It's been a really long couple of weeks here in Galway. The last post ended with chocolate caramel cupcakes, which were a huge hit for my mate's birthday, and after that I did nothing for the weekend. Except run 10k. It was called a mini-marathon, which is sort of insulting really, because it's nowhere near a marathon. Still, it was really hard. Way harder than 8k. I managed to finish in 56 minutes, which is two or three minutes faster than last year. And I decided that running really isn't my thing, and I don't enjoy it enough to want to do an actual marathon, or even a half. I will stick to short runs and the odd 10k for a good cause.

When I finally decided to try do some work, I realised that what I had been planning on working on was already finished, I had just done it so long ago that I had forgotten. On the Monday I had my GRC meeting, which went just fine, and made me determined to make my stupid lab work go well, so that I can finish this stupid PhD. However, that's much easier said than done. So it's pretty much agreed now that I will try to finish enough to write up my thesis at the end of this year. Which is good.

Then later that day I fed Wilbert the Snake a mouse, which must have not been a very good mouse, or maybe I defrosted it too quickly, because when he bit it and wrapped around it the mouse's tummy burst open and spilt guts everywhere! It was gross. He still ate it though. He has been very boring since then - he is getting ready to molt, but sure is taking his time about it. He would not eat his mice this week, which is very annoying, because they went to waste and they cost me 2 euro each! However, after I changed his bedding and water he did get right into his water, his whole body, and went for a little swim, which I had never seen him do before.

After Wilbert's dinner it was time for rugby practice, where we played a practice game against another team and my legs were hurting me so much that I decided I should really go to the physio. I did so the next day, and she was really good. She used some ultrasound thing on my legs to get rid of the shin-splints, then did dry-needling to fix up my calf muscles so that I wouldn't get more shin splints. Which hurt. A lot. Dry-needling is exactly what it sounds like - needles are stuck into you. There were at least four needles sticking out of my calf muscle and she wriggled them around, which made all my muscles twitch. For the rest of the day I was limping and felt as if somebody and tried to tear my calf muscle right out of my leg. But on the bright side, my legs are almost all better. Unfortunately that hasn't made me much faster for rugby. Yet despite my lack of speed I got my first try in our game last week! Yay! It was a very exciting moment.

So that was all the news of last week, and then over the weekend the Volvo Ocean Race festival started. It involved a lot of noise and huge crowds. There is a little 'village' set up down at the docks, with loads of food stalls (really good ones) and little shops, plus a huge stage. A stage with such hugely load amps that I can hear the noise very clearly from my apartment, which is blocks away. So when the boats came in on Monday night and I was trying to get a good night's sleep (which I needed because I had a cold) I was woken up at one in the morning by the sound of Split Enz 'I See Red' and some incredibly annoying woman shouting through the microphone. I listened for long enough to, first, gather that the NZ boat had come into Galway first (but we didn't win overall, sadly) and, secondly, get so annoyed with that woman at the microphone that I hunted in my earplugs and slept with them in. Which is very uncomfortable! The next day I went down to check out the boats and they were much smaller than I expected. To think that a group of people spent 9 months on those little things, sailing across huge oceans with big waves!

Now it is Thursday and I have had to sleep with earplugs every night. The crowds are huge and the rain is not dampening their spirits. For those of us that live here it's pretty funny that it won't stop raining - now everybody will know what Ireland is really like, instead of being fooled by the bouts of good weather that often show up just for tourists. However, the rain has not improved my cold at all, which has gone from a sinus cold to a gross phlegmy cold to a sore throat cold. I was getting better, but then yesterday it rained on us for our entire rugby game. And then as soon as we finished it stopped. Chocolate cookies helped, and so did going home and making soup for dinner. Yesterday was July the 4th so for the Volvo Race Week it was America day, and there were fireworks out in the harbour. They were really good, and the first fireworks I'd seen in ages! It didn't last long enough though. Apparently fireworks are illegal here, to the point where even the cities don't hold a fireworks display at New Years. How crappy is that?!

I have given up on working for the day. It's nearly time for my first yoga class. Because I joined yoga this week. Which made the physio much happier with me. I am very un-stretchy, and it would be easier on my legs if I was more stretchy. I reckon it is going to be hard, but all my friends do it and say it's great. So I guess we'll see.

