basics of prisms (because it's impossible to go a whole week without learning any math!). Actually on Wednesday this week I had four hours of math all with the same professor starting at 9am (which is unusual since normally we only have two hours of lectures on Wednesdays and only one hour of math), so it was definitely a lot all at once, but I luckily got through it (with a little help from a lot of coffee). This week two of my labs were fairly easy since in one we just did a bunch of stuff on Excel and then in one of the other labs we did some more focimetry (lensometry). It was nice to have these fairly straightforward labs, since in my clinical optometry lab we had an assessment on ophthalmoscopy. Basically we were given 30 minutes to use an ophthalmoscope and look into one of our classmates eyes and draw the fundus (aka the retina). We had to include many of the structures of the retina including many of the blood vessels, which we had to colour in using the correct colours. The instructors are then going to mark our drawing against the retinal photographs that they have of each of us. It actually doesn't sound too hard but basically everyone was nervous about it since we have only had three lab sessions so far on ophthalmoscopy, so we didn't really feel ready and thought we would run out of time, but it seemed to go much smoother than most of us thought (although we don't have our marks yet from that, so we'll have to just wait and see).

Part of my course involves me sitting as a patient for an eye exam at the school's optometry clinic and on Thursday I had my eye exam. The exam is performed by the final year students and the reception staff tell all the patients that it will take about an hour and a half. But some of my classmates had told me there's took almost 4 hours, so I made sure I had tones of time, but luckily my exam only took just over an hour. Now the eye exam was definitely different that what we have in Canada. For starters the pretesting involves the usual automated NCT (puff of air test which checks the eye pressures), but then the only other pretest that was done was about a 5-10 minute visual field test, which had two parts for each eye, the first part was just the white stimulus and the second part was a red stimulus. I then went to the exam room and the student and her supervisor introduced themselves. After dealing with all of the patient history portion of the exam the student then used their ophthalmoscope and looked at the exterior of my eye, the cornea and then all of the structures of my eye and then did a comprehensive examination of my retina. The student then placed a trial frame on my and did retinoscopy to objectively determine my spectacle prescription. They then subjectively confirmed and slightly modified the prescription by having me read out the letters and look at some spots on the eye chart while they added, subtracted and moved the lenses to the trial frame. Once they were happy with the prescription they then did some other little tests (cover/uncover test, amplitude of accommodation, pupil reflex, near point of convergence, near vision and motility tests). Once completed the supervisor then came in and verified the prescription and the health of the eye. I thought it was kind of neat to see how they did the exam, especially since it was the first time that I had an exam where a slit lamp and a phoropter weren't used or even in the room. It sounds so far that this is basically how most optometrists here perform their eye exams, while it is only a very small number who even have access to a phoropter. I am really starting to look forward to learn how to perform all of these tests and to learn the reasoning behind the different techniques used here compared to those typically done in North America.

Now asides from school this week I also went to the German market which is on downtown (which is a five minute walk from campus). The market started last weekend and runs until Christmas. So far I have been to the market twice, and looks like I’ll likely be going several times each week as there is just so much to see in this a massive outdoor market. Here are a bunch of the pictures that I have taken so far while at the market.

The farris wheel was actually much bigger than it looks here!

This was the small crowd on Monday around 4:30

The beautiful lights

Some of many little stalls with handmade gifts

Oh the sweet smells of donuts and chocolates!

...and don't forget about the candy and schnitzel!

Two of the many temporary pubs (note the huge lines...and to think it's only 5pm)

Now that was my week in a nutshell.

Cheers,

Jeff

Well I had to have some German beer with my schnitzel ;-)

 

 
*Word of the week: "brown sauce" which sounds gross but it turned out that it is just "HP steak sauce". Apparently Birmingham use to have a big HP sauce plant located here. I have also found that here brown sauce is more common than ketchup and can be found in all pubs and basically all restaurants. When I asked what my British friends what they put it on, they said that it's basically anything, like with eggs in the morning or with a sandwich at lunch. I asked about what they thought about putting it on a steak and well apparently that thought had never crossed there mind!

