26 July 2008
The photos from our interrailing adventure are now up!
Days 1-4: Prague
Days 5-6: Bratislava
Days 7-8: Budapest
Days 9-10: Ljubljana
Days 11-12: Zagreb
Day 13: Split
Days 14-15: Brac Island
Days 16-17: Trogir
15 July 2008
Day 11 – Ljubljana (travelling to Zagreb)
Day 7 saw us travelling to Budapest, the capital of Hungary. The three-hour train journey was quick and easy, and we arrived straight into the mid-afternoon heat and bustle of Budapest´s Keleti train station. The heat really hit us, as Bratislava had been quite cool! We travelled straight to the hostel, Maxim Doubles, which is the nicest place we´ve stayed so far!
After a week of travelling and sleeping in hostels, we decided we deserved a trip to one of Budapest´s famous thermal spas, the Szechenyi Furdo. The spa is in Pest, in the City Park, and dates back to 1918. It was heaven! Big outdoor swimming pool, thermal baths indoors and outdoors (ranging from 30 to 38 degrees), lots of different pools to go in (including a 20 degree one, which was quite chilly after the thermal ones!), saunas and jacuzzis! Ahhhh!
After the spa we got hot corn-on-the-cobs, walked around the City Park and Heroes Square, and then got the oldest metro in continental Europe back into the city centre. We had dinner at a local restaurant in Raday Street, where we ate traditional beef ragout and paprika chicken. Yum!
Day 8 was the hottest day we´ve had so far – 36 degrees in the shade! We laboured up Gellert Hill (past the famous Gellert Baths) to see the monuments and the views from the top. We got the funicular to the top of Buda´s castle hill, where we spent the afternoon exploring the old castle. In the late afternoon we went to Deli train station to try and reserve a seat for the nine-hour train journey to Ljubljana, Slovenia, only to be told parts of it would be replaced by a bus and no reservations were possible. O_o
In the evening we went back to the hostel for a much-needed shower, and then had Turkish food at a street cafe (Hungary has a lot of Turkish influences) and ice-cream at Buger King (got to mix it up a little!).
Day 9 saw us travelling to Ljubljana on the dreaded un-reserved, part-bus journey – and it was fine! The first train was modern and spacious, the bus leg was only and hour, and the second train had Hogwarts-style compartments! We got a little delayed and arrived into Ljubljana at 10pm, had emergency McDonald´s (it was right there!) and headed to the hostel. The hostel, DIC, is actually a university halls of residence, and we were lucky enough for them to have run out of dorm beds, so we got a private room! Woop! We stayed up later than planned to watch an awesome lightning storm, which lit up the sky with continuous lightning for almost an hour! Crazy!
Day 10 saw us exploring Ljubljana. We got the funicular (obviously – our third one so far on this trip after Prague and Budapest!) to Ljubljana Castle, where we watched the Virtual Tour of Ljubljana and climbed to the top of the castle tower. We had lunch at Hot Horse in town. which served a favourite dish of the locals – horse burgers (sorry Kaja!) After lunch we walked around town for a while, but it started raining, so we headed to a cafe and had the weirdest hot drinks ever: we thought we ordered hot chocolates with vanilla and berries, but we ended up with custard and hot berry yogurt! I swear!
After the cafe we walked around for a bit longer, and then got some food from a supermarket and headed back to the hostel as it was still raining. It was nice to just relax in a private room for a while!
In the evening we had dinner at Sokol, where the waiters wore national costumes and Tulpesh had deep-fried bull´s testicle! He was more worried that the dish came with tartar sauce than the fact it was a testicle. O_o Apparently it tasted like turkey!
Today we are going to explore all of Ljubljana´s museums, which are closed on Mondays, and then get a late afternoon train to Zagreb. All our travelling has gone really well so far, and the hostels we´ve picked have largely been decent. It feels like we´ve been travelling for an age, though, so I think by the time we have to head home we will feel like we´ve had a long enough holiday!
