Emz-the-geographically-variable

Two days after Italy, I went to Moscow for a week long work meeting. It was cold, 6C on the last day of August! A taxi driver was waiting for me at the airport, and he took me to a hotel where all the ESA and NASA people stay when working there. Our suite was quite modern and Ikea furnished, and had two bedrooms and a living room and a large shiny bathroom. It was cheap by Moscow standards – 235 euro/night! Feeling a bit tired, I decided to iron my business clothes for the week and turned on the TV.  For unexplained reasons, we had a US Troop TV channel, whose ads were patriotic affirmations of US cultural supremacy, or alternately, pleas for troops not to commit suicide because it hurts unit morale.
 

The meetings were held in the ESA Moscow office. It is on the 5^th floor of an older posh building, formerly probably apartments judging from the Jacuzzi in the bathroom. They fed us Russian food for lunches, which I really enjoy, even the infamous dill trimmings that literally season every dish.
 

Highlights of Moscow include borsht (beet soup with sour cream and dill), almost seeing Red Square, which was closed to set up for some kind of civic celebration. A guard spent several minutes watching us take pictures from the fence and then summoned us, “Women!” and told us the times it would be open, unfortunately incompatible with our meeting. We got the idea though, and walked around all over to see the Onion Things (churches), the old mall which used to be the one place in the USSR rich people could always get all manner of products denied to the average citizen, the expensive restaurant and clothes store section that looks very European with its cobblestone streets. Moscow seems a bit grimy (the cars are always covered by a layer of dirt), but is in much better repair than St. Pete’s. It is also less interesting, as it has a feeling not unlike other modern cities, and is building tons of standard everywhere apartment buildings and office blocks. The metro is fun – fast, well layed out, awfully deep, enclosed by thick nuclear blast doors, and with each station decorated differently, some with art, others fancy with chandeliers, wood and marble.
 

On the last day we were invited to Star City, where Russian cosmonauts have been trained since the beginning, and whose buildings, features, and people have figured prominently in the research I conduct for my job. The place seemed vaguely familiar from all that I had read about it! Somehow I expected it to be more decrepit, but in fact it was not too bad though most stuff was built between the 60s and 80s and looks that way. We had tea in the ESA Star City Office, and had a tour of most of the important areas – the Soyuz complex simulator, where we saw US astronaut Shannon Walker training; the Mir mock-ups in a long training hall; the Hydrolab, where space suit Extra Vehicular Activity training takes place; the biggest centrifuge in the world which is I think 18 m from pivot point to crew compartment and can induce loads of up to 30G; and an isolation chamber. As part of training, Russian cosmonauts must spend 5 days in a tiny room doing boring tasks. The first and last night they can sleep, but the middle three days they must keep themselves awake and keep their performance up on the tasks. We talked with a very young-seeming cosmonaut just after he got out of the chamber to ask how it was.
 

In light of the the claimed Russian/US integration and cultural exchange so important to mutual understanding and good working relationships, one can’t help but notice a small cluster of large, modern American-style townhouses standing incongruously beside the older cement blocks. These are the US astronauts’ accommodation while staying in Star City, as NASA personnel were dissatisfied with the cosmonauts’ quarters and wanted their people to enjoy US standards. Way to integrate, guys!
 

After Russia, I spent a couple of days working at home and spending a few seconds with Gio, and this morning came by speedytrain to Germany to help get ready for this cave expedition dry run I will be a guinea pig for in a couple of weeks in Sardinia. I am staying with the family I was living with when I was here, lying in my old bed, and very happy to feel welcomed and at home here still.

Due to a few delays, we arrived home at 23:00 or so and had to leave to catch a plane to Italy again at 07:00 the next morning. We quickly exchanged the contents of our bags, slept a few winks in our own bed, and were off again, this time for Milan. From there we made a pilgrimage to eat a pizza in the best pizza place ever (incidentally owned an operated by Chinese) caught a train to Loano, a small seaside town on the Italian Riviera where Gio’s family traditionally spends August. After cold rainy Scandinavia, I was quite overwhelmed by 34 degrees Celsius and everywhere sun and brightly coloured houses. I kept having to interrupt the constant stream of Italian with stupid exclamations such as “here there are so many colours!” Besides a bit of work I had to do to, we spent a few lazy days mainly swimming and eating. We tried to go for a jog once, but after exactly 8 minutes I was near death from the unaccustomed heat, and had to call it off.
 

