*wave*

Aug. 1st, 2010 11:20 pm
Hi I am going to America again, on Singapore's birthday even. Whoo!

Sooner or later one can expect extended levels of angst about my quest to get an (unlocked) iphone 4, figure out how am I to sleep, try to get around, interact with the natives, (and very likely) freak out about how cold it is all the time!

Today's OMG mental moment: Am I going to have to fix my own eyebrows now???
Oh hell I think I'm in love.

San Francisco (and Berkeley, and UC Berkeley) is just full of unicorns and rainbows. You'd think it might just be new people enthusiasm, but everyone has been amazing, honestly truly without a single shred of cynicism, insincerity and sarcasm that characterises like, just every speech and thought pattern I've ever had.

There's a lot more applied than I'm used to, and just more exploring (aka farting around except we call it Science aka the real spirit of science) than focus, and initially I was like this is all rubbish let's get to the systematics but now I've been bitten by their mind leech and it's beginning to sound sensible.

So I met up with a stunning number of people today, including Tari!!!! (Hi Tari!) and gave her her present. It was great talking to you, I hope I didn't come off as too nuts or loud or what. In terms of people at Berkeley PMB, half of them were doing things so unrelated to what I want to do it's funny (corn paramutation???!?!?! transcriptor repression and activation of immune responses/pigmentation what? Environmental microbiology???) but they explained everything to me nicely and I just got excited everywhere by how new and shining it all was. I was so yay it makes me sick.

Starbucks (Where I met Tari) was actually cheaper than that in Singapore today, I got orange blossom tea (green tea, orange blossoms, wolfberries) for 1.99. Otherwise it was just lots of food all day provided by the university and/or faculty/grad students. Let's see...I ate a poppyseed bagel with cream cheese on one side and strawberry cream cheese on the other, some fruit salad, yoghurt with berries, fruit juice in the morning, half a turkey and cheese, most of a pickle, fruit salad and a chocolate cookie that I ate in installments for lunch (also I lost my water bottle at this time), and for dinner we went for a potluck thing at a prof's place where I had roast chicken, cornbread, some vegan spicy tofu mushroom thing that sucked (it had potential, and squandered it most shamelessly), and pasta with sausage.

Also I drank wine because it was the closest thing around and I was shouting, and since it was good, I drank a little too much and yes well. Do you know I get even more excited about science and unable to follow a single narrative thread when I'm tipsy? (As you can sort of tell from this post)

The Berkeley campus is very nice. Magnolias are flowering. Fat tame squirrels everywhere. Lots of appallingly fashion-forward young ridiculously attractive people.

Tomorrow = walking tour and creole food.
Approximately five milliseconds after I posted virtuously about papers and not sleeping and whatnot I went and slept. It was constantly interrupted by tentative knocks that I couldn't tell was from my door or what, so I kept panicking and leaping out of bed to check the door without my glasses, which is not very smart.

Around 4 my stomach started digesting itself because the only thing I'd had was airplane breakfast (hotcakes, mushy egg (??), random cooked vegetables, yoghurt and cheese) at around 7 a.m. here time.

Actually it would be more accurate to say that I procrastinated about having to go out, fell asleep, kept hitting the snooze button, woke up with the tremendously fierce biological urge to go back to sleep, stared blankly through 2 pdfs (one involved viral transfection, and the other some sort of flowering gene control thing, but hahaha that's the extent of my knowledge) until 4pm, whereupon I went out, wandered down a block almost to the public library, and then succumbed to (in SF the land of good food or so the food blogs imply) STARBUCKS.

*abject humiliation*

And I didn't know what the rules of tipping were, so I stuffed a dollar in the tip jar. I got a greek honey parfait and a grande vanilla rooibos (yes god thank you for bestowing this mediocre but still pretty okay rooibos upon me), which worked up to be $5.40. At this rate I don't think I can eat in this country very often.



(.UOY also fail at self preservation)

ALSO HE WAS CUTE OKAY I ADMIT IT WHAT GOD THIS CITY IS JUST FULL OF RIDICULOUSLY ATTRACTIVE PEOPLE.
Holy magic marker wouldja look at that.



Yes I am in San Francisco now, it is ridiculously pretty and easy to get around and has a lot of attractive people and reminds me of Europe, and I am ridiculously deprived of sleep. Since the last time I actually went unconscious was oh, Wednesday Singapore time 1430hrs. Meaning I've been awake for...36 hours wow fuck go me.

My hotel room (http://www.hotelshattuckplaza.com/) is amazing and enormous and smells wonderful, I take back everything I said about lavender not being my favourite scent. It is crazy fantastic when you're so e_e that children cry when they see you (okay, no)

Also prof is going to laugh when he knows that I already kena having to speak up to the concierge at the hotel. YES OUTDOOR VOICE IT SHALL BE.

Okay I'm going to remain awake for the rest of today until after dinner, and then sleep like heck so that I'll be conscious tomorrow for the INTERVIEWS. Let's read some papers! And here's my tentative schedule for tomorrow (so many people!). Sorry my paranoia doesn't allow me to put their names in case someone gets this searching google.

10:15-10:45 –
11:00 -11:30 –
11:45 -12:15 –

1:30-2:00 –
2:15-2:45 –
3:00-3:30 –
3:45-4:15 –

Oh yes the flight here from Tokyo was so turbulent I was standing around waiting for the toilet and my feet left the ground. I guess I was having so much fun (I like air turbulence it is very soothing) that the stewardess sent me right back to my seat, unrelieved, like a naughty child.

The food was pretty good on the flight.

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ika

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