11 July 2008
Day 7 – Bratislava (travelling to Budapest)
Day 3, where we left off the last time we blogged, ended up being a quiet day – we were exhausted from all the walking we’d done the day before. We walked around Josefov, Prague’s Jewish quarter, and sat in a quiet pub and had some Czech beer. In the evening we had proper Czech food in a local pub – Tulpesh had a pig’s knee and we can testify that it’s the size of a baby’s head!
On day 4 we took the metro up to Vyšehrad Castle and walked around the lovely grounds, savouring the views all over Prague. In the afternoon we went to the Kafka museum, which was very interesting. In the evening we got the night train to Bratislava – an exhilarating experience, but we didn’t get a lot of sleep!
We spent day 5 exploring Bratislava, which is a much smaller city than Prague. We walked around Bratislava Castle, visited the Museum of Clocks, and had pizza in a small Italian. We visited St. Martin’s Cathedral and had lovely ice-creams, then spent the evening chilling out in a local cafe.
Yesterday we were running out of Slovakian money, so we had a thrifty breakfast al-fresco (with food purchased from Tesco, the global devil). We visited the Municipal museum, wrote postcards (so look out for those!), visited the Slovak National Gallery and bought some new reading materials at an English second-hand book store. I also spent a chunk of the evening napping on a park bench, head in Tulpesh’s lap – this interrailing business is exhausting!
Today we’ve got up early, and we’re going to catch the 9:40 train to Budapest! Woop!
07 July 2008
Day 3 – Prague
We’re having a fantastic time here in Prague – the city is amazing! We arrived in the afternoon on Saturday, and spent the evening getting to know the city. We walked around for a bit, had Italian food near Wenceslas Square, saw Charles Bridge, had cheap Pilsner Urquell in a nice bar (£1 a pint!) and blueberry milkshake and chocolate cake in a hip cafe.
Yesterday we had lovely weather – sunny and warm. We went to the train station in the morning to book sleeper beds on the train to Bratislava for tomorrow, and then headed into Staré Město to see the old town. We saw the Municipal House, Old Town Square, Tyn Church, the cool astronomical clock, and climbed to the top of the City Hall to see the fantastic views.
We walked into Hradčany, where we had lunch (rabbit and wild boar!), and explored the largest castle in the world, Prague Castle, where the amazing St. Vitus Cathedral is. After all this walking we were so knackered we had a little nap in the shade in a garden in Malá Strana. We also went on the funicular railway to the top of Petřín Hill, where there is a beautiful rose garden and where Tulpesh climbed the 289 steps to the top of the Petřín Hill Tower. We had dinner in an authentic, world-renowned establishment – we think it was called something unpronounceable… like KFC? After dinner we headed to the cinema to watch Hancock, as it started chucking it down with rain!
Today we have explored the National Museum and walked around town, although it’s still raining, and soon we’re going to have lunch somewhere. We’re taking it a little easier today, as we walked almost 15 kilometres yesterday!
04 July 2008
We’re off to Eastern Europe!
We’ve posted our planned route earlier, and now we’re actually going! Woop!
Our route through Eastern Europe:
05/07: Fly to Prague, Czech Republic
08/07: Train to Bratislava, Slovakia
11/07: Train to Budapest, Hungary
13/07: Train to Ljubjana, Slovenia
15/07: Train to Zagreb, Croatia
17/07: Train to Split, Croatia
18/07: Ferry to Brac, Croatia
20/07: Ferry to Trogir, Croatia
21/07: Fly home from Split, Croatia
We’ll be blogging here on our website, and posting photos on our Facebook profiles:
First stop: Prague!
30 June 2008
Sajid just sent me this YouTube video:
Dr Quantum – Double Slit Experiment
My mind boggles!
On a different note, I spent yesterday night creating this:
I made this with the Earthsong postcards from Amazon and clips from Sajid.
Lastly, please visit my friend Kay’s blog, Don’t forget Zimbabwe. I’ve donated money to WeZimbabwe and Zimbabwe Benefit Foundation, and will write to the Prime Minister and sign the online petitions. Every little helps!
29 May 2008
Hello everyone!
Was a bit lax on the blog entries in the second week so I have to give a retrospective account now that I’m back home. I’ll probably miss a lot of stuff out, which will annoy me when I later remember, but I think it’s still worth doing as we got up to lots of exciting stuff and I can stick photos here and there to illustrate the funness!
