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Travelling
18 May 2008
We had made plans on Friday night to all meet in the hotel lobby for 9am, go for breakfast, and then organise what to do with our much anticipated day off. I got the lobby for 8am to send emails and read the Guardian. People didn’t actually start ambling in until about half past 9, and then some people needed to do laundry etc. In the end me, Steffen, Raphael, Carolina, Ranger Dave (more about this legendary character later!) and Natalia went to Finagel A Bagel round the corner of the hotel to have breakfast.
When there are too many people all with different priorities and plans it gets difficult to reach consensus, so it actually got until gone 11am before me and Carolina got bored of hanging around and left to take the ferry to the New England Aquarium. Luckily the Ranger caught us up and so the three of us left for our adventure.
The ferry was covered by my weekly pass, transport here is so darned cheap! We saw lots of jellyfish in the harbour on the way over, and a woman walking a dog that was actually bigger than her! Mad!
Ranger Dave didn’t fancy the aquarium and just wanted a wander around, but by random chance we bumped into Marijan in the queue, so the three of us went round the aquarium and gawped at the huge turtles and cool bright coloured fish and things. They even had a pool where you could pick up and touch crabs and starfish, so there are some cool photos of me braving a crab in my hand with lots of other 5 year old children! :)
After the aquarium we left Carolina to go shopping and me, Ranger and Marijan took a ferry round the Harbor Islands and stopped on Charles Island. 7 quid for the whole trip, which was 40 minutes in the ferry there and a walk around the Island Fort. There were supposed to be guided ranger tours, but we got there too late. Dave picked up a map and took the role of ranger tour guide and did the job so well I named him Ranger Dave. It’s just me that calls him that and whether he actually likes the name or not is an entirely different matter! We walked around the island for an hour reading about different types of fort architecture and history and then just managed to get the second to last ferry back to Long Wharf.
We then went downtown to get the Ranger some swimming trunks, and then Marijan left us to to have a wander and myself and the Ranger when to the supermarket to get fruit (oh sweet nutritious fruit that is so rare in this otherwise wonderful place!), and rolls and ham and things for today. We’re going to be in the lab all day today and the cafe where we usually get our delicious lunch (for free) isn’t open so we have to sort ourselves out.
The plan was for everyone to try and meet in the hotel lobby for 7pm even if we had all gone our separate ways, but as it turned only me, Michael, Ranger and Marijan managed this, so the four of us decided to wander downtown to get some dinner. We went to Quincy Market and ate in this huge food court with more different cuisines than I could shake my salivating tongue at! I had a swordfish ‘kebob’ and a fruit shake called a monkey punch, which were both delicious (and again, super-cheap!)
We were all stuffed by then so decided to walk off the meal. A couple of the guys bought cheesy Boston souvenirs and then the Ranger came up with the brilliant idea of going to see jazz at the top of the Prudential Center. It was bloody amazing! We bought a couple of beers and watched really a really good jazz band 52 floors above Boston. It. was. jaw. dropping! Then on the way back we stopped in another part of the centre and watch a funk band kicking it old school, with lots of very sharply dressed black dudes dancing like I only can in my very happiest and funkiest of dreams!
Got back to hotel at around 1am after a very full but very fun day off and again crashed out to the sounds of adverts trying to sell me Preparation H and machines that will attack my abs and give me a six-pack and lots of babes in just 90, yes, just 90 days! (as part of a healthy diet regime, of course!)
It’s now Sunday morning about 8.10am and I’ve been typing for almost a full hour without any breakfast. The Ranger’s coming up to my room to make rolls (he bought the cheese, I bought the ham) at 8.30am, so I’m going to bust a move now. Because I’m not actually running an experiment I might not stay the full
day and might get some more sightseeing in. :)
Good luck with exams Dip! Well done Kisna on getting through your exams without knifing yourself. Enjoy the few days of relief you get before you start screwing about results day! :)
Hello to everyone else, I hope you’ve enjoyed reading about my time so far. I’ll try and get photos to everyone soon.
Byee!
17 May 2008
Lectures started at 8am instead of 9am today, because one of the stats lectures ran over and we were all really keen on hearing the rest of it. These guys have a really good knack for explaining some of the horrible stuff really simply. I’ve picked up so much more stuff from the talks than banging my head against a textbook for hours and hours!
Then we had a couple more talks on FreeSurfer and using it to analyse functional data and map it onto anatomicals. We get these step by step tutorials with problems to solve that are actually quite fun and really useful!
During the tutorials people had to finish designing the stimuli for the experiments we designed in the workshops on Tues/Thurs. My group (Melissa and Sajun) came up with what was considered a pretty good idea for our our problem (‘How people consider the uneven distribution of wealth’), but way too hard to design and implement in the short time we have, so we’re just sitting in on the other experiments on Sunday and not running one for ourselves.
The day was scheduled to finish at 6pm, but we kind of finished by about 4pm because by the end of the week I think even the guys giving the talk, and even Dr Savoy who has more energy and enthusiasm than I’ve seen in a long while, were getting tired!
In the evening Jennel (speech development researcher from Dallas) organised for everyone to go to Border Cafe in Harvard Square for Mexican food and margaritas, which was great fun! I had blackened rib-eye steak that was just short of being bigger than my face! It was raining so we had a fun time getting there. Lots of people had plans to meet other people around Boston (for example, Michael went to visit his supervisor who’s on sabbatical in Dartmouth), but we managed to get quite a few people together, almost 12 of us I think.
After dinner we went to a really nice bar called Grendel’s (yes after the Beowulf monster, what a coinkidink innit Mae?) where I had a couple of really nice mojitos and I talked a lot of crap to a lot of people who were probably not a little sick of listening to me ramble on by then! I really got going on Nietzsche and the sale of a letter written by Einstein denouncing religion as ‘childish’! Got home for bout 1ish I think, and just crashed out, which is quite reasonable after the week I’d just had!
14 May 2008
Got to be even quicker than yesterday writing this today, because I slept for half an hour extra and now only have 30 minutes to shower and shave before heading over for breakfast!
We didn’t finish until 9.45pm yesterday, so it was almost a 14-hour day! It was really good though, had more lectures and we got to see their 3T scanner, which is pretty much the same as ours since it’s also Siemens, and their MEG scanner which is much cooler and they have much better software. Some of the stuff they’ve developed here is amazing! They’ve got an EEG sensor array that you can use inside the MRI... Possibilities are endless!
In the evening they provided a buffet and then we split into groups. Ended up in a group of just me and another girl, but it was cool. We apparently came up with a really great question that had never been asked before in 15 years, but the experiment we came up with was pretty darned rubbish! Oh well! All in the name of learning!
Finish at 5.30pm today which is nice, I’m going to try and organise for everyone to go out together for a meal instead of just scattering off, or at least go out for drinks in the evening. :)
8 September 2010
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