Which is why I was a bit concerned about Gio’s plan to bike to France. We rented bicycles. Mine, the smaller of the two, was a mountain bike with thin racing wheels attached. Our friend Luca arrived (another Milanese who has been living in Leiden the past year), and we three went straight up the nearest mountain. It was painful, especially for me, as I hadn’t been on a bike for more than a month and am not very heat tolerant at the best of times. However, the view from 850m of the town and the valley below was well worth the effort, and I discovered, at the tender age of 25, why people invented skinny bike wheels. My bike was a small mountain bike with racing wheels attached, and even such as it was, was the fastest thing I have ever powered with my own legs. Snaking downhill I allowed the bicycle to get a bit faster at a time until I was comfortable it was sticking to the road in the turns and could be brought to a halt or safely ploughed into a cliff as necessary to avoid oncoming maniacs in larger vehicles. At some point, feeling like I discovered I could fly (I mean without an airplane), I decided to augment the speed a little. We reached eye-watering speeds of almost 60 kph.
 

The following day we packed up the bikes with our tents and other gear and went North, through all the small towns and the long smelly tunnels through the mountains. Somehow, the relative flatness of the first part of the journey along the coast seemed so easy compared to the mountain the day before we really flew. We stopped for lunch and to read and laze a bit, and to have an iced limoncello in a shady crack in an old town, but mostly just wanted to keep going. We passed into France on the first day! The campsite in the town of Menton is high on a mountain. A nice spot, but after more than 100 km of hills on a hot day, it was a bit of a nasty surprise. We made it, pitched the tents and had a shower, and walked back down to the town for a much deserved dinner and ice cream. After, we climbed again to the campsite, lay down, and slept instantly.
 

The next day we had the idea to go Monaco. (I always get confused if Monte Carlo is the city in the country of Monaco or vice versa, because as far as I can tell they occupy the same position and dimensions of the Earth’s surface.)  We biked under the tunnel by the sea used by the Formula 1 race, which excited my male companions a lot more than me. As I understand it, Monaco is a tax haven for filthy rich bastards who do not wish to return any of their money to the various countries in which they have extracted it, many of them poorer countries, as evidenced by the flags hanging from the back of the multi-million dollar yachts the size of small cruise ships. We climbed another mountain to see the palace and the view from there, then headed home, passing back through France to Italy and finally catching a train somewhere around Sanremo as Luca had to be back in Milan by evening. The train station there was noteworthy for having about 4 km of walking underground using walkalators in order to find the platforms. Including the first vertical excursion, and the train station, our trip was 235 km.
 

Another day, we decided to visit a cave. For me, the motivation was to learn how to take nice photographs with my camera in a cave, as I will be living in one in a couple of weeks. It was quite a commercial operation. We were charged 11 euro and herded into the cave with 100 other noisy people, where they told us not to take pictures inside the first of the two caverns as there were some archaeological things inside: some footprints of prehistoric man (how do they date footprints? I still think they were from a kid who was in there exploring in the 1920s…), and some bones of bears that crawled in there, got damp, and died, in cooler times. Past these points of interest, I decided to take a couple of pictures of the walls, and was promptly yelled at. I shortly found myself in an animated discussion in Italian about the ludicrousness of the rule: why no pictures? Because the operation had sold the rights to a TV company! This event marks my first argument in Italian with a stranger – an important milestone (kilometerstone?) in the road to linguistic competence. In any case, the cave, although beautiful, is a bit of a disappointment because it is impossible to appreciate natural beauty under these conditions of stupidity and overcrowding. I hope in the next one I have some minutes to experience it more deeply.
 

It turns out that being able to respond to annoying strangers in their own language is kind of empowering. I left Italy before Gio as I had to leave for Russia and had a Russian guest coming to stay. The train to Milan was full of little compartments with 6 seats in each. I was the last to enter my cabin, and there was no room for my enormous backpack (which contained my stuff, most of Gio’s stuff and our camping gear). Someone suggested I leave it in the narrow corridor outside, as this is apparently common procedure. I did so, but conscious of being in the way,  I got up and held the backpack in our compartment’s doorway at each stop while people passed. At one stop, one of the people who got on, a man in his sixties with a small wheelable suitcase, lingered near the door for several minutes. Even long after the train recommenced its journey, he remained there. Finally, I decided to put the bag down and sit. Shortly after, he came down the corridor muttering and complaining irritably about my bag in the hall. I moved it for him, and as I stood aside, retorted in Italian, “You know I was waiting for you for like ten minutes, eh?” Sudden silence!

In August I participated in the “Bright Student Conference” put on by the League of European Research Universities in Helsinki, Finland. The first person I met in Finland was on the bus from the airport, a student studying in the Netherlands who incidentally was born and raised in Ottawa, Canada (we identified several mutual acquaintances). In fact, the conference of EUROPEAN students had 4 Canadians, and 3 of them were from Ottawa!
 