The most awful week ever

This last week has surely been the most awful week ever. It all started on Monday. Obviously. On Monday morning my supervisor shows up in my office to tell me that my GRC meeting will be in one week. That's the yearly meeting with my graduate review committee to decide how my PhD is going and if I can continue. Which isn't really a big deal, it's just a formality really. But what it meant was that I spent the week making plans for the rest of my PhD and actually thinking about it all instead of repressing it like I usually do. It wasn't fun. There are only four months until my third year is finished. The first half of the PhD is done and my paper has been accepted (yay!) but I still have a lot of lab work. Can it be done in four months? I don't know. Not to mention that my supervisor doesn't realise that I want to leave so soon. I wrote up a schedule and it is awful - lab work every day, lots of it, and on weekends, no more procrastinating. It will be so exhausting! I am already so exhausted just thinking about it.

So if a week of hard work is not enough (and I really was working hard), we played the most awful, disgusting rugby game imaginable. It's not that we lost - that's really not such a bad thing. We have lost before (although for the summer league we had not lost a game yet). It was the other team that was awful. The were the most vicious pack of savages that we have ever come across. Some of it was also bad luck, but that bad luck definitely had a lot to do with their aggressive attitudes. About 10 seconds into the game one of their guys managed to elbow one of our girls in the face and he split her forehead open! She was gushing blood everywhere and had to go to the hospital for stitches. The ref was useless, the organiser of the league came over and he was useless too - they didn't do anything! You would think that they would be concerned for the players' safety and that at least somebody there would have some first aid knowledge. Instead they didn't even seem to possess common sense. I mean, she had a head injury, there could have been more damage than what we saw, and they didn't even offer to call an ambulance! I think they really should have done at least that. Instead she went off to the hospital, meaning we lost two of our best players and had no more subs. The game continued and a couple of minutes later the other team took out one of their own players - one of the blokes knocked one of the girls down and we all thought she must have broken her shoulder or something because she didn't get up for ages. She was crying and couldn't play the rest of the match. Yet it continued and the ref did not send off the guy that hurt our player nor the one that knocked down the other team's player. If that was our team being aggressive the ref wouldn't even have to do that because our own captain would send us off to chill out for awhile. So the game continued as it started; we were bummed out and off our game after the accident, they were aggressive and the ref was useless. Instead of penalising them he threatened to send our captain off for whining. For the last 10 minutes of the game we played in a torrential downpour. So all in all, it doesn't really get much worse than that.

But we still only lost by about 6 points I think, and we are still at the top of our division in the league. We just have to make sure that we win all of the rest of our matches by lots of points. And that the team we played this last week don't do so well. Which they might not, I'm not sure that they're really so good as all that - a lot of people were saying that the players last week were not the same players as in other weeks, as if they had borrowed some new people just for the purpose of beating us. That would explain the huge aggressive guys on the team, they were probably real rugby players and not used to non-contact sports. I hope so, because after what they did to our player (I mean, she is all swollen and scarred!) we really need to beat them in the league. And maybe meet them in a dark alley and beat some manners into them. It was such an awful, depressing game.

Well, all of that happened on Wednesday, so there were only two days left until the weekend, but they were days full of lab work, so they were not very good days. Not only that, but the lab work was not very successful. So that sucks. The week got moderately better when a woman stopped in with a box of chocolates for me, as a thank you for giving a group of students a tour of the zoology museum. It was very unexpected, and I felt quite underserving of it because I do get paid for my time. Unfortunately I couldn't even stop to chat to her and say a proper thank you because my supervisor was in my office trying to get her head around my research (in other words, wasting time that I could have spent doing real work). But finally Thursday was over and that evening I had a real break from work - I made cupcakes instead, for a friend's birthday. They were delicious, chocolate with caramel frosting and more caramel sauce on top. It was a long evening though, full of silly blonde mistakes, probably on account of my being so tired. First I screwed up the caramel by burning the sugar (it tasted awful). That was OK though, I had enough butter to make more. But then I didn't have enough butter for the frosting. So I dashed out to get some more, and as I went to take the butter from the shelf I noticed the weight of a pack of butter. That is when I realised my blonde mistake. The reason that thought there wasn't enough butter was that I had forgotten how much butter is in a pack of butter. I had used twice as much butter as I should have for the cupcakes! This is why you should always weigh everything!! Luckily cupcakes can survive quite a lot of mistakes and they were still good. Just somewhat denser than they usually are. Everybody loved them and thought they were like little chocolate brownies. So basically, I got through another day of work, then on Friday evening I fed everybody cupcakes, and now it is Saturday and I should have been working but I took the day off instead. Now I'm going to go to bed early and try to recover from my awful week.

