Rainy Sunday

My plan for today was to walk to Victory Park and maybe later to Mount Eden, but when I went outside it was pouring!

Instead, I decided to walk to the Auckland Museum. At least, I would be inside!

The Auckland Museum is in the Auckland Domain, one of the public parks. The park is really nice, great for running or taking a stroll, but getting there from The Railway Campus is a nuisance. One has to cross the big motorway and walk along it for a while.

The museum had some interesting collections. The biggest exhibit focused on the life and culture of Maori, of course. Besides many older artefacts on display, the museum had also organized a traditional Maori dance performance. This cost extra, though, and I didn't go see it since I had seen these performances before at the All Blacks game and the Evolution Conference.

Interestingly enough, photography was allowed in most exhibit halls. See some pictures on the right.

I had also gotten a ticket to one of the current special exhibits called "Egypt: Beyond the Tomb."
The exhibit was really well done. The visitors could follow the path of a young woman called Keku, who lived 2700 years ago, make her journey from embalming and mummyfication through the underworld, and hopefully to paradise.
The Egyptians were obsessed with the afterlife; growing up, their whole life seemed only to prepare them for this path. The highlight of the exhibit was of course Keku's mummy, well-preserved in two separate coffins.

Finally, there was one impressive exhibit devoted to volcanoes. The museum itself is built on top of a volcano, and of course 48 volcanoes lie underneath the whole Auckland region.
The exhibit told us a little bit of the history of Auckland's volcanoes, some recent eruptions (mostly in other countries, though), and presented a scenario of what would happen if a new volcano would erupt tomorrow, in present-day Auckland.

Moving

Today, I got to move into my new, cheaper room! It's a little bit like a three-bedroom apartment, and I will share bathroom and kitchenette with two other girls. The room is of course smaller than my old one, but it's definitely big enough for me (I don't have much stuff anyways).

The whole process of moving my stuff from one room to the other, moving food and kitchen utensils between the two self-cook kitchen areas, filling out the paperwork, waiting for the receptionist to do the room inspection, etc, took about three hours... it was rather exhausting ;)

The other two girls haven't arrived yet. I think they might move in tomorrow.

After I moved all my stuff, I went for a walk downtown. I explored another farmer's market, grabbed lunch at a little cafe, and did some window-shopping.

Overall, though, the weather was lousy and the city smelly.
I hope it will be a little better tomorrow!

Frustrating Moment of the Day:
When I got something out of the fridge at 9:30 at night, I realized that the fridge had never turned on, when I stocked it this morning (I had turned the little knob all the way to "very cold," though).
Why is my fridge not working??
My frozen veggies, meat, ICE CREAM, etc had had a whole day to slowly thaw!

Of course, this late at night, the reception was closed...
I decided to cook all my veggies and the left over meat (only one chicken drumstick, thank god).

Fortunately, on my way to the kitchen I ran into one of the RAs. When I asked him what could be wrong with my fridge, he suggested it probably wasn't broken and I just needed to turn on the power.
Well, how do you do that??

He kindly came with me and demonstrated:
You need to take a stool, climb up on the 6 ft tall fridge, insert a one-foot spoon in a 3 square-inch hole in the top of the cupboard (the fridge is in a cupboard that you can lock) and tip over a switch.

No, I am not kidding you.

The fridge turned on, but I still wanted to cook some of the veggies and the chicken. So if you walked by the Railway Campus kitchen at 11pm, you probably saw me grilling up some food.

For the next three days, I won't have to come up with dinner ideas, because there will be cooked vegetables in the fridge.

Transformers

This morning, I met up with a few people from the lab to watch the movie Transformers. Today was opening day, so we decided to see the earliest show at 10am, to dodge the crowds.
The movies in NZ cost differently, depending on how new they are. Since this movie just came out, it was going to be more expensive. However, Vicky bought "movie money" (basically a bunch of tickets in bulk, maybe ten or so?) and got a discount.

I didn't really know anything about the story, other than there are fighting robots that "transform" into something else.

I don't think I would buy the movie on DVD, but overall it had a lot of funny parts, and pretty cool computer graphics. It was a little bit long, though (2 hours, 24 minutes).