My accommodation was a comfortable institutional cell in a Student Union run hostel. Despite the Spartan appearance, I was informed that it was equipped with a sauna, for which I was given a passcode on a small scrap of paper and told the times for the male and female use the following morning. Although I had not brought a bathing suit, I read that Fins like to bathe naked and there were separate times for guys and gals, so I decided to inquire discretely to the front desk attendant about how one goes about taking a Finnish sauna. She wasn’t very forthcoming (I imagine it was a stupid question), so I decided to wake up early and give it a shot. It was hard to find. I walked out of the hotel, around the block, into a construction zone where a workman took of his hat to me, through a door, down into a basement, along a corridor, and opened a large metal door using my passcode. Inside, I found two girls were getting undressed. I fiddled with my stuff for a minute to see what they did. They entered another room, naked. I followed suit, discretely observing for cues about behaviour. Inside was a thin strip of swimming pool, like a lane had been sold separately from an average sized pool. There was a row of showers along one side, and the sauna part of the sauna through a wooden door. I took a shower, did a couple of laps, took a shower again to wash off the chlorine, and then entered the sauna where I made a lot of steam and lay down on a person-shelf for a couple of minutes. When I was hot, I repeated the procedure until the time ran out. It was quite nice. The Fins have good ideas. Not always, though, in bathrooms they seem to make no distinction between the shower and the bathroom itself, meaning the floor gets entirely wet when you shower and your socks inevitably get soggy when go back in to brush your teeth or get something that was forgotten.
 

The conference itself was quite entertaining, with some guest lecturers on topics relating to “Europe as a Knowledge Society”. I learnt some things about reindeer herding in Lapland and its sustainability issues (it was used as an example in a wider discussion). I also ate part of one at a reception. We participated in work groups in which we were instructed to come up with answers to some questions over the course of periodic brainstorming hours. I had hoped the goal was to produce something a little more practically implementable rather than discuss values and history at a high theoretical level, but it was an interesting exercise nonetheless. Most of the participants were top research Masters students in various disciplines, so plenty to share and discuss (though some were trying constantly to prove their own intelligence by commenting and arguing on every little meaningless detail at rates of over 500 words per minute) and a good time after hours at various official receptions, and exploring the city and its bars (I had a cocktail for 8.50e, ouch!!). The last dinner was a traditional “sit-sit” dinner, which appeared at first to be a nice formal dinner in a very old building. After the alcohol started flowing, in a variety of sequential forms, a song-leader would stand up and propose a toast and lead everyone to sing songs, usually in Finish or Swedish and of questionable content. Then we, sitting in assigned seats male-female-male-female, would toast to the three members of the opposite sex around us, drain our glasses, and eat a few bites of our rapidly cooling meal before the next one. If we were especially unlucky, we would be forced to rock back and forth linking arms or even standing on the chairs while performing these activities. After not fewer than 5 hours, my collection of glassware still contained a judicious portion of my allotted beverages and we were being ushered towards the coat check. The Fin across from me, a big Viking of a lad who had been in undergraduate for the past 12 years and when asked of his speciality would reply “student life”, asked me with some consternation if I was aware that the establishment had no provision for take-away leftover drinks.  I assured him with relief that I knew it was the case. A genuine touch of tragedy crossed his face, but only for a moment. He politely reconfirmed I had no further plans for my drinks, and proceeded to methodically drain each glass.
 

I had the opportunity to meet and talk to a lot of students and professors, but 2.5 days is not a lot to base a lasting relationship on. You never know who you will meet again, though – after the conference, Gio arrived and we went to stay at some friends I had met at the St. Petersburg summerschool earlier this year. They kindly offered us a room in their apartment, a bit outside of Helsinki in a place called Espoo (hahaha. Sorry, I should not laugh at the names of other people’s cities…) from which we made a camping expedition to Nuuksio, Helsinki’s local national park.
 

The landscape in Finland is very Canadian, which made me happy: glacially scraped rocks, northern vegetation, and lakes (though not too many hills). Finland also has “everyman’s right”, which states that you can camp wherever you want as long as you don’t bother anyone and stay 50 m away from them.  What a magnificent idea! In the park itself, fire pits are prepared with benches and grills, some even with a sort of gazebo shelter, and split dry logs are provided free of charge as firewood. What luxury! We got rained on a fair amount, but pitched our tent, cooked some sausages, and when it really started to pour curled up in our sleeping bags to watch the end of the Star Trek Voyager series (less geeky than it sounds) on Gio’s little laptop. I melted my shoe a bit trying to dry it and now my foot doesn’t quite fit normally and I look like a hobo. An entirely satisfactory experience.
 

We returned to our friends’ place the next day, and took them out for dinner as a thank you (at a Tibetan restaurant – Finnish food is hard to find in Finland!). The last day, we crammed our belongings into a large locker in the central station and for 4 euro were free of it for the day. We went to an island fortress by ferry and explored the numerous tunnels in the fortifications using my LED headlamp, and taking strange X-Files pictures of each other in the strange lighting conditions afforded by the combination.
 

My conclusion about Helsinki was that it is a satisfactory and liveable city with a nice transportation system, but is not overly picturesque or remarkable. The old town is quite nice with the cathedral, main piazza, and old university buildings, and there are some tall ships moored down in the port. Anyway it was fun, and the furthest North we have been; just over the 60^th parallel.
 