Too much work, too little play

OK, so sorry for being really lazy at the moment but there really is not much to be writing about at the moment anyway you know. I think I last wrote when we were having a couple of weeks of crazily good weather, during which I managed to not get sunburnt. I think that was two weeks ago now. Since then, I have been working. Boring, right? But things are going OK at work for the moment so it's not so bad. However, if I don't stop procrastinating about the lab work that I have to do then things won't be OK for much longer. It's just so difficult to get motivated when, one, you don't know what you are doing and have to teach yourself everything and, two, you just really don't want to do it. At first it was OK because that beautiful sunny weather that made me not want to work went away. We had days and days of endless rain (although it did manage to stop just enough for rugby practices and games). Last week was awful for some reason - we had a long weekend, during which time I did no work and lots of sitting around the house (because it was cold and rainy outside) and for some reason shorter weeks are always less productive because your idea of what day it is gets all messed up.

Luckily I had a nice distraction from work last week - I gave a talk at the aquarium for their 'marine month'. It had absolutely nothing to do with my PhD. I talked about dolphins and how they get caught in fishing nets. There were about a dozen kids there and they were a really good audience, with lots of questions (really clever questions for such small children actually). So that was fun, and I was looking forward to Saturday, when they were going to have a dolphin/whale rescue demonstration, using an inflatable whale to show the public what to do if you come across a stranding. I was asked to come along as a scientist and answer any biology questions that people might have. However, it was cancelled, because they have lost their whale. But that wasn't such a bad thing as it was looking like the weekend was going to be horrible and rainy. Only the next thing you know, Saturday arrived and it was warm and sunny! The weather here changes that quickly, and I had no plans for a nice sunny day, but all my friends were going to the one day festival being put on by Mumford & Sons. Has their music reached NZ yet? They're really popular over here. So a friend of mine had a spare ticket and it had been years since I'd been to a concert of any sort, so I forked out 40 euro and went along. It was good - I think most people would have said that it was really, really great - but I think concerts just aren't really my thing. I like the music but I hate all the people crowding around and pressing into you. There was some stoner half asleep and leaning all over people and somebody in front of me kept farting. Plus there were less than 100 toilets for a crowd of thousands, it was awful. Makes you think it would be easier to be a boy. But even they weren't allowed to avoid the queue - there were security guards standing around to prevent them from peeing wherever they wanted. Which is good, sort of, except that then there are twice as many people in line for the loos and you miss out on all the music while you wait. How terribly inefficient and under-prepared is that!

Well, after such a big Saturday I did very little on Sunday, which is a shame because the weather was nice but there is just not that much to do here and I was tired. I sat around watching movies on tele (Nanny McPhee and E.T. were on) and reading my book instead. It's an historical fiction novel about Charles Darwin. Then I made an awesome dinner for my flatmate and I, and it was still such nice weather that we went out for ice-cream, which involved manoeuvring crowds of people who were out to watch the football. All night I could hear people yelling the 'ole' chant. I guess Ireland must have won or something. I hope it doesn't continue tonight because I really would prefer a good nights sleep. On Wednesday is our Zoology colloquium, at which all of us students give a talk about our research and then we have a departmental BBQ. There are not so many students these days so it should finish early, which means food will be early, which is perfect because I intend to leave early and go to our rugby game, which I'm sure will be far more fun than the departmental BBQ. For my contribution I will be introducing the Irish to lamingtons. Chocolate ones. Should be good. And that is all that is going on in my life at the moment, and there will probably be nothing exciting happening over the next couple of weeks either, because the life of a third year PhD student is terribly tedious. To make matters worse I think I have a bit of an RSI from spending too much time typing, and now I have a very sore wrist. Just goes to show that working hard is not good for you.

PS - sorry, no photos either, like I said, nothing much is happening at the moment...

