Hey all!
Ok, so it’s official – I love fencing! That’s now going to be my weekly Wednesday thing. It’s good because it’s not as strenuous exercise as I was fearing (not yet at least!), it’s mostly about foot work at the moment, being able to stretch and bend in the right way and keeping your sword in the right position. I felt fine during the lesson but the next day (and even the day after!) my arm was aching like crazy! I’m sure once it really gets started I’ll be struggling!
I’ve also joined an archery society and will be starting lessons in the next few weeks. All I need is horse riding and then by the time I come back after 3 years I’ll be a medieval bad ass! Well, that’s if I actually get good at any of these things which I kinda doubt!
I’m gonna learn to dive too which should be pretty fun – I’m sure I’ll be kept busy!
My first week and a bit of work is done and I’m enjoying it a lot! The people I’m working with are great – really friendly and helpful. At the moment I’m spending my time trying to make a compound that will be used in some biological tests to test out a hypothesis one of the biologists has about how one of the enzymes I will be targeting works. It’s really handy for me as it means I get to find my way around the lab and do my reading in the first few weeks to prepare myself before really discussing with my supervisor the details of what I want to do for the next three years.
As ever there’s a few differences working in this lab compared to ones I’ve worked in before but the main one (at least for those of you reading that went to Southampton Uni) is that WE DON’T HAVE TO DO COSHH FORMS!!! (Basically, we used to have to fill out forms on the health and safety, what we’d do in the event of a fire or spill etc. for each toxic compound we’d use (which was practically every one)). Here we just have to read that stuff, but not copy it out into our books for each experiment. This might seem like a small thing but it saves HOURS and means I’ll be able to get a lot more done which I’m really happy about. On the down side, ordering chemicals can take ages. I didn’t really think about it before coming here but of course, it has to cross quite a lot of ocean and some of the things are too dangerous to come by plane. Apparently the longest wait has been over a year!
I had an impromptu introduction to Kiwi sweets last night. I was chatting with with my housemates at dinner and they mentioned some sweet that I hadn’t heard of that apparently struck them with horror. So we all walked down to the supermarket to buy their cookies, Squiggles, hokey-pokey, Groovy Gumdrop icecream, weird coconut squares whose names I’ve forgotten, TimTams etc. I gotta say, the Squiggles were pretty good.
Less photos in this post because it’s been raining a fair amount (and I’ve been at work rather than out exploring 😉 ) but hopefully next weeks post will be a bit more colourful.