In July I went to Canada to spend some time with family and friends after a whole year away. Gio and I drove down the Massachusetts, which I still can’t spell without a spellchecker, to visit my dad who is staying there for a bit as his care giving skills are required. Even though I spent three weeks on the continent and my schedule was designated down to five minute increments, everyone was mad at me for not having enough time to spend with them. I think it is safer to be away for only six months at a time. The whole trip was of course very nice, but of little blog interest.
 

One exception might be an expedition to Algonquin park. Gio and I rented a silver PT Cruiser (not intentionally), which is quite possibly the most ridiculous car when you strap a big canoe on top of it. We took my mum, a minimum of gear since 3 people in a 17 foot canoe is already cozy, and only muesli to eat. We paddled, portaged (even a Kevlar canoe is damned heavy when it’s resting squarely on your neck vertebrae!), swam, and camped, and meanwhile were eaten alive by mosquitoes and everything else and were rained on regularly. It was a smashing good time.
 

After 5 days of nuts and oats we went for a huge Angus burger at Harvey’s for lunch and when we got home to Ottawa when to the Keg for a steak. Meeeeeeeaaat!

 (Picture #1: Famous Onion Thing)

My journey to Russia began auspiciously, as the train arrived under Schipol airport, where it stopped and nothing happened. Nothing continued to happen, except that the cortisol level of the passengers worried about missing their flights increased. After a very long time, the doors made a strange sound and half opened, and that was good enough for me. In the airport, I found my check-in gate. This part was confusing to me because instead of a nice lady underneath a sign that said “Prague” there was an insistent lady telling me to go away and print a boarding pass at the automated machines, which in my experience are generally reserved for holders of e-tickets. She insisted; I obliged, and sure enough a pass was printed.

Which got me as far as Prague, at which point I rather belatedly realized that I didn’t have a boarding pass for the next leg: St. Petersburg. I tried to ask The Man there (a generic reference to anyone you ever need to ask anything), but the security in Prague is right in front of the gate so you can’t get to the people who know what they are talking about until you wait in line behind the previous flight of boarding passengers, who become irritated in Czech if you attempt to bypass them. When I finally got to the gate, The Man informed me they had paged me five times. (Apparently my name pronounced in Czech doesn’t cause me to have an orienting response.) I had not been checked in, and all the seats were taken. I decided not to freak out since I have learned if you expect everything to go wrong when travelling you usually have the satisfaction of being right, and occasionally have the pleasant surprise of being wrong and actually getting to your destination as planned. In any case, they bumped me up to “business class” and informed me of how lucky I was. The ticket printing machine wouldn’t print tickets, so they settled for scribbling one out by hand.

In any case, I boarded last, on a Russiya Airlines plane likely made over a century ago. Business class was quickly discovered to be the first nine seats of the rest of the airplane, cordoned off with a small curtain but otherwise alike in every way. Since I hadn’t paid extra and was actually on the flight, despite my incompetence with automated check-in ladies, I was feeling pretty happy and took the opportunity to evaluate the tangible benefits of travelling Business Class. There were three:

1) A cup of orange juice was served before take-off, and unused portions were promptly collected;
2) A moist, warm towel was offered before breakfast for the purpose of washing ones’ hands; and
3) Upon arrival at the airport, two big airport buses arrived to take us to the terminal. We 9 superior individuals had a bus to ourselves lest we be inconvenienced by the common masses, who all presumably were squashed into the other one.

Russian officials either scare me or provide me with a source of entertainment, according to my mood. This is because they never, ever smile, and the customs lady was no exception. In this case, I tried to be the most polite, friendly Canadian the world has ever seen, with the distinct goal of obtaining at least a sympathetic upward twitch of the lips. No luck. I laughed.

I stopped by the Tourist Information booth to pick up a free map, and found it strangely endearing that the info lady seemed to have cut out a number of subway maps from a magazine to supplement her supplies. I asked about the city bus, and she directed me outside the terminal, where I saw a #13 just about to leave a stop. My instructions explicitly said to check it was going to one destination over another, but it was unlabelled and there was no time to check so I just got on.

The bus was a bit of surprise. It looked like someone had left it in a sand dune for 40 years, exhumed it, and pressed it into service – all dirty, rusty and falling apart. Conversely, the Russians therein were immaculately dressed. One of them yelled at me for a while because I pressed her with my backpack, but I couldn’t help it because there was absolutely no room. I apologized and moved and then had to ignore her because I was all out of ideas. The bus was already enroute when I thought about a ticket – I was forced to enter on the back, there were none of the normal European Stamping machines visible, and definitely no way of getting through the crowd to the bus driver. I didn’t even know how much it cost. So I decided to do nothing, and tackle the next problem which was whether the bus and I were trying to get to the same place. This was satisfied by a man next to me via hand motions and map pointing. I was indeed on the right bus. Somehow I understood they were going to the same station, and I was to follow them when the time arose. I noticed people lining up with money to pay before getting off, which all seemed a bit backwards. The bus driver was a hairy, greasy, unkempt man grunting at people and smoking a cigarette.

