I had never been to South Carolina until Thursday. And pretty much all I knew was that it was a decadent 60 degrees and sunny there, which sold me on the trip. That and work paying the airfare and hotel.

I woke up Thursday morning at 4 to find 6 inches of newly fallen snow, so any doubts I might have had about briefly leaving Vermont were gone. The plane left Burlington 90 minutes late because of some problem with de-icing. I'd never seen a plane de-iced before, from the inside or out, and while it was fairly interesting, I wonder why they don't just spray warm salt water at it instead of fluorescent orange goo. Wouldn't this take care of most of the problem? My flight was through Washington-Dulles (which is still not in New York, Karen) and had enough turbulence for the off-duty pilot sitting across the aisle to remark, "That was a hell of a landing, wasn't it?" While he could just have been trying to imply that he was the ace of all pilots I really have no idea, as I was just concentrating on not throwing up.

Charleston on a Thursday afternoon in February was sunny as advertised, and there were zero inches of snow on the ground. Instead there were palm trees everywhere, and the sky a supernaturally perfect combination of wispy clouds and royal blue. The path along I-26 from the airport to downtown Charleston took us from rows of tiny shedlike houses with locked gates across the yards to larger plantation-style commercial properties with elaborate ironwork across the balconies. Even the trees were draped with scenic Spanish moss in a manner that almost but not quite suggested that the city pays people to run out at night and moss up all the trees for tourists.

The hotel we were staying at for the conference, Charleston Place, is an incredibly nice four-star resort cleverly hidden in the middle of the older area between the College of Charleston and Fort Sumter. Truly, it's hidden. Somehow a seven-story building disappears when you look down King St for it. You remember coming that way: out of the old theater that's been converted to a Charleston Place meeting annex, up past all the chi-chi boutiques and O'Reilly's, the world's most brightly lit Irish pub, to Calhoun St, where some college-age girls were advertising a showing of The Vagina Monologues by holding up sandwich boards reading, "HONK IF YOU LOVE VAGINA!"

There was a lot of honking.

Thursday night was the start of the conference, with a dinner session that turned into quite a heated debate, the subject of which I'm not at liberty to discuss. I think they gave us dinner so that not all the physicians could yell at once. Catered food and vegetarianism is a delicate mix, and I went down the buffet table peering suspiciously at all the dishes: lettuce? Check, plant life. Slices of tomato? Check, non-sentient plant life. Then the hot plates upped the ante a little, going from stuffed chicken breast (easy, animal) through pork risotto (slightly more difficult but still animal) to curried she-crab soup (sounds easy to you, but you didn't hear it in a room full of yelling NIH investigators from a server with an accent I could have spread on my roll). Finally I spied some couscous with tomato sauce. Easy. Plant life and pasta.

Did you know I'm violently allergic to shellfish? No? Neither did I until Thursday night. The couscous and tomato sauce was actually a vegetarian final exam, cooked as it apparently was with crawfish juice. People, I failed that exam all over my hotel bathroom for a solid hour. Apparently I barfed so hard I broke blood vessels at the corners of both eyes, one side of my mouth and all along my jawline. Sexy.

The accidental crawfish also made my period randomly spring into action, and I am here to tell you that front desk staff at hotels as nice as Charleston Place are trained to totally not roll their eyes when you straggle down at 1am, pink, swollen, and reeking of puke, to ask where you can find feminine protection at that hour. They are trained to simply look you over from head to toe, then reach under the desk and pull out a huge shopping bag full of Protection and offer you several handfulls. People who stay at the Charleston Place and who are not pink, swollen and puke-smelling, are also trained to not scream in horror at you on the elevator after you have forgotten to bring anything to carry the Protection in besides your two hands. It's something in the Charleston water, I think.

So the second day of the conference saw me wearing my hair down, long and in my face in a futile attempt to hide the fact that said face was still pink, swollen, and covered in the fabulous freckles of broken capillaries. Although I no longer smelled like puke. I hope. I have no idea what my boss thought sitting next to me, but I did, however, manage to decode lunch successfully (those mashed potatoes looked good right up until I poked them suspiciously and a piece of pork fell out. Gotcha!)

After the conference, I had a full evening in Charleston, so I wandered lonely as a big pink freckly thing around the downtown area, and finally settled down to study my aphasia homework with a vodka gimlet. Perhaps two. Don't worry, they'll be lined out of the reimbursements. If you are in Charleston and are looking for tastiness and strong gimlets, I highly recommend Sermet's Corner on King St. It has comfy couches, yummy vegetarian appetizers (I had the artichoke torta) and hot bread baskets with garlic dipping oil. Just what the doctor ordered. They also play 70s folk and rock over the sound system before the Friday night dinner crowd arrives. So I spent a happy and surprisingly productive couple of hours until the sun set, munching torta, drinking gimlets and reading about Clark's model of collaborative referencing in aphasic communication, all to the mellow croon of The Doobie Brothers, James Taylor and Michael McDonald. I am so unhip it's ridiculous.

(Part 2 tomorrow)