MONDAY 19 MAY
We had a lecture on Optical Imaging techniques, which really ain’t my bag, but was interesting nonetheless. We also got demos of some of stuff they use. This where my paparazzi attitude came in handy as I have a pic of Marijan with one of the head set-ups on.
In the afternoon we got a talk on Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation from Alvaro Pascual-Leone which was pretty darned exciting cos he’s one of the macmothers in the field and I read a lot of his work/books for my undergrad lit review on TMS and schizophrenia. Never would have thought at the time that a couple of years later I’d be sitting in on his talk in Boston. Mad!
No real plans were made in the eve. None of us really fancied doing anything exciting so we just decided on some cheap and cheerful pizza. What I now know is a 15 minute walk from the hotel took almost 45 minutes cos (so called!) Ranger Dave took us around the block 3 times over. Gotta admit I was getting mildly hungry and grumpy by the end of the walkabout and was tempted to just go home.
We ended up having pizza at Papa Ginos which was pretty cool. It was still pretty early in the eve so me Dave and Michael made the trek to a nearby mall so that Dave could get some sheets and pillows and stuff for his new apartment. That walk didn’t get off to a great start cos Dave got us walking 10 blocks in the wrong direction before we checked the map turned back to where we came from! Not much to report on in the mall. I bought a shirt from Old Navy, and Dave managed to buy what he needed. Yay!
TUESDAY 22 MAY
Now, here’s where it gets a bit fuzzy. I didn’t have my camera for Tues or Wed cos now I cant remember which order things happened in! The course was 9 to 5.30 again and today was the Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy lecture, the thing I’d flown just a few hundred miles to attend! As it was only an hour slot, and I was the only person really interested in (I wonder why!), I wasn’t expecting much more than an introductory whistle-stop type talk. Dr Savoy had kindly arrange for me to have lunch with Dr Ratai who gave the talk, and Claudia (Swiss cog neuroscientist working on auditory hallucinations in schizophrenics also interesting in MRS’ing the patients). We exchanged ideas about our projects and Claudia had some great ideas on overcoming some of the more practical issues of scanning children. On her advice I think we’ll show relaxing pictures of nature or some thing neutral while the kids are in the scanner instead of showing them Disney videos as was originally planned, as this is likely to cause them laugh or induce large eye movements etc.
In the afternoon we had a lecture on databasing neuroimaging studies and I have to admit my narcolepsy kicked in something rotten. Might as well admit to it now, before Steffen posts the (many) photos of me trying to suffocate some bugs that had become trapped in my eyelids.
I’ll have to check with the other dudes on the course but I think we factioned off into smaller groups that evening cos no one had managed to organise something for the whole group of us to do. I didn’t have my camera with me so I don’t even have any photos to jog my memory but I think that was the evening a small group of us (Me, Michael, Raphael, Marijan, Mellisa and Dave) went to a Thai restaurant in Charlestown called Chow Thai (I think). I do remember I had a beef pannang which was delicious, and there was a palaver at the end when I tried to get a separate bill so I could et reimbursed later and they didn’t really understand what was going on, and then it turned out we had underpaid or something and I had to cough up an extra couple of dollars! They had loads of rough guides in the restaurant including a very new edition on Norway. Was fun reading about Vigelands park cos I’d been there,
THURSDAY 24 MAY
Thursday was the last full day of the course. We had some really interesting talks, including from Dr Lichtman and the Brainbow technology that I remember being a cover article on Nature! I think they’re missing a trick not putting the images on canvas and marketing them as art. They’re so pretty in themselves, nevermind that they’re actually images of brain tissue! In the afternoon some of the people who had neuroimaging experiments planned got a chance to present their work and get some feedback from the group. I think it was a really good exercise for the people that presenting cos lots of people had interesting feedback to give. Unfortunately for me, my work isn’t really task driven, and no one else in the room really had much to contribute on chemical shift imaging or the other MRS-related fun that matter to my work.