My first impression of the Russian Landscape was not very positive, but I later learnt it was not a generalizable impression. Around the airport, construction was happening along the highways, leading everything to look like rutted dried mud. Also, when I left the Netherlands spring was well underway, and here everything is a bit delayed due to the latitude. Everything in St. P’s was brown, and the highway was reminiscent of those in China in terms of orderliness of conduct. I saw a man on a fast bike driving on the highway!

At the train station, the man and his wife waited for me to pay and took me into the metro station, where they aimed me at a ticket booth and disappeared. I waited in the mob, and when I arrived at the front I pointed at my map and held up one finger. I received some change that felt like it was made of aluminium, and a metal token with an “M” on it, and proudly presented to The Man at the gate. He agreed with my map-pointings but then suddenly stopped me “no biggidge!”. It turns out there is a special token if you want to carry things on the metro. I caught sight of the lady I met on the bus, still in line for some reason. She most likely asked me what was going on, and I pointed to my huge backpack. She bought me a new token and refused to take my money for it. The St. Petersburg metro is about 1 km underground, reached by extremely long escalators (why? To get under the rivers? To obtain thermal heat from the Earth’s core? As bomb shelters?). The station itself looked like a long hall with elevator doors along each side, which match up precisely with the train before opening.

(Picture #2: the metro in the bowels of the Earth)

They led me to my train and counted on their fingers to show me how many stops (10), since they were going the other direction. I thanked them profusely in all languages I could think of. I thought this finger-counting was a bit excessive, as I did have a map with the names in Russian and the matching up of symbols worked in China, but I was completely wrong, since the stops are not labelled when you actually get there (!). There was some more finger-counting, map-pointing, and smiling and I arrived at the station of interest, feeling slightly apprehensive, discombobulated, and conspicuously ignorant, but generally pleased with myself, the world, etc.

I navigated to my hotel on foot, marvelling at the ancient trams and funny-looking vehicles. The hotel was in a falling apart 1960s cement bunker of a building, but inside was okay, if a bit make-shift and low-budget. While trying to find the bathroom, I bumped into someone else who looked distinctly Mediterranean, and asked if he was there for the Neuroscience conference. He was. Later, after the Italian had slept off the previous night’s festivities, we met with our roommates who had also arrived, a Ukrainian and a Pole. We went to visit St. Petersburg!

The centre gives a much different impression to the bus + airport combination. It is full of interesting old buildings, nicely maintained, long bridges over the rivers, a fort, and various cultural curiosities. The weather was sunny and warm. We passed a pleasant afternoon. Our Ukrainian friend spoke Russian, and could be induced to solicit information from passers-by, so we ate quite a nice but non-fancy and un-touristic meal at an authentic local diner. Later, we had difficultly finding a bar/club, and ended up having cocktails (and vodka, but not for me) in a Sushi bar.

The next day we were collected by coach, already containing the 30-odd course participants and lecturers, and driven to our hotel in the woods. Besides the stupidity of only being given one key for two people, I liked the hotel very much. My Ukrainian and I are on the 9th floor, in a small but clean room with a peeling balcony, and our own bathroom. The food and most of our needs are provided for, so we just go to class and eat and go to class and eat pretty much all day.

The lectures are mostly interesting, though as in any such activity there are a range of instructional abilities, and some people are incomprehensible, or don’t bother to explain their acronyms or methods, which is a little frustrating. I am not deeply into the physics of modelling little details of ion channels and stuff so plenty was new and bewildering. As usual I am taking notes compulsively, so hopefully this stuff will stay with me and will make more sense as I continue to gather knowledge.

We also have had a couple of sports activities, notably a “run after neural treasures” orienteering exercise in the woods which involved running like mad through the underbrush and then stopping suddenly to try and engage our hippocampi in the activity of answering difficult/curiously worded neuroscience questions. My group came second (because we were late) and won a bottle of champagne. I got a wet foot and spent the evening padding around the hotel in socks, to my colleagues’ amusement or disgust. There is a lot of garbage dumped in the woods, which is a bit disappointing, but I still felt fantastic being around all those rock and trees. I remember my pet rats and ferrets when I was a kid used to go absolutely nuts when we took them up to the cottage for the first time each year – senses overloaded, nose, years, and whiskers twitching, and tripping over themselves with excitement. I felt a bit like that.

On the first evening, the organizers took us on a short walk to the beach where we built a fire and had beer (Irish beer?? Why?) and snacks (I tried to eat everything, including a unit of dried fish which was terribly fishy). We have repeated this procedure several times on our own in small groups, and it is Most Pleasant to collect wood, make a fire, drink a beer and sit around under a starry sky with a handful of very intelligent, interesting young people. Though I have to say things got a little neuro-geeky at some point after midnight when some of us started drawing and arguing over brain wave diagrams in the sand with our fingers to illustrate some of the finer points of our work. I have been mockingly dubbed “our Canadian Scout” on account of my fire-building behaviour.