Heat Wave

It has been strangely hot here. The entire last week has been nice weather. Finally it was Saturday and I didn't have to work. It was 27 degrees! We drove out to a beach, the coral beach, which instead of sand has a type of coral called maerl all washed up. Lots of little shells too and for once I refrained from picking them up. Instead I lay on the beach all day. I am so impressed with myself - I didn't get burnt for once. I was very smart and wore plenty of sunscreen and kept reapplying it. We even managed to go for a swim. The water was icy cold! It was the type of cold where you step in and immediately have to stop out because the cold gets right into the bones of your ankles. Then you get back in and wait until it feels ok, then inch in bit by bit. Only there was lots of seaweed so we didn't want to go deep. Instead we had go back to the shallows and sit down, slowly, bit by bit, then edge back into the slightly deeper water. Eventually the water was up to my ribcage and after that it was ok to sort of swim a bit. In a shallow, paddling sort of way. There was a small boy that was threatening to splash us. He must have only been about 3 but the water was very cold so it was a pretty heavy threat. I stayed in the water as long as I could and then the sun did not seem so hot. In fact it took quite a long time to warm up again. Finally I was warm again and then it was time to go home because it turned out we had been at the beach for hours. Everybody else was burnt and will be so uncomfortable tomorrow but I am good! On the way home we stopped for ice-cream - here it is not common to get scooped ice-cream, instead the soft-serve ice-creams are really common. They call them a 99 - once upon a time I guess they cost 99 cents. They pile so much softserve into the cone and stick a flake into it. It is so much that even I struggle to eat it. I really wish it would stay so warm for the entire summer. I will be so sad if it gets cold again.

How was Portugal?

So, sorry about the delay, but Portugal was really tiring! The conference would go from 9 am until after 6, entire days of just sitting there, listening to people talk and discussing work stuff with various other researchers, not to mention having to contend with my supervisor shooting ideas at me so quickly that I can barely comprehend them. I had my talk on the first morning of the conference, so the two nights previous to that I had not gotten anywhere near enough sleep. I mostly knew my talk but when we arrived at the venue the conference room was huge! Enough for about 500 people surely! There were less than a hundred of us, which I think was sort of worse than if it had been full. The screen was really gigantic, it was all on a much larger scale than anything I'd done before. I talked and talked but even while speaking I could not keep track of whether I was saying the right things or not. I got to the end and had no idea if I had really said what I was supposed to say. I had to answer a couple of questions and then it was over and I could relax. Here is me at the podium (photo is way too zoomed in!):

It was definitely the scariest talk that I have done - the room was so big and the audience were all experts in my field and could actually judge my work. However, over the next three days people kept coming up to me and telling me that I gave a good talk so it must have been OK! I was very glad that it was over. After that the conference was mostly talks that were about adhesion but not so much the biological side of things and I found most of them very hard to follow. Unfortunately the one talk I really wanted to hear, by the only other person that really looks at barnacle adhesive, was not so great. He is Japanese and his accent was really strong, plus his English was not that good and the talk itself was not well structured so it was hard to follow. On the up-side, he is really interested in my structural biology because his lab is entirely molecular based, and he gave me a barnacle brooch - it is an acorn barnacle but that's OK because my barnacles are ugly anyway. So here is me (centre right of crowd, white shirt) talking to the foremost researcher in my field (the Japanese guy,  you can even see a white barnacle brooch on his jacket):

Sadly the conference took up most of my time in Portugal. They fed us really well, and listening to talks all day is really tiring so I ate way too much. For the first two evenings I had dinner in the city with various other researchers and students. The weather was gorgeous, it's a shame we had so much of it being stuck indoors all day.

