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.