It turns out I really like Russian food. At breakfast, the best thing is a variety of milky porridges made from grains with various interesting physical properties. At lunch and dinner, there are savoury meat-and-rice/potatoes combinations, and interesting salads and pickled stuff, and also nice soups and juice. I particularly like Borscht(?), which is very purple and made of beets. Some of the fish dishes are a bad idea, but I don’t really think fish taste good so this can be attributed to a personal bias. The bread is unremarkable, bordering on sub-standard, but it might just be this hotel.

The weather is nice, the days long, the neuronal models complicated, the air clean, and the trees treeful… I like it here.

 Adendum: I’m home, sick, and miserable, but here’s a nice boat that did something historically significant:

Ah, the post exam stupor. I find myself turning circles in the living room, vigorously motivated to be doing something, but not to be doing any of the things that come to mind. At least I made it home without incident this time, without forgetting anything at school, for example my car, in one memorable incident some time ago. (Of course that might be because I don’t have a car to “misplace” anymore.)

This thought, the first semi-coherent one in some hours, suddenly is hijacked: is this a new state of consciousness? What are the neural correlates of post-exam stupor? What brain regions are affected, using which physiological mechanisms, and what experimental paradigms could I use to find out? I realize this course has seriously screwed me up. Perhaps the level of corticosteroid in my lateral amygdale has caused long-term potentiation of… aaaaaaa, turn off damn it! Still, through all the torture I have retained a faintly glowing grain of appreciation and a wisp of curiosity about brains and cognition, which is pretty much the point of wanting to be a scientist according to myself I am not sure this quote by T.S. Eliot had anything to do with cognitive neuroscience when he said: “We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started… and know the place for the first time.”

 On a different note, our neighbours really are rompicoglioni (I believe the translation is “breakers of our nuts”?). They came around complaining I was making too much noise (with my fiddle) as they were “really trying to get some sleep” (add exasperated tone)…. At 10 o’clock on a Saturday evening. Okay, maybe it’s a bit late to fully appreciate hearing a howling cat being strangled to death, but sleeping? On Saturday? Before 2200? Are they vampires? And then Gio bought a drum set…. They don’t seem to return my cheery morning hellos anymore for some reason.

 Now that is the end of March, traditionally for me the time for longing glances into the melting stratified ice/poo layers for the first glimpse of grass shoots, the Netherlands decided winter should start. This consists of having ice pellets flung into your eyes at near the speed of sound while you attempt to control the bicycle you inevitably find between your legs during all outdoor excursions, in true Dutch fashion. My complaining is only half-hearted, though, because I remember December: as a period of near complete darkness (owing to the short daylight hours, long school hours, and the basement classroom) in which I was soaked through to the skin twice a day and spent the rest of it shiveringly trying to become One with baseboard heaters in my classroom, home, and anywhere else. Ice pellets welcome! Snow grains, crystals, and flakes! Sleet too, if you must! Just no more rainy darkness.

 And that’s most of the news I’m afraid. Neighbours, neurons, glorious noisemaking, and rain. Life during the school semester doesn’t make for an interesting blog, but there are a few adventures on the horizon: Russia at the end of next month for an intensive neuroscience “Spring School”, Switzerland at the end of May for some camping and Dutch friends meets rocks and trees - type introductions, my school’s own Summer School (with a topic I’m very interested in and a Big Cheese guest chair), a workshop on Brain Computer Interfacing in Utrecht, and finally, home to Canada in July!! Eeeeeeee!

I witnessed the end of 2007 with my head in a bidet, violently ejecting colourful fluids out of unspeakable orifices. How disgusting. But having that as a start, 2008 can only get better, and I since I accidentally started the year with a crash diet, losing 3.5 kg in two days, at least I’m on my way to getting in better shape.

 This year I decided to stay in Europe for the holidays instead of returning home to Canada, so my mum joined us in Leiden and after my exams, we all went to Italy to spend some time with the family in Milan and with some friends in the mountains. Milan still gives me the overwhelming impression of grungy greyness punctuated with inordinate numbers of dented European cars, creatively arranged on every imaginable surface, but my mum didn’t seem to mind it too much. It beats the inside of a bidet, anyway, and she managed to avoid our plague. Our flight home last night was about 5 hours late due to several snowflakes, which disturbed the European aviation personnel to an unexpected degree. We were given “light meal refreshment” vouchers for 4.50 euro as compensation or morale support. I asked The Meal Voucher Man what, out of curiosity, was the problem, and he gesticulated italianly at the nearby window and explained about how the incredibly bad weather was gumming up the works. I peered curiously out into the darkness, where a few small flakes were drifting serenely down to land, and melt, on the tarmac. My mum and I exchanged sighs about European concepts of winter, and were overheard and questioned by a couple of Californians. I translated for them too what the man had said, laughing at the pitiful amount of snow, but they looked back at me with very big eyes and said, oh, yes, what terrible weather and it’s sooo cold here! *sigh*

