Induction Days

As many of you know, I walk a fine line between extrovert and introvert. My mood can go dim and my energy levels can drop if I have too little or too much social interaction.

To little and I become a barnacle, clinging to my rock and convinced that no, I don't need to go out and spend time with people (ugh!) or go exercise and get off my butt. Inevitably, I feel much better when I am finally forced to interact with friends or go for a run, and have to admit the person who kicked me off the couch was indeed right.

To much social interaction or social stimulus and I get quickly worn out and somewhat grouchy and my brain stalls on any decisions as the cognitive spark is dampened faster than a camp fire flooded by a tsunami.

While I might have been in the realm of the former during the summer, when everyone was off getting on with their lives and I was stuck in delays, I have definitely stumbled into the danger zone of the latter this week, simply because of the ENORMOUS amount of people and social events I have encountered in my adventures.

That's not to say that these events and people have been anything less than FANTASTIC. And YES, I'd say the extravagant use of capital letters here is warranted. As I keep telling everyone I talk to (probably ad-nauseum):

I am exactly where I want to be.

First of all- I have encountered an extraordinary number of fantastic people from all over the planet. It has been a privilege to learn some of their stories and to exchange knowledge of differing cultures. Fo example, tonight one of my flatmates from China taught Stefi (my Greek flatmate) and me to roll out and fold dumplings. It was very tasty.

I have been to society fairs, sports fairs, graduate center quiz nights, boat trips, Café Crawls, Pub Crawls, and even a dorm party that ended in a fire alarm (I swear, it probably wasn't us). My social brain is saturated.

Cardiff Bay

The Pierhead Building

First stop on the Pub Crawl

Second, I finally met the 5 other individuals who will be studying with me this year. I AM SO EXCITED. Each one of them is brilliant, with a different perspective on neuroscience and something meaningful to say about it. After finding each other in the first administrative lecture on our docket on Monday, we went to grab a coffee between our morning and afternoon sessions of induction events. I and two of my fellow Wellcome Trust students ended up engaging in a long, loud, and enthusiastic philosophical discussion ranging from the role of religion in human society to the importance of neuroscience to the question of the human condition to our enthusiasm for and value of public communication. Our program studies will cover neuroscience from multiple disciplines, including genetics, biochemistry, psychology, and traditional neuroscience, and I think that as a group, we are balanced in our backgrounds well enough that we will be able to aid each other in coming up to speed in all fields.

Coffee with Wellcome Trust Students!

Third: Cardiff University's Neuroscience Department is well renowned and well-funded and the head of our program, Dr. Vincenzo Crunelli, has excellent perspective on the practicalities of being a PhD student in this program and has made me feel we will be well supported.

Ohmygoodness our desks! The Haydn Ellis building is beautiful and our desks are located in an area where we can see into the heart of the building and straight down to the floors below. I LOVE IT. It's such a change from working in a windowless lab. I love my lab at Davis, but seriously, that building was hard to work in. My only complaint at Haydn Ellis is having to use a PC. I miss being surrounded by Macs!

Windows!
Desk is on the railing adjacent to and right of the one shown here.

Lectures start late next week, but in the mean time, we will all, like the over achievers we are, be furiously researching the potential projects for our lab rotations next January.

Cardiff Castle sneak peek! I swear I'll get to it.

Cardiff Bus Tour

Saturday was an opportunity to take a trip around Cardiff with new friends. My flatmate Stefi invited me to come along with some friends she had already met (fellow Greeks students and some of their roommates) and we all loaded onto a red double decker open top tour bus outside Cardiff Castle.

Our bus, outside Cardiff Castle

International Students: New friends

The castle is interesting because it's an amalgam of several different styles based on the histories of the various peoples who have invaded Wales over the years. The front of the castle is divided in the center, with one half in the Roman style and one half in the Victorian gothic. Inside is another castle in the Norman tradition.

The Left Side...

…and the Right.