Basically a typical week

Let’s see what we did this past week...

School was pretty good as were now getting into stuff I learned at Georgian. Were learning about the different eye structures (cornea, limbus, sclera, etc.) and there is a lot of pathology that they are also introducing (most I learned at Georgian) but it's nice to lean it again, since now I actually have to know way more about each pathology. The nice thing is that with the pathologies they're introducing them now and then going to talk about them more and more over the next three years. They're actually doing the same thing with all of the pharmacology too. This past week we also had a quick lab learning how to do focimetry (the UK term for lensometry) on spheres. It was so basic, but they had a neat focimeter that was battery powered and the scale was actually inside the eye piece, so you got the stuff in focus and look down to see the value (unlike the normal focimeters where the readings are on the dial/drum outside at the side of the focimeter. (For those that don't know focimetry/lensometry is how we read the prescription of a lens). In my clinical optometry lab we also just did some more practice with the direct ophthalmoscope, since this Thursday we are going to be assessed on our ophthalmoscopy skills :-O. We will have half an hour to do ophthalmoscopy and draw and label a picture of what we see, but luckily it is only one eye we will have to do this for. (Again for those who have no clue what I’m talking about basically a direct ophthalmoscope is a handheld instrument we use to look at the back of the eye (the retina), and here there is the optic nerve, a load of blood vessels, as well as the macula (an area that is responsible for our central/detailed vision)). They are going to end up marking us by comparing our drawings to pictures they took when we first arrived back in the end of September. After my lab one of my classmates who had bought his own ophthalmoscope did some more practiced on my right eye and since I have some of my old retinal photos on my laptop we then compared. It turned out he was remarkable accurate, but the only thing was that it took about 45min-1hr for him to do it :-P. I'm just so surprised that they have us doing all this already, as some people in the class are still having trouble understanding what the difference is between retinoscopy and ophthalmoscopy. Retinoscopy is looking at a reflex of light coming out of the eye and from this we could determine the patient's prescription but we usually then take this prescription and then get the patient's input on what they like to refine the prescription (while as mentioned before Ophthalmoscopy is looking at the structures in the back of the eye).

On Wednesday there was an equipment fair at the school, where a few companies that sell Ophthalmoscopes and Retinoscopes came to show us there instruments. Keeler (a UK company) of course was there and so was Heine (a German company). Unfortunately Welch Allyn couldn't make it, which was disappointing for many of us from Canada. Most UK students ended up purchasing their equipment on Wednesday since we found out that we definitely need to have an Ophthalmoscope, retinoscope and a trial frame by the end of January. Most UK students seem to be purchasing from Keeler since it's the most popular in the UK. Yet most of us Canadians are still looking at our options since Welch Allyn is more popular in North America and also since it seems expensive here since its about £800-900 (which converts to about $1600-1800 Canadian) which seems like a lot of money for just a direct ophthalmoscope and retinoscope. Also we're not too sure about the trial frame, since the one that they seem to be pushing here is a new oculus trial frame, which looks nice but seems very expensive at about £300 ($600 Canadian). But we'll just have to see what I end up getting, since I have been practicing with all three types of ophthalmoscope, but I so far I seem to like the Welch Allyn the best, even though the Keeler one looks pretty cool.

