Words, words, words. .. They hardly seem capable of fulfilling the mammoth task that Irequire of them in moments like these. Admitted Iy, the task I ask of them is no mean fete- to convey the moments of sheer elation, the feelings of pure joy and the overall nostalgia that was and stillis the Euroscience

Open Forum, To rin0 201.0. Alas this journey of self discovery that I shared

with 5 lucky Australians needs to be documented. So here goes nothing. .. Throughout my domestic commute to Sydney I was welcomed by some familiar faces and equally so by some fresh ones, the Sydney International Airport was original assembly point of the ESOF 2010 "crew" and boy, were we excited. The smiles and welcomes that were abundant amongst all really

should have given me an indication of what lay ahead of me, but in the end I

don't think anything could have paved the way for the excitement of such a

trip. Some 36 hours after departing my humble abode in Goondiwindi,

Australia I arrived in Torino, Italy. Some may say I was a long way from home

(i. e. Geoff), but I had other thoughts. Even without my huge procession of

tangible materialistic objects that was my luggage, I felt as if Italy was a home

away from home- within an hour of grounding my feet in Europe. The lack-

lustre customs that welcomed us in Tonno gave me my first taste of the

Italian lifestyle. You could smell the culture in the air, quite literally, gelato, the

burning rubber of a vesper (moped) pounding the pavement, coffee, pizzas

backing, spaghetti boiling, all mixed in with the humidity characteristic of the Italian summer.

The thing that made ESOF special to me was that, no matter how many textbooks that I scrimmaged through, no matter how many EEl's that I wrote, no matter how many questions that I asked my Biology teacher I would never come remoteIy close to the amount of cutting edge science that was at my finger tips ready for me to explore during those 6 days at the Lingotto Centre and that is exactly what I did, I explored the infinite possibilities that science has to offer society as a whole. At the beginning of this year, not even the far distant reaches of my imaginations would have been able to house the

possibility of sitting in a lecture entitles:"Dietary Polyphenols- Combating Chronic Disease" or walking the hallways with A1do Fasolo, a neurobiologist specialising in the olfactory system or the one and only CarlJohan Sundberg- a licensed physician and associate professor at the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, where his research group focuses on physical activity and the molecular mechanisms of angiogenesis and mitochondrial biogenesis in human skeletal muscle. What a marvel to be walking the same hallways as these men, little own to converse with them about fields of science that they are currently heading. As was explained in one of the lectures I attended, at some point in their lives, more than likely this moment would have occurred quite recently- these research scientists were the single most knowledgeable person on this planet, in regards to their research field.