The restaurants serve more fish than anything else and have no idea that cod is an endangered species. The fish is generally fried whole and they serve it to you just like that, with the head and tail and everything. I have never had fish like that before - in fact I think I at more fish in Portugal than I every have before. Some of it was good but it was all very salty - the Portuguese seem to like excessive amounts of salt even more than I do. The hotel was really nice and breakfast each morning was included - they had these little custard tarts which are a Portuguese speciality and they were so amazing! Each morning I had to go back for seconds and thirds, it is lucky such yummy little tarts are not available here! On the Thursday evening was the conference dinner, at which they first plied us with alcohol and tiny little snacks, then plied us with more alcohol as we waited for our dinner. There was a fish course (cod, of course), for which I used the wrong knife - I know that you are supposed to go from the outside in but it was such a big plateful, it seemed to large for the small knife and fork. However, then came a meat course, which I think was suckling pig because they have a lot of that over there, and my big knife and fork were gone so I was left with just the small ones. I was not the only one to make that mistake at least! They kept on topping up our drinks so I have no idea how much I had. Finally there was dessert, which was a buffet, there was so much good stuff and as usual my eyes were bigger than my stomach so I ended up feeling terribly stuffed full. There was lemon meringue pie and pavlova (not as good as a kiwi one) and chocolate tart and chocolate mousse. The best part though was the bowls full of fresh strawberries. They brought out the entertainment then, a traditional Portugues music group, singing Fada songs, which is now recognised as being a part of the cultural heritage of Portugal. It is basically songs full of emotion in which the singers stand with their eyes closed and put as much emotion into every single word as possible. There is guitar in the background and it ends in a big crescendo. It is really strange to see people up there singing with their eyes closed and lots of exaggerated facial expressions.

So, anyway, the conference finally ended on Friday and for the afternoon I joined a tour organised by the travel agency that organised the conference. There were not many of us on it but that was actually quite nice. Unfortunately the conference had run late, so our tour was running late, so some things were cut a little short. It was still really good though and I wish I could have stayed in Portugal for longer. We managed to pack a lot into a single afternoon and I took enough photos to make up for not having had any time earlier. First the bus took us through Lisbon, a suburb of which is called Belem, which is named after Bethlehem, and has a big old monastery, which you can see in the photo below. It also has a famous pastry shop where the traditional little custard tarts are made, the original recipe of which is a well guarded secret. And for good reason too, otherwise we would all be that much fatter.

There is a tower along the river that was to guard against invasion (by the Spanish I think but I'm not sure). We did not have time to get out to see it but the side facing the river is shaped a bit like a ship, so that approaching enemy vessels would see what looked to be a giant ship waiting to chase them off.

The day was very overcast, so the ocean was a greenish-grey colour and just faded into the horizon. The photos don't do it justice because I took them through the bus window. There were a lot of little forts along the coast, you can see one in this photo below, and there were also a lot of fishing boats, which I guess would explain the huge bias for fresh fish on the menu.

We drove and drove and drove - I was getting very hungry. We went though a small town that makes the best ice cream in Portugal (and the world, apparently). They told us all about it but we did not stop to have some! There was a tree with crochet-art wrapped around it, featuring geckos, which are an adhesive-capable animal so I had to take a photo of it.

Finally we left the coast and started driving inland, into the mountais. We passed fields of trees that are subject to such strong wind that the trees are growing along the ground - they were clearly pine trees but they looked like low bushes, only you could see a trunk at one end. I tried to take photos but they really didn't show them in such an impressive way as I saw them so you will have to take my word for it. We finally made it to another small town and stopped for lunch. Again, before we even began eating the alcohol was flowing and they always top up your wine glass without even asking first. Lunch was something that I have never had before - squid! It is roasted on great big metal skewers, which are then hung on chains above your table and you can just slide it off with your knife and fork.

They served it with fries, which were actually really delicious fries, and a spinach puree that was quite awful. The squid itself was very interesting - it was slightly fishy and very chewy. I don't think I liked it very much, it was edible but I would never choose to order it, no matter how traditional it may be.

When lunch was finished it was already late afternoon and we had not yet reached our destination. If only the conference had ended early! We next stopped at a place called Capo da Roca - the most western point of Europe. Despite the overcast day it was still a really beautiful place, largely on account of the impressive rock formations at the base of the cliffs.

 

The greenery that was all around was not grass but some type of succulant. The flowers were unusual and really pretty so as usual I stopped to take photos of them. We could not stop for too long but really, there was not that much to see other than some impressive cliffs.

However, before we could leave we all had to have our photos take at the pillar signifying the most western point of Europe. So here I am and this means that you cannot complain that I never put up pictures of myself on here.

Finally we continued to our destination, a small town called Sintra. Sintra is a place full of interesting architecture and castles. I think it is where the nobility used to live, plus the Spanish nobility had a holiday home there. The man that would have been King if Portugal had not become a republic lives there still. There is a castle right on top of the mountain that has views of the sea and the plain on the other side, however we did not have time to go up there. I'm not sure how interesting it would have been, however. There is also a convent that looked very nice to visit but if I want to see everything I guess I will just have to go back there one day.