Aside from school and the studying I have actually been doing lately, I didn't do too much last week. One thing I did was I had toad in a hole the other night, which is sausages in a Yorkshire pudding cake kind of thing served with of course chips and peas (it seams like everything come with peas and then either chips or mashed potatoes). As of now I’ve tried a Sunday roast, bangers and mash, steak and ale pie, Sheppard’s pie and fish and chips (which I got from a pub instead of a chipper, so it doesn't really count, but soon enough I'll go to the a nearby chipper which I have heard is good). Also the other Saturday a Canadian friend and I were hanging out and decided to head to the pub around 11:30pm (yes I have to specify am/pm since here the pubs are open and serve alcohol from around 9am until midnight). We just went to a pub that is kind of on campus. Since it was a Saturday evening we figured it would be relatively busy, but it turned out to be dead. But we ended up grabbing a pint and hanging out. then around ten to twelve they called last call, which initially surprised me but then I remembered that most pubs close relatively early every night, and it's just the "clubs" that are open until all hours of the morning. So we didn't pay too much attention since we were still good with our pints, so we went back to talking, but then next thing we knew around twelve the security started coming around telling everyone to drink up and get out. They were even using words like "less talking and more drinking". It was so odd that they stop serving about 10minutes before they kick people out, which is definitely way different than in Canada where they do last call about an hour before the place closes and in Canada you would never hear the security encouraging people to drink faster.

Oh and I almost forgot I switched my cell/mobile phone over to O2 from Virgin this week. One reason was that I was doing pay as you go and you typically get like 300 free text messages when you top up with either company which is great, but I found out that with virgin they give you the free messages the first month but usually you have to wait until the next month before you recieve the messages, so basically I would have to go a whole month paying for all my text messages (which adds up quickly). I of course called virigin (which costs money to all call the customer service department) and told them that I was thinking of switching to a different company because of this (and unlike in Canada where they do everything they can to keep you) they just said okay and gave me all the information I needed to switch companies. Most of my friends are currently on O2 and one of them got me a sim card so I ended up switching my number over to this new sim card. I thought my phone was unlocked already, but appearently it wasn't so I went and got it unlocked (which in the UK is no big deal ... but well that didn't go as smoothly as it normally should have ... which is a long story) ... ultimately I got it all sorted out so I now have the same phone number but I am on O2 pay as you go! I then did an initial top-up and they have a rewards program where I get to play an online game and win a prize for topping up (they do this to encourage people to top up since the money you put on your phone doesn't expire after a month like it does in Canada). I went and played and ended up winning a prize (well actually I am fairly certain that everyone wins a prize). I ended up getting a free graze pack. Graze is a UK company that basically these packages of fruits and nuts and delivers them to your door (ultimately it usually costs about £3, so it wasn't a huge win, but still nice). In the package they typically have three different things, one of which is some fresh fruit, but because of a postal strike here I ended up getting four things.

The first thing I got was called "milkshake mix" (which isn't actually suppose to be mixed for a milk shake, but would have been good) and it had dried strawberries, dried bananas and some white chocolate (the dried fruit I didn't like, but then again I'm not really a fruit person, but the chocolate on the other hand was oh so good).

The next one was called "seaweed peanut crackers" which were a bunch of peanuts that were coated with either some sesame seeds, seaweed, chili seasoning, or soy sauce. These were pretty good and crispy.

The next one was just as the name suggests "white chocolate coated raisins" which were of course great.

The last package then consisted of some honey cashews which were probably my favourite out of everything in the package.

This was a really neat idea for getting young people good healthy foods. Plus how it works is you tell them the types of foods you like or would like to try and then they send you whatever they feel like on the list of stuff you like or want to try, so this way you never know what you'll end up getting. If anyone reading this is interested (and lives in the UK) check out http://www.graze.com/ and use the code D1QRZKTN for a free box (they gave me this to pass on to any friends when I got my free box).