NO, we didn't drive the tour bus into the Castle. Don't be ridiculous. We couldn't even see over the wall from our seats on the bus. You'll just have to wait for me to collect my Castle Key card (a 3 year access pass into the Castle for Cardiff residents) and go to the Country Faire this upcoming saturday.

We did, however, need to entertain ourselves while we waited for the bus to depart, hence the mini history lesson.

There are quite a lot of international students in Cardiff, as I've mentioned earlier, and over the past few days I've met almost everyone but Americans. Many, many, many Greeks, some British, some Chinese,  some from the Caribbean, some from Africa, a Slovenian, a girl from Spain, a girl from Turkey… If I wanted an international experience, this is it.

Unfortunately, its been such a whirlwind of people I'm having difficulty remembering faces, let alone names. I suppose once classes start and people have something to do other than get together for social events, I'll start to see who I actually encounter regularly and perhaps get better at actually meeting people, not just nodding at them while we try to communicate through the barrier of language and extremely noisy and chaotic environments. Nevertheless, people seem very nice.

Anyway, back to the tour.

We saw many of the beautiful buildings in the city center as we drove around… the National Museum, the University, the Welsh government or City Center (I'm not sure… with the wind in your hair and the city around you and the cars and the greek flying back and forth, it's hard to hear the tour guide. Oh well.).

Pretty Building

Pretty Building

National Museum of Art and Natural History (probably)

A university building

Pretty statue and tower

CLOCK

University Building farther away from city center

Many of the buildings, the tour guide pointed out, have Dragons on the top: weather vanes, statues, etc. The Welsh are quite proud of their identity and the Welsh dragon appears everywhere. It's like hidden Mickeys, if hidden Mickeys had a penchant for munching on virgins and couldn't get decent fire insurance.

There's a dragon on top there

The tour bus also took us out of the city center towards Cardiff bay, where things started to look a bit more industrial. We passed some evidence of Cardiff's importance as a shipping town, less prominent now than in days past, and moved out into…filming stages and the Doctor Who Experience! Ok- it was a drive by, but at least I know where they are now (and it looks like they aren't that easy to get to…) The Doctor Who experience is shut down at the moment so they can make some Peter Capaldi additions (they're experiencing a "regeneration", the tour guide joked).

BBC production studios

Doctor Who Experience

I have no idea why the TARDIS is there. 

We then drove past the Wales Millennium Center, which yes, is as impressive in person as it appears to be in photographs. This is also the site of some filming.

Plaza outside the center

COLOR

Wowza

Cardiff also appears to have something called "Techniquest", which seems to be some form of science center along the lines of the Exploratorium.

We drove back to the city center passing through some lovely looking buildings of various historical significance (I have no idea… I had trouble retaining what the tour guide was saying at that point because I was straining hard to hear the speakers.) and ended the day by running around Queens Street covering some of the necessary shopping for setting up our apartments. On our way through the supermarket, I picked up something called a "Victoria Sandwich" which is certainly nothing of the sort! It was an impulse buy assisted by its direction of profits towards cancer research, and I made sure to share it with new friends to make sure I didn't eat it all myself. It was delicious (strawberry jam and cream in between cake: I know, right?). One person tried to refuse, but I informed them they had to eat some, it was for cancer.
That worked. ;)
The moral of this story is that you must eat cake to do your part for cancer. It's a terribly serious burden.

Eat cake for cancer.

Taxi ride home!

22,000 steps

On my first full day in Cardiff, I walked, according to my phone, 22,000 steps. I am absolutely sure this is an underestimate.

Much of my agenda was solely determined by whim and current proximity to other locales where I could get stuff done. I achieved tasks as I came across them in my erratic wanderings.

No one seemed to be around in the flat when I finally made it past reception and dropped my stuff of in my room, so I set out straight away to get my Student ID card with the vague notion that I would get the card and then walk all the way back past my flat to the Tesco (it's kind of like the American Costco or Target but with smaller convenience store outlets) and get some bedding: sheets, pillow, duvet etc.

