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).