Anyways, that was my week last week ... as for this week I plan on going to the German market that is taking place downtown, so look forward to seeing some more pictures next week ;-)

Jeff

*word of the week: Here is where it gets confusing and took me about a month to sort out ... "french fries" in Canada are called either "chips" (if they are thicker) or "fries" (if they are thin like at MacDonald’s) here. They also still have potato wedges. What we call "chips" (potato chips) in Canada they call "crisps" here.... see I told you that it was a bit confusing :-P

Tiramisu & Bonfire Night! ... what a week :D

On the weekend it was one of my friend's Birthdays, so some of us decided to celebrate their Birthday on Tuesday. They wanted it simple and not have too many people to make a fuss about it, so it was just a few of us after the Optics Society meeting. We managed to make it a surprise and we got her a card and some flowers. Also one of my friends had wanted to make a tiramisu, so on Monday night we went out and got all the ingredients he needed to make the tiramisu and then we went back and I helped him make it. I had never really had a tiramisu before and judging by the name it sounded quite difficult, but ultimately once you had the right ingredients it was fairly simple. It just some homemade cream and coffee on these hard sponge cake finger cookies. Basically once you have made the cream you then layer some of the cookies and coat the cookies in coffee and cream (ironically "coffee and cream" is the name of a fast food restaurant beside the campus). You just continue doing this to all of the layers (minimum 3 layers) and then on the top layer you got to make sure there is a crap load of cream on top and then sprinkle some chocolate. Once finished you let it set over night so that the cookies can soak up all of the coffee and cream. On Tuesday we then managed to surprise the birthday girl (I think she was surprised anyways) and we all had the tiramisu and it turned out great.

I don't have the actual picture yet, but it looked kind of like this, but i'll post the actual picture when i get it :P

On Wednesday we made a quick little dinner since it was a busy day for everyone with classes and meetings, but we ended up having a pasta dish and then a potato bake. We had also planned to have a third year optometry student come over to have dinner with us too and also practice our ophthalmoscopy skills using her ophthalmoscope. It turned out well, although we didn't have too much time to practice, as the batteries died in her ophthalmoscope, but we're going to try and practice some more next week. She ended up having a Welch Allyn Ophthalmoscope which was nice to practice with a bit since the vast majority here are made by Keeler (a UK company). The products of the two companies appear essentially the same, but the designs are completely different, as well they all have a few slightly different features.

                        Welch Allyn                                    Keeler

It's good to practice with the different ones, since we have been told that we must purchase our Ophthalmoscope, Retinoscope, and a trial frame by the end of January. Although I shouldn't really complain about it at all since these are basically the only instruments that we have to purchase during our studies, while I believe that in North America you have to purchase a lot more equipment.

Remember, remember the fifth of November ... that was this Thursday! Over here apparently Guy Fawkes Day (also known as Bonfire Day) is basically like a big holiday (similar to our Victoria Day in Canada, except here it isn't a bank holiday). On Thursday evening a few of us wanted to go out and do something for Guy Fawkes Day. We had heard about two celebrations in town which were both about an hours walk (in different directions) from campus. We weighed all the options and opted to go to the one at Birmingham University, and I think we made the best choice. Seeing as it was about an hours walk, we of course opted to take a bus to the University. This was my first trip on the Birmingham bus system, and I was really hoping it would be on a double decker bus. But I figured with my luck it would likely just be a standard bus, or even one of those articulating buses that you see in Ottawa. It turned out to be my lucky day, as it was a double decker! On the way to the University we decided to stay on the lower level, since none of us had been to Birmingham University before, and actually it was the first time any of us had ridden on a bus in Birmingham, so we wanted to make sure we got off at the right spot. We managed to easily get to the University and it was really quite neat. Birmingham University seems to have a big residence area with a bunch of trees, grass, hill, and a big enough pond that they could actually call it a lake (unlike Aston's "lake" which is smaller than the pond that I grew up with).

They ended up having a decent sized "fun fair" with a bunch of carnival rides, a few games and a few food vendors. We walked around a bit and saw everything that was going on, and eventually found the Birmingham University's juggling Society who was juggling fire down by the pond. It also turned out that apparently this was going to be the best spot to watch the fireworks. We hung out there and watch the people juggle the fire for about an hour.

It turned out to be a typical English night, with all the rain, and so we wondered if they were going to cancel the fireworks, but luckily they didn't (apparently it is very rare for them to cancel a fireworks display due to rain in England). We ended up standing under some umbrellas and watched the fireworks display.