Sajun who was such a fun dude, had also been working lord knows how many hours on a powerpoint presentation for our social decision making project. I have to admit that I felt bad cos apart from the workshops, and deciding that we couldn’t really implement the experiment in time, I hadn’t really done squat by way of extra curricular activity! He’d put together a whole bunch of pictures and charts detailing the rationale for out experiment and all sorts. (must remember to email him from a copy!). He’d even added a couple of videos to the beginning and the end I think interesting and baffled the group in equal measures! This was the second video... What it’s got to do with the unequal distribution of wealth I’ve really no idea, but the guy’s one hell of a hard worker and entertaining presenter!
Most people had flights etc to catch as soon as the course finished on the Friday so an informal group dinner was organised for the eve that day. Sharon suggested karaoke at a Japanese restaurant in Kenmore, which people were surprisingly enthusiastic about!
Before we all dashed off to the meal we present Dr Savoy a cheeky parody of a conference poster presentation that Steffen, Carolina and Natatlia had come up with as a way of saying thank you. They’d actually spent loads of time on it (sometimes during the course, tut tut!), I’d actually only contributed the small logo in the corner which involved photoshoppin a statue to look like it was surfing (as a play on FreeSurfer, geddit?). The sight of Dr Savoy wearing a cap that looks like a brain being taken aback by the poster (and Brian’s excellent presentation skills!) certainly was a sight!
Once we’d all managed to make our way to the restaurant using variously planes, trains and automobiles we actually had (almost) all 26 people there including Dr Savoy. The food was great, I had sashimi deluxe which was raw squid, yellowtail (whatever the funk that is), mackerel, salmon, tuna and more thing I can’t remember. Delicious!(‘cept for the squid, to borrow a maedagre phrase ‘it wasn’t my favourite’). And, Sajung taught me how to use chopsticks the proper and polite Korean way too!
The best part of the eve was absolutely the karaoke. Definitely think the flowing cocktails on helped lubricate the vocals chords of most of the group, but I can honestly say it was the fun atmosphere and not the booze that got me blaring out the hits (and doing a lil impromptu compeering and joke telling inbetween songs!). The whole evening was an absolute blast but three highlights immediately spring to mind:
1. Sajung getting the singing started with an amazing operatic style solo rendition of Louis Armstrong’s Wonderful World (those of you who actually clicked on the youtube link above will more understand the brilliance of the song choice). No ones singing topped that all eve – the guy is a bonafide leg-end.
2. Steffen belting out Highway to Hell, and for some funky reason (probably the scorpion fishbowl type cocktail thing they were drinkin) ending up sounding more English than I do!
3. The 30 man rendition of Total eclipse of the heart, belted out with such emotion it almost brought a tear to my eye. sniff, sniff. I actually dedicated the song to Mae cos I know it’s one of her all time cheesefest favourites :)
Notable mentions also go to every time some random song came one that no one knew and some poor bugger always just decided to read the lyrics out loud (no, not always me actually!), and singing a song like he was singing it to me. You melted my heart Ranger, you melted my heart. We eventually got booted out at 12 when the place closed, which I think was for the best, as a couple of people (and their vocal chords) were a little worse for wear!
26 May 2008
Dear Mrs Murray,
While we thank you for your valued custom and use of the Tesco Loyalty Card, the Manager of our store in Banbury is considering banning you and your family from shopping with us, unless your husband stops his antics.
Below is a list of offences over the past few months, all verified by our surveillance cameras:
June 15: Took 24 boxes of condoms and randomly put them in people’s trolleys when they weren’t looking.
July 2: Set all the alarm clocks in Housewares to go off at 5-minute intervals.
July 7: Made a trail of tomato juice on the floor leading to the feminine products aisle.
July 19: Walked up to an employee and told her in an official tone, “Code 3 in Housewares” and watched what happened.
August 14: Moved a ‘CAUTION – WET FLOOR’ sign to a carpeted area.
September 23: When the Deputy Manager asked if she could help him, he began to cry and asked “Why can’t you people just leave me alone?”.
November 10: While appearing to be choosing kitchen knives in the Housewares aisle, asked an assistant if he knew where the antidepressants were.