 School, since it has taken up a good part of my life in the past 4 months, probably deserves a paragraph. I have taken two more courses since last report, “Development and Plasticity of the Nervous System” and “ACMA”, whose acronym I have not yet worked out but has something to do with Multivariate Statistics. DPNS was a bit of a monster, involving two full days a week in class, half in lectures and half in labs. The first half involved reading and memorizing vast tracts of a textbook with the approximate density of Uranium, followed by an exam, and then moving to some recently published works on various nervous-system related diseases (Alzheimer’s, Schiz, mental retardation, etc.). (Aside: researchers of cognition are interested in what goes wrong for two reasons: you can find out some interesting things about how things work when they don’t, and because that’s where the pharmaceutical funding comes from and therefore is where most researchers are making headway.) We also cut up some rat brains and examined them in detail, stained some astrocytes and neurons with various things and peered at them, and even had a Brain in a Vat (haha, Dennett, for those of you who have studied philosophy), though in pieces – I held pieces of human brain in my hands! One of my classmates who studied biology previously has actually watched the dissection of a complete cadaver, and another attended a class where he got his own brain to investigate as he saw fit. The cadaver I think is a bit creepy but I wouldn’t mind doing a full brain! Fortunately my fascination with living systems quickly out-competes any kind of natural disgust I might have, so I could probably do the full cadaver. HOWEVER, my fascination with biology and particularly the nervous system has limits, which I found in a lab in Marseille, France. There I was introduced to animal research, and rats with Lego and wires glued into their heads with dental cement, with little screws that can be adjusted to lower electrodes through their brains a little more every day, until finally they are “sacrificed” so that the researchers can determine for certain what tissue they were destroying - blah. Whatever I will eventually be doing, it probably won’t be mutilating little furry beasts.

 Since I’m on the topic of Marseille, what a scum hole! So much for the romantic French Riviera. My first evening out I witness a snatch-and-run mugging, a car accident and ensuing brawl, some shady dealings in a back alley where I overheard a man say to another (in French) something about how they would be stupid to involve the police, and was finally followed a couple of blocks and around a grocery store by a really drugged up woman who didn’t make any sense in any language that I understand. Maybe it was coincidence, but I was not left with a feeling of security and good family values.

And now I am home, and that is all.

I’m having a really psychologically geeky moment here, so most readers may wish to skip this one altogether. If not, you were warned.
 

Read the rest of this entry »

This afternoon my growing animosity for the city of Beijing blossomed into full-blown hatred. The mission: go to Silk Street to get suits fitted and refitted. The team: myself, Sasha (obviously), Sascha (confusingly), Olé (the Norwegian), and Daniel (the Spanish). The conditions: 42C, actually sunny (! Possibly because of a test of cloud-seeding with silver iodide which they are hoping to use before the Olympics next year?), polluted as usual, and crowded as always. The date: 08 08 2007, which turned out to be significant.
 

The suit fittings occurred uneventfully. My two suits are coming along, though they do need a few little adjustments since the Chinese tailor underestimated my bottom/waist ratio. This was actually a good shopping experience since the people have skills and are doing work, rather than just theiving merchants. I was thinking about getting a dress made but chickened out at some point. We all bought some underwear (mine is red) and went to the shoes and bags floor because some people wanted shoes and bags (logical, aren’t we?). I don’t like that floor because the off-gassing of new plastic is sickening.  My endurance for shopping is sub-par for my sex, and this proved to be a real trial.  A demonstration of the conditions ensue.
 

Emz: *curiously looks at item while trying to determine quality, value, etc.*
 

Little Chinese lady #1 (LCL#1): Oooh! You, lady! Lady! Come here in my shop! I see you nice girl, I give you vey good price!
 

Emz: No thanks, I’m just looking! *smiles Canadianly and attempts to move on*
 

LCL: What you want? We have many styles! What size you want to try! Vey comfortable!
 

Emz: No thanks, really I’m just looking. *keeps walking*
 

LCL: *grabbing by the arm and dragging inside* I see you student! Very good price! Vey special, just for you! Wehr you from?
 

Emz: *attempting to disentangle self without causing offence* I’m from Canada. No, no, really, I’m looking for my friends. I don’t want to buy anything.
 

LCL: Oooh! Canada! Vey nice country! Here, you sit down, you tired! *pushes onto stool* I give you vey good price because you from Canada! We good friends! How much you offer?
 

Etc., etc.
 

Towards the end of our visit I just started messing with them.
 

LCL#4872: You! You! Nice lady! Vey special price just for you! What you looking for lady, you tell me what you want!
 