The first stop for me and my room-mate (did I mention that I got paired with a random student at the hotel? Luckily we managed to get along really well!) was the shops! There were not many of them, but both of us had to buy a couple of souvinirs before leaving Portugal. Unfortunately I ran out of money and so did the ATM so my spending was limited! I did buy a cute little handbag (actually I'm still not sure if it's really cute or really ugly but I like it anyway), I brought a silver necklace strung on a cord made of cork (they grow cork trees in Sintra - I never even knew that cork was a specific type of wood!) and we brought shots of cherry liquer in chocolate cups! It is a Portuguese thing and they were only 1 euro. You sip the liquer, then when the cup is still half full you pop the whole thing in your mouth and just bite down on it. It is very strong but the shop-keeper was right - the flavours really do complement each other.

After the shops we made our way to the only palace that was within walking distance, but luckily it was the one that I most wanted to see (I actually had no idea what we would see before getting on the tour bus, but they gave us some brochures and maps to look at before we arrived). It was called the Quinta da Regaleira and includes a small palace, a chapel, a tower and a large area of gardens. The architecture is very gothic and the gardens half wild.

The chapel was Roman Catholic with pictures of saints and carvings of cherubs. I did not go inside; I've seen plenty of churches after all my travels and there was a big puddle in front of the entrance. Besides, we were on the search for the bathrooms and they definitely were not in the chapel so we continued on rather quickly.

Luckily, we found bathrooms easily enough and then could continue our explorations. The tower was next - it was an octagonal tower and you could climb up it. The first spiral staircase was enough enough but they got narrower and narrower until they were all but vertical - the last one was more like a ladder and it was precarious going in my jandals (I very nearly wrote flip-flops there because over here they don't understand the word jandal, I have had to change my vocabulary!).

At the top, after catching my breath, I could take a look around at the panoramic view - you could see across the park and down onto the chapel and castle in one direction, the town centre and the ocean in another and behind us was a mountain.

And look, here is another picture of me! Am I not terribly vain and narcissistic today? Now you really can't say that I never show photos of myself. Here you can also see the cool pillars of the wee tower room that we were in. Then, after the photos were done, we had to make our way down the steep staircases, which was even more precarious than going up!

The next step was a small, artifical lake (personally, I would call it a pond myself). It is called the lake of the waterfall but the waterfall is not turned on until the summer I guess, so it was just a lake. The day was incredibly bright and the area very rocky, so my photos are a little over-exposed. This is also one of those instances where a photo does not do the scene justice - the entire park was like an illustration in a story.

Instead of crossing the bridge we walked over stepping stones because I wanted to find an entrance to the tunnels that cross beneath the park. The tunnel that I found was very dark and it took a lot to convincing my new friend to join me. Luckily my key-ring has a small torch on it and eventually she believed me that it was a very short piece of tunnel so she came along.

After a short walk through a pitch black section of tunnel (it was so dark that even my pathetic key-ring torch was useful) we came upon daylight and could look out at the lake. I think that in the summer time the waterfall would be falling down past this opening.

The rest of the tunnels had lights along the floor, though there were side tunnels that were in complete darkness. I would have like the time to explore further. The map and brochure had showed a structure that they called the Initiation well, so we followed the tunnels to find it.

This well  is not so much a well as a reverse-tower - there is no water in it and there is a spiral staircase running around the egde from the top to the bottom. We did not climb to the top so I only have the photo showing the view up. It was very wet and slippery in the bottom of the well, despite it not being a real well.

We followed yet more tunnels to get out and even though we had not seen anywhere near everything it was time to leave. I would love to go back, to see more of the gardens, the grottoes and the palace. But at least for our short visit it was spring, so there were flowers and the trees were green.  To go back to my habit of taking photos of flowers, here is a flower that I always think looks quite like a bird.

Sadly, the day was pretty much done after seeing the palace. But to look on the bright side, we were all incredibly tired and getting hungry so it was time for dinner. We drove for what seemed like an age, through what seemed to be the middle of nowhere, until we finally came to yet another small town and stopped at a restaurant. This town was far from the ocean so we felt quite safe from being served more seafood. There were pictures of pigs everywhere so it was pretty easy to guess what the main course would be. They brought it out to show it to us before the carved it up - a very young pig (though not quite a baby, really), all de-boned and roasted. Poor baby pig!

