Students descend on Dunedin, I flee to new crib in the 'burbs

I am falling behind on my blog posts, and it's not because things stopped happening. Let's see, where to begin. I'll start by recounting an excellent lecture I attended by 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry winner Harry Kroto (he discovered C60, buckminsterfullerene). In Mr. Kroto's talk, which was titled "Science, Society, and Sustainability," he gave a summary for dummies of the most important findings in physics, chemistry, and biology of the past 200 years, discussed the harmful effects of mixing religion with science, and expressed the urgency of the global warming crisis. Mr. Kroto travels the world teaching mathematics and chemistry to schoolchildren and has a website in which he posts educational lectures targeted at young people from primary school to college (http://geoset.group.shef.ac.uk/). I got the sense that these sorts of lectures are very special events at Otago, whereas they were business as usual at Williams (although still very well attended).

My summer scholarship has completed, and my fellow summer students have returned home, mostly to Australia. We made t-shirts with the following slogan: Front: "5 Aussies, 2 Kiwis, and an American walk into a bar..."; Back: "But the bar was empty because it was Dunedin in summer", playing on the lack of activity in this university town during the warm-er months. Right now, however, Dunedin is hopping, and that would be quite an understatement. This week is O (Orientation) week, and the central quad is filled with tents occupied by clubs and local businesses that all want a piece of the "freshies." The students are going nuts in these opening days when there is no class but plenty of Speight's to go around: at night they roam the streets in a drunken rage, the streets are strewn with broken glass, furniture and debris cover the tiny front lawns of each student flat, and just last night I witnessed some guys bashing the remains of a small car with bludgeons of some kind. Fortunately, the disaster zone is confined to a few streets surrounding the university; unfortunately, those streets happen to be between the biochemistry department and my new flat.

Yes, finding a flat was an exhausting experience. I visited nearly a dozen flats or boarding houses, some with a Malaysian graduate student named Jim who was looking for a flatmate. When it became clear that Jim wanted a more luxurious residence farther from the center of town, we ended up going our separate ways. My final decision was between living with a young couple who had just started the Bike Otago bike shop in town, or a student flat a couple blocks away with three flatmates. I could only begin to imagine the perks of living with bike store owners, so the morning after meeting them I sent them a text message saying I would like to commit to their place. But they responded by saying that they had suddenly decided they were no longer interested in having a flatmate, which was code for "we've found someone we like better than you." So I ended up at the student flat, which turned out to be the right place after all, I think.

The place is located on Jura Street, a short cul-de-sac in the suburb of Northeast Valley, a couple blocks away from the steepest street in the world. Despite being named after a mountain range, Jura Street itself and its surrounding streets are pancake flat. I have heard that Northeast Valley gets very cold in the wintertime due to hills shielding it from the sun, but right now it seems like a fantastic place to live. It has its own grocery store, Asian market, drug store, couple of classy restaurants and bars, and dirt-cheap fruit/veggie stand. It borders the Botanical Gardens, which I get to walk through on my way to work, as well as Woodhaugh Gardens, which lead to those fantastic walking/running trails I was so excited about.

My flatmates are very agreeable indeed. I've talked the most so far with Kyle, a third-year anthropology student who is 1/4 Maori. We spent Saturday morning stocking the flat with essentials such as dishwasher detergent, laundry powder, dish rags, etc. Then there are Estella, a first-year commerce student originally from Korea, and Ivanice, who recently graduated and is working as a receptionist at the hospital before finding a more scientific job. The flat has a nice little living room and kitchen with all the necessary supplies, although the knives are dull, the toaster is shot, and I nearly burned the house down a couple nights ago while attempting to melt chocolate in the microwave (the turnstile failed to turn so microwaves incinerated two chocolate chips and left the rest untouched, causing smoke to billow out and fill the kitchen while I used the bathroom, unawares). If it ever stops raining (it has been going non-stop now for 72 hours) I will post pictures of 7B Jura Street.

In athletic endeavors, I have decided to compete in a triathlon in Invercargill on March 22. This required refreshing my swimming ability (or lack thereof) by going to the local pool complex twice a week, which I plan to continue until the race. I have also convinced a med student named Mike to travel down there with me and do the duathlon, so we're going on bike rides and short runs together. Speaking of running, I have continued to baby my knee up to half an hour of pounding and it appears to be okay so far.

If you would like to have a look at the report and layman's abstract I wrote for my summer project, go to this link. There are some pretty pictures I made with protein modeling programs. After writing it I realized that my project was 90% failure, but that's actually quite good because in science, as in most endeavors that are worthwhile in life, you typically fail somewhere around 95% of the time (that's significant failure).

Happy Waitangi Day

Today is Waitangi Day, a Kiwi summer holiday that celebrates the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi between the Maori and British in 1840. At first the treaty was largely ignored by Europeans in New Zealand but in the past several decades it became an important symbol of Maori rights. The holiday is roughly equivalent to Independence Day in the U.S., with most businesses closed and barbecues a popular means of celebrating, but there aren't any fireworks. Since this is the last weekend that most of the School of Medical Sciences summer students will be in Dunedin, we had some final social gatherings. The first was a pot-luck dinner on Wednesday night in which participants were encouraged to cook foods unique to certain cultures. There was pizza, pineapple rice, Korean dumplings, crystallized taro, apples and cream, beer bread, rice and zuchinni, scalloped potatoes, salad with bacon and yams, fairy bread (white processed bread with butter and sprinkles), and pavlova (meringue dessert). I attempted to cook ugali (failure) and futari (success), two East African dishes. Ugali is a thick porridge made from corn flour, but the corn flour I used was way too refined and so produced a lumpy, sticky, and almost transparent goo. The futari, a yam and squash curry, turned out delicious, however. Then last night we had a large party in Carrington in which multiple people had way too much to drink.

Last weekend I went to the Wingatui horse races with a couple dozen people from the biochemistry department. This outing was a major disappointment in two ways: 1) I lost money; 2) the horse racing track was just a big fenced field with some old crummy bleachers and a jumbotron on a tractor trailer. And the scattered spectators were mostly country folk drinking beer and eating sausages. It was a far cry from the pompous racing events you see in the movies.

Back in biochemistry I signed up to be a demonstrator (lab TA) for MED2, the biochemistry class for second year medical students, which I am very excited about. I also gave a presentation this week to the others in the lab on my work (see below). And I talked to Sigurd about plans for the year. Of particular note is that there is a possibility, if we can dig up airfare, that I would be able to travel to Palo Alto to perform Small Angle X-ray Scattering experiments at the Standford Synchrotron, a massive particle accelerator kind of like the Large Hadron Collider.


Many hours in the past several days have been dedicated to hunting for a place to live this year. I met a Malaysian graduate student named Jim who is willing to share a two bedroom flat with me. We drove to a dozen places around town and have found a few that look good, so have left messages with the landlords. Jim is willing to pay more and live farther from the university than I'd like, but hopefully we can work something out. Otherwise my fallback will be a boarding house for international students, which may or may not still have vacancies by the time we figure the flat situation out, or trying to squeeze in with a larger group. The whole process is quite exhausting.

Tomorrow morning I have organized a lab tramp! We'll see how many show up.