I know it kind of looks like snow but it's just the flash off the rain! I swear!

The fireworks show lasted about half an hour, and there were a bunch of neat fireworks that I hadn't seen before. It was a really good fireworks show.

Once it finished we tried to walk back to the bus stop, but it turned out that there was so many people there and everyone was trying to go back to the main walkway and it turned out to be shear grid lock. It ended up taking about twenty minutes cooped up in a massive crowd of a few thousand people before we finally got out of the crowd. On the way back to the bus I also stopped off at one of the vendors and picked up some cotton candy. We then went and took the bus back. This time I made sure we got up on the upper deck of the bus and I sat right overtop of the driver, it was awesome! It turned out to be a great night!

Since then I haven't really done anything, except study :P

Cheers,
Jeff


*word of the week: North Amercian "Cotton Candy" is just called "Candy Floss" here. It's very odd I find since cotton candy looks like a bunch of cotton, and not at all like floss. Plus there is no way that you could floss your teeth with it either!

Indian Food & Skegness Weekend

I'm back and finally caught up a bit on sleep after my very busy weekend!

Before we get to the weekend lets finish off last week. On Wednesday I made my famous pork chops and coke recipe for everyone, but I also added some tricoloured peppers for those weird people in my group who don't consider ketchup a veggie. It turned out great (as usual) and everyone was shocked that I had cooked with coke and ketchup and that it actually tasted good! After that meal was such a success one of my friends decided that on Thursday they would make us some Indian food. She has made Indian food for us once before and knew that some of us have a very low tolerance for spice, so she's good at making it not too spicy. So she ended up making us daal palak (which is a spinach and lentils dish) and aloo bengan (a potatoes and aubergine/egg plant dish) and another friend made some rice. The first thing I tried was the aloo bengan which was awesome! It had a bit of spice but nothing I couldn't handle, especially since the potatoes helped mellow it out. Then I tried some of the daal palak ... now that was great, don't get me wrong ... but the spice just kicked my butt! She wasn't sure the amount of spice to add for the quantity she was making and thought she was making it mild but it turned out to be just the normal Indian spiciness (which is way too spicy for me). But I managed to eat it all (with help from a tone of the rice) and as I was eating it I slowly (very slowly) started to get us to the spice. My plan is going to be to try and build up my tolerance to these spicy foods so that one day we can go to an Indian restaurant and I’ll be able to order anything I want off the menu with out having to worry about it being spicy or not :-P

That's enough talk about food, now I’m sure some/most of you want to hear about the AOP Student Eye Opener Conference in Skegness this weekend.

I woke up and packed all my stuff at 5am on the Saturday morning. It turned out to be a real challenge packing everything since the only bag I have is my backpack or a big suitcase...so I of course tried to squeeze everything into the back pack. It turned out to be a real squeeze but I managed to fit all the necessities in the back pack. Afterwards I went and waited for the bus at about 6:40 (which is what the confirmation e-mail had told us to do). We all hung out and the bus pulled up at 7, and the 22 of us all got on to the nice big coach bus. It was nice and roomy and most of us even managed to have two seats to ourselves. We ended up leaving Aston at about 7:30, because we had been waiting for someone to show up, but they never did. But so we were on the road and I found it kind of strange because the whole bus ride it seemed just like I was going on a school trip or something in Canada on a grey hound.

The highways and the scenery and everything was very much just like I was back in Canada, the only difference was that we were on the wrong side of the road and that there were way more round a-bouts (but that was ok, since each place there was a round a-bout we would have normally had a stop light in Canada, so this way we still were moving, and so there were much fewer stops). The weirdest thing was I kept seeing road signs that looked like inukshuk (it turns out they just mean that the motorway regulations regulations are in effect ... I don't really know what that means).