Emz: I want nothing, thank you.
 

LCL#4872: You want…. Nothing? *very confused*
 

Emz: No thank you. It’s been well proven that material wealth does not increase happiness. I am perfectly content in my current state of material being.
 

LCL#4872: *completely lost, is jostled out of the way by LCL#4873*
 

LCL#4873: Hello! You want buy some chilren’s close?
 

Emz: No thank you. Don’t like children.
 

LCL#4873: *momentarily thrown off-balance* You buy some! Your childen vey beautiful in real silk dess!
 

Emz: No really, I don’t have childen. I don’t like them. They smell and they are ugly, even in silk dresses.
 

LCL#4873: *uncertain pause* …well, gifts! You need some childens close for gifs!
 

Emz: Heavens, no! I don’t associate with people who have children!
 

Etc., etc. You have to be careful not to get screwed, I got handed something I bought tied in a plastic bad and when I opened it I discovered it was not what I asked for (and forced them to exchange! “Oh, vey solly!” And they tell you all kinds of crap is real leather or 100% cotton or silk or whatever). They occasionally get nasty and start insulting you if you refuse to buy something, which can be interesting too “What wrong with your fend? Something wrong with her head, I tell you she need go to hospital! Really good price!”
 

I had the intention of buying some more gifts for my people and for myself, but was prevented by an overwhelming sense of revulsion for the human race, not for the style of the markets here, but the sheer excess of needless consumption, and much of it is junk which breaks after a few uses and must be tossed. This culture is merely a reflection (maybe with a convex mirror?) of the West, who everyone wants to be like. In this underground artificially lit world we fight each other for pennies. These people do it 12 hours a day all week, poor things. I want no more part in it.
 

Sasha and I split at some point from the boys who apparently still wanted to shop (!) and after an ice cream began to walk to Tiananmen square. Our destination was slightly beyond it, at a teahouse where my department had arranged a social evening at a teahouse/variety show. The roads are wide, the blocks are long, and the traffic and hawkers are unrelentless. And then came a human traffic jam, governed by a squad of policemen who were not letting it turn in any direction and were blocking the pedestrian underpass. They may have been herding people in small groups down under the underpass and somewhere else, but it was really unclear and going very slowly. After about 5 minutes Sasha and I decided to play dumb and make a break for it, just crossing the road and going on our way which didn’t appear to be in the direction of the blockade.
 
We were chased down and yelled at by two policemen. My Canadian veneer had been rubbed thin by the sweaty skin of a thousand human beings and I was surprised to find myself challenging him. He was getting quite angry and pointing at his hat and saying “No no no!” and pointing back the way we had come, when a scrolling message in red LED lights appeared in my consciousness which went like this: YOU ARE IN CHINA, MORON. PLEASE STOP YELLING AT THE POLICEMAN. Fortunately at that moment part of the crowd behind me took advantage of my distraction to slip past the other side. The police turned their attention away for a second, and we slipped by and crossed the 8 lanes of traffic at a run with a flock of bicycles.
 

Other areas were blocked too, and it gradually dawned on us that the date today is 08 08 2007 which is exactly 365 days before 08 08 2008, the start of the Olympic games here and a very lucky number for the Chinese, who like 8. Several long blocks separated us from our destination, all with a crowd density greater >5 people per square meter, and a few shoving matches broke out. We were not happy monkeys when we finally arrived.
 

The variety show was quite interesting, though I think I will never appreciate Chinese opera. I did like the Changing Faces (described earlier), a couple of guys who made noises with their mouths and did some very convincing bird conversations, some Kung Fu dudes, some Chinese rap, and most impressively a guy who danced and did tricks with a gigantic heavy clay pot. I got that on video. We drank tea and had interesting snacks.
 

After, Beijing was still a mess. We had absolutely no interest in seeing what was going on in the Square, so we broke in to fours and looked for taxies. They were all full so we walked a lot and took the subway. It was full too. I think it is not possible not to see a crowd of people in China. With us was a Chinese guy who has lived in Beijing for 2 years (he was complaining about Beijing too, for the record) and had never taken the subway, so it was funny to show him how it worked (we are pros!). The subway was even more of a mess than usual, I spent 45 minutes standing glued to 4-5 other people, everyone dripping from the heat. I absented my body for that period by way of a fantasy involving a certain Greek island, so it went quickly. Then the walk back to our campus from the train station – 35C felt cool getting out of the train – and traffic, traffic, everywhere. All the world was traffic, and people.  
 

Now I have sterilized my body and air conditioned myself my outlook has improved; however, I never want to see this city again after 25 Aug 2007.  It occurs to me that many people here have not been out of Beijing, and almost all outside of China. Their worlds are this city. They climb the Great Wall in high heels and designer clothes talking on cellphones merely to buy certificates of proof and to take pictures of themselves in front of it. How is it possible to live without knowing of the silence, peace, and solitude of the natural world?