I think that might be the first time that I have really eaten a baby animal - I have had lamb of course, but the lamb that we eat is generally a year old, so it is not really a baby. Suckling pig, however, really is a baby animal, because, as the name implies, the animal has not yet been weaned. It doesn't really taste the same as ordinary pork and is far softer. It was much nicer than the squid! However, Portuguese cuisine seems to be awfully heavy on protein compared to how I would normally eat. There is some salad served and some potato, but very little in the way of vegetables! Finally, with the massive overload of protein out of the way, it was time for dessert. So here is the second amazing Portuguese dish that I have discovered, and like the little custard tarts I would like to reproduce if I can be bothered one day. It was called Doce da Casa, which means sweet of the house. So basically, it is the house speciality and should be different every day and between every restaurant. However, it seems that one particular dish has also take on the name and Doce da Casa will generally look like this. It consisted of a very light vanilla custard, topped with soft biscuit that was absolutely drenched in coffe, with some sort of very foamy, uncooked-meringue-like cream on the top. It was delicious! I had two! Luckily, my room-mate also loves food and had a second one so it wasn't just me being piggy!

Now I am back in Ireland. The trip was great and I wish I could have stayed. I was so tired that when I got back to Ireland I left my poster on the plane (I had a poster to present at the conference aswell, you see, which was placed in a big plastic tube for travelling, which I had wedged beneath my seat on the plane, where it was so out of my way that I forgot about it!). I tried to go back but couldn't, and then though maybe I'd just leave it, but my supervisor will probably want it again one day and the plastic tube was not mine so I had to find somebody to help me and wait for them to go find it. I spent the weekend recovering from my very tiring trip and now I have so much work to do. However, some of my lab work may finally be working out so I cannot slack off, though it is so cold and rainy that I would love to just stay in bed all morning with a book or a movie.

In Portugal

So over the last couple of weeks I have been doing a lot of lab work and when I have finished with that I have been finding every possible means to avoid thinking about this conference. I haven't done any background reading and I don't know my talk by heart. I only know it well enough to get on a small roll and then stumble over everything. I couldn't sleep last night, I must have been worried, then today I had to get up at 5.30. On the bus ride I tried to go over my talk but I was so tired. On the plane I tried again but my head hurt so much. I was planning on having a quiet afternoon at the hotel and doing work, but it seemed like a better idea to be social and get to know some people. So here I am, it's 9.30 at night, I'm short on sleep and have to be out at about 8am tomorrow, so I probably need to get up at 6.30. I still don't know my talk, I am tired, my head hurts, the water in the taps tastes funny and the air-conditioning cannot be turned off. I also have to share a room with a random stranger, who I have not met yet so I definintely can't have an early sleep, because it would be weird to wake up beside a person that I don't know - did I mention that the two single beds are pushed up right against each other, and you can't move them because there are built in bedside cabinets next to them? What sort of hotel-planning is that - if you ask for two single beds why would they think that you would want them right next to each other? So I need to go over this talk a couple more times, then go to sleep. By lunchtime tomorrow it will all be over and I can relax. Of course, there will still be talks to listen to, a poster to stand beside and answer questions about, and  trying to mingle without offending anyone or bad-mouthing my supervisor, but it will still be far easier than preparing for my own talk. Then I will go out and take photos of the city so that there is more on here than my endless blathering.

No title ...

So this week has been pretty sucky. I am largely hating work at the moment - it is terribly full-on and I get the feeling that it's going to stay that way until I finish. I'm just not cut out for putting such long hours into a job that I don't like. I have so much lab work to do and I really don't like lab work, it just stresses me out and then because I am stressed out I fuck things up. I have to go to Portugal in just over a week and my talk is half ready, but there is this one piece of work that I was hoping to have finished for both my paper and my talk and now it is not finished because I'm not sure if I'm doing it right, and I don't know how to use the microscope properly, and maybe I don't even have the right microscope available. The technicians at the hospital are willing to help me which is great, but they aren't free until after the conference. So first of all I have to deal with my supervisor's condescension and patronisation over me not being able to have this simple piece of work finished on time, and then the questions that people might ask at the conference because I don't understand this stuff properly. I could give them an answer that is completely wrong, which would be terrible. But at the same time, what do I care anyway, it's not like I'm going to stay in this line of research for the rest of my career. Though it would be terribly vindictive to get it all wrong on purpose just to screw over my supervisor. Who is still behaving badly. I ran into her and her family today (unfortunately, what a way to ruin Saturday) and after the necessary 'hi-how-are-you's she actually said to me: 'off to the lab? off to the lab?' in a chirpy voice while nodding her head, as if it's OK for her to expect me to work constantly. It's one thing for a student to choose to work the weekend, but they can't actually tell us to do so, that's against some sort of university rules. I really wanted to tell her no, I'm actually doing groceries and relaxing because I do actually need to eat and live, but instead I was nice. And then I was so put out that I did no work all day. Instead I made ciabatta bread (which is awesome by the way, I shouldn't make it because I eat too much of it). I watched The Secret Garden too. Old kids movies are great. Sadly I will have to work tomorrow though. I really don't want to. I just can't hack working the weekends. I brought a lotto ticket today though, maybe I won and can run away to a tropical island.