I also noticed that when we were on the main motorways they even had the rest stops with the gas stations, a Costa coffee shop and a fast food restaurant (but instead of McDonalds it was mainly Burger King). During our journey to the East coast, we ended up stopping once for about half an hour at a rest stop. It was actually kind of neat because as we sat there an older yellow double decker bus pulled up and a bunch of students filled out. At first it looked like it was a sports team, but we quickly realized that it was it was just the first two out the door that were dressed in a uniform, the rest were in various other costumes. We later found out that the bus of University students was heading all the way up to Newcastle for a big Halloween party. In the long run we ultimately got to the Butlins in Skegness around 11:30 (about 4hours, even though our expected time of arrival was suppose to be around 10) and so we all filled out and found our way to the AOP conference check in area. It became quickly apparent that Skegness is very much a summer/cottage community since aside from Fantasy Island with the roller coaster there was a bunch of trailer parks, Butlins and one small downtown street which all made up the town. Butlins was just on the outskirts of the town and after stepping out of the coach we discovered that Butlins is very much a family/kids resort. There were kids running around all over the place, and there were tones of kids’ rides, games and activities. But we were there to have a good time, and there was no turning back now. After we all checked in we went to our rooms, which had three people to a room and the rooms had one bathroom and two bedrooms, one bedroom with two single beds and the other had a queen bed. Seeing as there were only three guys from Aston we were basically given a room to ourselves. After everyone threw there stuff down the next thing was there was a scavenger hunt thing, which all the other schools had started to do around 10, and was due to be finished at 12, but we just tried answering all the clues without going to any of the places. We thought that we had done really well and were very clever, but later found out that we were completely wrong with all our answers. Afterwards we went to lunch from 12-1. It was a big cafeteria style lunch set up and I ended up getting fish and chips, along with some lasagne and peas. Both looked and smelled good but turned out to be fairly bland. Afterwards we all went to the conference. There were a bunch of talks from various people basically informing us about various places that we as optometrists could work (independent practice, hospital, multiples and domiciliary).

We then had a coffee break and got to talk to the wide range of vendors that were there (such as people from Ciba vision, Vision Express, British Contact Lens Association, British Association of Behavioural Optometrist, Optometry Giving Sight, Keeler, a practice management software company, etc). Then it was time for a somewhat boring presentation about CV (resume) writing and interview skills that was given by two guys from a recruitment agency. There wasn't really anything interesting that they said and it was kind of poorly delivered but I had my coffee so it made it tolerable.

As soon as it was over there was another coffee and networking time, and then the last presentation of the day. The last presentation was given by a guy named Brian Tompkins and it was about contact lenses and why optometrists in the UK should dispense contact lenses more to their patients. His presentation was very entertaining, although it seemed a bit scattered at times, but all in all it was very well done. All the talks and everything ended up going later than expected so instead of having about an hour break we all went outside and watched a Fireworks display that was going on. It was neat walking to the display since we passed all the kids and their parents in the resort who were all dressed up in their Halloween costumes, so that was neat to see. I also was talking to some British optometry students and found out that apparently Halloween isn't nearly as big in the UK as it is at home, which was disappointing to hear. But then the fireworks went off so that cheered me right back up.

After the fireworks we had about an hour break before the eyeball/drinks reception, so all the females quickly tried to get ready while I just walked around for a bit and went through all of the papers that I had been given so far at the conference. A few minutes before we were suppose to be at the reception I just through on my orange dress shirt (got to stay in the Halloween spirit) tie and dress pants. I also had purchased some nice cheap new dress shoes that I got to wear too. The reception was suppose to be very formal with a jacket and such, and it turned out that basically all of the guys had jackets and were wearing white shirts, well except for me since I didn't bring my jacket with me to the UK, but I didn't mind too much since it definitely meant I got to stand out of the crowd a bit better. After the reception it was around 8pm and when we all filled over to the restaurant for dinner.