I did make it back in time for the meeting with my mentors.

The meeting went pretty well; I feel we should have had it a few weeks ago, though.

Later that day, Dee helped me set up BLAST on my computer.

BLAST is a tool that allows scientists to compare protein or DNA sequences against a library of sequences of another genome for similarities. This can be useful, for example, when you have a sequence of DNA of unknown function. By "blasting" this sequence against the genomes of other species, you might discover sequences in these genomes that are already known and are very similar to your query sequence. Oftentimes, similar sequences perform similar functions, and then you are one step closer to identifying the uses of your initial query sequence.

Where Did my Summer Go?

I took a trip to downtown Auckland during lunch break today to run some errands. While I was walking through Albert Park, I spotted these trees.





This is when I realized that it is Fall, almost Winter here, and I missed out on a Summer! We also had 40 degrees Fahrenheit this morning... I guess I should have noticed this sooner :)

I was prepared for the cold lab today - lots of layers and hot tea ;)

We have a new student in the lab. Her name is Melanie, and she is also studying Bioinformatics.

Life in the Lab

We got free food at the lab today. A company trying to sell special pipettes for lab work brought cookies, fruit, crackers, and cheese, and a lot of posters explaining these excellent pipettes.
Most people, though, mainly concentrated on the free food :)

Our room in the building was freezing today!
It used to be a room full of computer servers, so it has a solid AC that's turned up all the way for some reason. Apparently, there is also no way to turn it off, either. There are no servers left in this room, by the way...
Tomorrow, I'll get my winter jacket in there :)

Marcel went to a job interview yesterday. He was interviewing with a company that buys cows from farmers across New Zealand, butchers them, and then exports the meat overseas. Their biggest client is Burger Kind in Japan.
Part of the interview was a visit in the factory. Poor Marcel smelled like dead meat for the rest of the day ;) If he gets/takes the job, he will be working as a systems administrator, by the way, so he won't have to do any meat cutting!

Sleepy Day at the Lab

There wasn't much going on at the lab today.

When we got bored with work, Thomas tried to start up the Tanks server.
Tanks is a silly computer game, where everyone steers a little tank across a field, trying to shot as many other tanks as possible. There are unlimited "lives," and the only high score you can get is the "kill count."
It's a multiplayer game, so the whole lab can play at the same time.

Unfortunately, Marcel was out today, and he is the only one who has administrator access to start up the game server... so no game today.

Instead, we made plans to go to the movies on Friday.
The Transformers movie is coming out. Apparently it's based on some kind of cartoon or comic series? I have no idea - I'm always clueless when it comes to pop-culture trivia like that.
Friday is opening day. The plan is to go in the morning, at 10am, hoping it will be a little less busy.

I also had a meeting with one of my mentors today. I had to wait for him for a while, so I started talking to some of the students working in his lab. Of course they have lots of German speakers - seriously, I haven't seen/heard so many German speakers since I went to Germany a few years ago!
The student I talked to also went to the Evolution Conference, so we happily reminisced a little bit :)

Lots of Chocolate Cake

I finally got around to uploading newer pictures. Look to the right and scroll down :D

When I came to the lab this morning, Vicky told me that it was Thomas' birthday yesterday. I don't know him that well, so not getting him a card was fine.
Vicky and her friend got him a present and a chocolate cake. Thomas himself also brought in leftover birthday cake - more chocolate!
The cakes were both really good, but the frosting was a little sweet.

I also got some work done today. I needed to organize my scripts a little bit (otherwise I get confused about what each of them does, in what order I called them, etc).

I also got a password today, for my University of Auckland username. It only took me how long... about four weeks? Bureaucracies work slowly...

On my way home, I found a cute little Japanese supermarket. It was immaculately clean and there was no single item labeled in English - man, was I lost! I picked up some random candy, just for fun, and some Daifuku (you can't go wrong there... most of the time!).
The candy turned out to be a rip-off! There was a little plush animal in the carton, and two hard candies... sad.
I also stopped by the regular supermarket, and picked up some smoked salmon! I thought I should treat myself to some good fish :)