In other news, there really is no news. Everything here is the same as always. I like that I now have a pet to talk to but this last week he has not come out at all. Turns out it was because he was shedding. So now I have a snake skin and I don't know what to do with it. Then I invited a friend to feed him and we watched the snake eat a mouse. He has not come out of his cage in ages and I am too nervous to pick him up out of it - the tank is his own space so I don't want to put my hands in there, I would rather wait for him to crawl out and then pick him up. Tomorrow is a feeding day so I will have something to break up the lab work. Some of the other PhD students have Master's students at the moment to do lab work for them - I don't have that but at the same time, first you have to teach them how to do all the work so it's probably more trouble than it's worth. Though with somebody else helping me out I might not lose my keys so often, because there would be someone else with me to notice where I put them down. Luckily there is always someone at work to let me into whatever doors I need. It would me much worse if I lost my house keys.

The weather here the last couple of weeks has been really atrocious - freezing cold winds and plenty of rain. It always seems to rain whenever I go outside and it stops when I go in. It is OK when there is rugby practice but as soon as a match begins it starts to really lash down. We won our last game despite the rain, but I think it would be a nice experience to play in good weather. We have team t-shirts now and sadly they are not purple - they were supposed to be but instead they are royal blue with a red stripe. My fluorescent pink socks really don't match so I should get some bright red ones instead. I would like them to have some blue on them to match the colour scheme, like blue polka dots or stars, but you don't seem to be able to get socks that match my imagination so I guess I will just have to make do. It's quite sad though, because I really do seem to like to make a spectacle of myself. You need a cheerful point to the game because a lot of them take it so serious and get sort of aggressive - they really just need to chill out and have some fun.

Anyway, that's all for now and I sadly have no photos for you this week because nothing exciting happens and if it does I don't often have my camera, but next week I'll be in Portugal so I'll surely see new things to take pictures of and have proper news instead of nothing news. Or maybe not. I don't even want to go, it will just be taking me away from work for a week, and I will have to be around my supervisor far more than I usually would, and speak to people that are working in the same area as me, at which point I will have to pretend that I am actually enthusiastic about my research and believe it is going somewhere. I mean, what if I were to actually tell people that I think it's a waste of time for a lab with no expertise like my lab (which is really just me) to be attempting such novel work and competing against real experienced scientists - imagine the repurcussions! Perhaps I would be fired. That would make life a lot easier though, if you are fired you don't even have to go to the trouble to make the decision to leave, you just are told to. I'm sure my family wouldn't mind me bludging off of them! However, that is unlikely to happen because my supervisor has already had one student leave so she really needs to get my through my PhD or she will end up looking pretty incompetent. Which she is in some senses, but they don't bother to teach people how to supervise or lecture or manage, they just expect scientists to be able to do so. Which is crazy, there are a lot of scientists out there who should not be allowed anywhere near a teaching and management position, but there is no such thing as a university position in which you are a researcher doing your own research without having to manage students and teach undergrads, which takes up so much time that you don't actually get to do any research at all. It really is not playing to people's strengths at all, especially seeing as loads of scientists are so socially inept that they should never be allowed anywhere near a position that involves being in charge of other people. However, I am sure I said goodnight a whole paragraph ago so I will stop my griping now and get some sleep so that I can manage to haul myself out of bed in the morning and go to work (despite it being a Sunday). Goodnight world - please let me win the lotto or meet a millionaire sometime soon ...