I managed to get my ID fairly easily- I know, surprising for my luck with bureaucratic measures, yes? I visited the graduate center to check it out, see if there were any graduate students there already (nope), and spend some time researching what bank I wanted to start an account with.

The Graduate Center

The main theme of my shopping trials this weekend seems to be the evidence of the humungous number of students (especially international students) Cardiff has recruited. The rumor, according to a Greek MBA student I was hanging out with today, is that of ~40,000 students at Cardiff, ~20,000 are newly incoming this year. My question is this: what happened to all the older students? (Did they die of stress?) ;)

Regardless, the presence of these students was apparent at the banks I tried. HSBC couldn't give me an appointment to get started until October 29th and I'm pretty sure Lloyds squeezed me into a cancelled appointment next Thursday. There's a rush every year, the Lloyds agent told me, because of all the international students Cardiff brings in.

My absolute favorite part of the day was randomly discovering a Victorian market (Cardiff Market for those of you who wish to look it up) that at first glance appeared to be squeezed between two buildings but which actually ended up being its own little alcove full of an eclectic mix of stalls. I found awesomely priced pears (4 for £1), raspberries (2 flats of £1), carrots, broccoli (1 head and like 4 large carrots for £2), free range eggs (£1.40) and fresh made bread (£0.70). I really want to get my food from this weekday/saturday market and the farmers markets on the weekends and see how much I can get outside the grocery store… I'll see how it goes!

The book stall!

Fresh fruits and veggies!

Under a glass paneled roof

Fresh bread

As I was finding a place to eat the delicious meat pie I got in the market, I found a local dog-rescue table and discovered they were looking for volunteers for dog walking! I've definitely registered volunteering my services and have told them I am perfectly willing to take the dog for a run. What an awesome way to try to slake my thirst for a dog of my own.

Lunch!

Doggies!

I walked back to my dorm with the groceries I had purchased (~30 min walk from downtown to dorm) and dropped them off, only to realize I still had a bare mattress in my room. On advice from my Greek flatmate, who I finally met, I went all the way back down to Queen's Street downtown to the Primark. Walking back was a bit of a challenge because I had two large bags containing but not limited to a duvet, a pillow, and a bath mat. The bags started ripping 3/4 of the way back to the dorm and I was rolling my eyes at myself again for deciding to take a long walk with a large number of heavy things.

I have four roommates so far and we're expecting one more. Two of my roommates are from China, one from Greece, and one from an island near Madagascar. We share the kitchen and living room, but until now we haven't spent much time there as a group.

Today I got to spend more time doing social things, mostly with my Greek flatmate Stefi and some other international students from the flat above us (two also from Greece, and some from China and Turkey) but we'll leave that for another post.

Panaroma of the park as I walked back through it with my groceries!

Summer of Delays

I'm sure many of you have heard of my trials and tribulations in extracting a student visa from the tortuous canals of the British government's bureaucracy. That process, meant to take around two months, ended up starting in June when I graduated Davis with my bachelor's degrees in History and Genetics and finishing when I finally received my visa this September, two days before my flight to Cardiff to start my graduate school program in Integrative Neuroscience. That was nerve-wracking.

So once I received my visa, I was enormously relieved. "YES," I said to myself, "Now the uncertainty is over, and my future plans are secure!"

Ha.

Ha.

HA HA HA HA HA.

So I get up at 6am on Thursday, September 18th, to do my final prep for the first three months I'm going to spend in Cardiff (you know, before I get to come back for the holidays). I pack, I shower, I pack again, I eat an amazing waffle breakfast (courtesy of Jeff), I pack some more, almost to see if I can possibly cram anything more into my bursting luggage.

It's half eaten because it was too tasty.
I forgot to take a picture first.

We set off for the airport, Jeff ahead of us in his car so he can first drop it off at work. Yay! Excellent plan. We have plenty of time and we're all going to get to go to the airport and then head off to our respective locations.