December 3: Darted around the store suspiciously, loudly humming the “Mission Impossible” theme.
December 6: In the Kitchenware aisle, practised the “Madonna look” using different size funnels.
December 18: Hid in a clothing rack and when people browsed, yelled “PICK ME!” “PICK ME!”
December 21: When an announcement came over the loudspeaker, assumed a foetal position on the floor and screamed “NO! NO! It’s those voices again!”
And; last, but not least:
December 23: Went into a fitting room, shut the door, waited a while; then yelled, very loudly, “There is no toilet paper in here.”
Yours sincerely,
Charles Brown
Store Manager
25 May 2008
Some photos from my adventures so far:
The group on the first night, when we went to an Italian restaurant
Boston, baby!
Border Cafe
More to come!
19 May 2008
Sunday was the day for us to implement the fMRI and MEG experiments that we designed in the workshops during the week. Not everyone had to be there, only a couple of people from each group to help sort out any last minute glitches. I was supposed to be one of the participants, and even had my MRI structurals taken, but then it was decided that it would be best if one person did all the experiments to make analysis easier. Bad news for Natalia, because she ended up either in the MEG or MR machine for pretty much the whole day!
We started at 9am, but after dabbling in a little more FreeSurfer, I decided it would be better use of my time to go sightseeing and shopping. In the end we managed to sort a lift into downtown with Mikhail, who had a car. Me, Carolina and Lauren (from Georgia) made our merry way. :)
We went straight to the Prudential and Copley malls, but I don’t think I could have afforded much more than a shoelace in most of the shops there (all Prada and Marc Jacobs), so we left Carolina to it and me and Lauren just went for a wander and a window shop. It was nice spending some time with Lauren, because I hadn’t shared much more than about five words with her since the start of the course! We walked up Boylston Street, which is mostly just more fancy stores that we could look through the windows of, while we made small talk and enjoyed the sunshine and the nice atmosphere.
While we were looking at a map, this random lady accosted us and gave a whistle-stop verbal tour of the last 100 years of Boston history and all the best places to go, so on her advice we continued walking up Boylston to the public park, where we took lots of cheesy photos of landmarks like America’s smallest suspension bridge an things.
After lapping the park we made our way back to the Prudential to meet Carolina along Newbury Street, which had more fun shops than Boylston. Managed to find an H&M and a second-hand store, but most of the stuff was either too cheesy or still too expensive! Also managed to bag Mae’s present, (NOT second-hand or H&M u cheeky buggers!), which I’m really happy with, can’t wait to give it to her!
The original plan was for lots of people on the course to meet at the Union Oyster Cafe for dinner at 7pm, so the three of us met up and made our way there, but couldn’t get hold of anyone! We ended up going Quincy Market to some more shopping, which was more my kind of place. :) I ended up buying a pretty nice shirt for $11 (which I’m wearing right now actually!). I know, I know, Mae, I don’t need another shirt, but their my weakness gosh darned it, and for that price it would be mental to have not bought it!
Then by random chance we bumped into Marijan again – that guy has the knack for turning up at the right place at the right time! The four of us decided to go have oysters anyway and the rest could turn up if they wanted. The Union Oyster place is apparently America’s oldest restaurant on one of its oldest streets and is very famous for its seafood. We had sat at the bar with a beer and rested our feet. I shared a couple of oysters from Carolina’s plate, apparently they are a real acquired taste, but I really liked them straight from the off! Bit funky in the mouth at first but really tasty (and not at all like chicken!).
Then Dave randomly turned up and about two hours later Steffen, Natalia and the rest of the gang turned up too, and there ended up being 12 of us all together! I had a seafood platter which was a fat swordfish steak, salmon, scallops, calamari and scord (which is apparently like cod, but not quite). I thought it was delicious, but a couple of the others who had the same thing thought the salmon and swordfish were a bit dry, maybe they’re just a little more discerning in their tastes than me, but I was happy! At about 11ish we all meandered back to the hotel, even though my feet were aching from all the walking I hobbled home instead of joining the taxi group, who somehow still managed to get back after us!
Hope your exams are going well Dip!
Goodnight y’all!