It was a fancy restaurant and the dinner was pretty good. I had a fancy soup, followed by chicken and mashed potatoes, and then for desert there was a chocolate mousse cake which was pretty good. The only thing is I wish I had of ordered the vegetarian dish as it was a fancy risotto that looked pretty good. It’s kind of weird over here actually the number of people who are vegetarian, because at the dinner I would say almost half of the meals served were vegetarian. After dinner most of us were planning to head off to a club that they have at the resort for adults, but on the way we found out that it was closed for a few weeks, so we all went to a sports bar that they had there which had a DJ and then just hung out and danced the rest of the night. It was probably around 2 or 2:30 that the group I was hanging around with decided to head back and on the way back to our rooms we decided to go check out the beach, since this was the first time that we had a chance to check it out. It turned out that apparently there is a gate to get to the beach, which was locked. We tried looking through the fence but it was so dark that we couldn't really see anything.

We then ended up taking a walk back to the rooms and it was about 3am by the time I got to sleep, since my one roommate and I got watching the end of some weird Chinese movie on TV (I think we mainly watched it since we have been so TV deprived since starting school).

The next morning I woke up bright and early and at 9am I went and had breakfast in the same cafeteria place that we had lunch the day before. It turned out that the breakfast was actually pretty decent. I had some back bacon (which was heavenly), some eggs and then some of these deep fried looking pieces of toast. Since it was so good I then went back and got some seconds but this time I also got some sausages (the first one was good, but I don't think the second one was cooked very well). I also managed to down about 3 cups of coffee, which had been some of the best coffee I’ve had since being over here, and the strange part is it came out of a machine! It was then shortly after 10 by the time I had finished all my breakfast so it was time to head over to the conference. The real crappy thing was that it had been raining so hard and the wind was blowing like 25-30k that by the time we all had walked the 30 second walk back to the conference we just were soaking wet. But they loaded us up with some more coffee and we heard another talk about the pre-registration period that we have to do after our third year. The talk was interesting and very informative, but applied more to second years that currently have to apply for their pre-reg positions. After the talk there were some prize draws for like door prizes (basically Nintendo DSs, Nintendo Wiis, Keeler refraction kits, and volt lenses). Surprisingly only one person from Aston won a Volk lens, meanwhile most of the other prises went to people from Glasgow or Cardiff, so we're all wondering if it was maybe fixed a bit.

That ended the conference but we still had about 5 hours to kill so they gave us all some free passes to a bunch of the events at the resort. The first thing we did was go down to the beach! The rain had stopped, yet it was still really windy but we figured that we had to go check it out since we came all that way to see the coast. It was kind of neat to see the sand and water again, as it reminded me a bit of some of the beaches back home. One neat thing they had was out in the middle of the water was where they had a big wind mill farm, which I thought was a great idea, since this way no one lives right next to them, so less people complaining about the noise, etc.

After spending about 15 minutes on the beach we headed back to the main part of the resort and all went and watched a movie. We ended up seeing Up (but not in 3D). It was the only decent looking movie that they had playing, and apparently it has just recently come out in the UK. It was an okay movie, but just sort of what I had expected. After the movie we walked around a bit, grabbed a snack and then tried to find something else to do, but most things were full, but so we ended up going bowling and managed to squeeze a few frames in before it was time to go.

We packed up everything and left Skegness around 5:15 and got back to Birmingham around 8:30 (since we didn't make any stops, and the bus driver found a slightly quicker way back). All in all it was a very long tiring weekend, but I’m happy I went as I did learn a bit of new information about the state of optometry in the UK, and it turned out that most of what I learned was through the networking I did with the vendors, and other optometry students. All in all I'll probably go again next year, provided it's somewhere different next year (and rumour has it they might be looking at Nottingham or somewhere more central for next year).

So that was my weekend (and week) last week ;-)

- word/phrase of the week:  When a British person says "half eight" it means "eight thirty" or "half past eight" ... not four which is what i keep thinking when people say it  :-P