And then the Prius decides to throw a fit and flash a big warning sign at us. Opening the manual, we found we were instructed to stop the car as soon as possible and call the manufacturer. Oh goody. We've got so much time for that.

Later, on the road in Jeff's car, we encounter the joys of rush hour traffic, but we do finally get to the airport with about an hour and 30 to spare, leaving us time for tearful farewells and entertaining pantomimes as I creep through airport security.

Really Prius? Really?

At the departure gate, I again fall into the illusion that now things will go smoothly. "I've made it past airport security," I tell myself, "they didn't become alerted to my inherent suspiciousness and only put my backpack through twice. I'm home-free!"

It is at this point that the stewardess makes an announcement. Due to mechanical problems with the windshield of our plane, she says, the flight will be delayed while they order parts from LOS ANGELES and wait for them to arrive and then fix the plane. "If you have an international connection, you should go straight to the front desk (outside the security line) and have them reschedule your flights."

THAT PLANE. THAT ONE.

Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay. I'm falling over in a combination of annoyance, frustration, and absolute hysterical amusement at this point.

I ended up with a ticket to London, as planned, but this new plan involved waiting 5 hours before my 1 hour flight could leave from San Jose to LAX and then another 5 hours before my 10 hour flight could leave from LAX for Heathrow and then (due to rescheduling and planning for further delays) another 5 hours before I could leave on my 3 hour bus ride to Cardiff. The ~30 hour trip landed me in Cardiff around 8-9pm, far past the time I could have checked in to my dorm.

It's hard to get somewhere when your bus between Terminals has an AIRPLANE in the way.

(PS- Katelyn, THANK YOU so much for the airplane snacks. The roasted peanuts became my dinner that night)

Fortunately, having 5 hours at each stop to kill provided me with some time to adapt to my new predicament. I checked into The River House when I arrived, a highly recommended hostel online. A girl my age with whom I made friends on the bus ride happened to be a Welsh local (fluent in Welsh to boot!) who could direct me to the locale of the hostel when we finally got off the bus. Thanks Esyllt!(My butt hurt from sitting so long at this point and I'm sure my lack of sleep made me a bit of a zombie.)

4th floor (attic). I'm on the second tier of a bunk bed.

I love the River House. I highly recommend it to people coming to Cardiff. It's beautiful, it's got clean bathrooms, it has an excellent view of Millennium Stadium and the river from the attic room, and it serves breakfast. Yum. It also starts breakfast around 7am and on a Saturday, it is very quiet when you go there at 8am, which is nice when you need a break from noise after 30 hours of travel. The garden out back was really pretty, but I didn't spend much time out there because somebody started smoking in it.

Funny thing was, the staff kept asking me if I was ok… I must have looked kind of disheveled and desperate after my journey.

Wall Decorations

As soon as I was settled in my hostel room, I started to fall in love with Cardiff again. There was some sort of sports event going on that night and I could hear the cheers of the crowd from my room. It was really awesome to listen to. It made the place feel alive and welcoming. In the morning I awoke to the sound of birds and the rush of water under rowing boats. Around 4-5 one or two man or woman racing hulls went past my window when I looked.

Breakfast

Garden

Female Rowers

Like an idiot, I decided after breakfast that my shower and sleep had made me refreshed and that of course the residence halls couldn't be that far away, so there was really no point in hiring a taxi. Hannah- I should have learned from our Cambridge arrival. Sigh.

On one hand, I got some directions from a very nice Welshman or Englishman who stopped on his walk to work to point the crazy girl in the right direction and I got to walk through the absolutely gorgeous I-keep-falling-in-love-with-it park.
On the other hand, I was carrying 50 lbs + of stuff and it is HUMID here. I was drenched in sweat and cowboy boots are not great for an extensive trek.

Part of the Park (looking backward)

Part of the park (looking forward)

I finally made it and checked in to Talybont Court this morning. Thank goodness.

My walking, however, was my no means over. For the love of Hubble its time to get a bike.