Best Banksy ever?

Banksy - Cave Cleaner (not actual title)
Originally uploaded by scotteek

This actual artwork has been tagged, but the photographer who took this cleaned it up. I really like this one.

Berlin

I’m writing this on the train to Regensburg. I figure I have 5 odd hours, so I might as well write some stuff about my time in Berlin. So, I arrived on Friday night at 9-ish, and met Tom at Kotbusser where he lives. The exact order of events is hazy, but we definitely had food and watched the second half of whichever game of football was on, then headed out to meet up with some of Tom’s friends. From there we headed out to some party in an old abandoned brewery – fairly standard for Berlin, but pretty damn cool from my perspective. We spent the night drinking, dancing and talking shit to friendly German girls and eventually got home at about 5:30. It’s been some time since I’ve been out all night, and this was probably the most memorable.

We got our shit together reasonably late on Saturday and eventually headed out to my high school friend Lincoln’s place, or his girlfriend’s place at least. It was his girlfriend’s birthday, and we spent the night catching up, drinking and talking shit to friendly German, French and Israeli girls. Something of a theme is definitely developing. It was awesome to see Lincoln again, and he really seems to be digging Berlin. Unfortunately we didn’t get to catch up again because I am a slack fucker, but he’s back in Sydney in August.

On day morning we went for breakfast with Tom’s boss, Timor, and his family. I briefly met Timor when he was in Sydney last year, but definitely didn’t know him well enough for him to feed me so well. Great people these Berliners. On Sunday night we just chilled and watched the football, for which my liver was thankful.

Monday was spent getting my tourist on, checking out the Bundestag/Reichstag, which while impressive, is really just another big sandstone building. As in Hong Kong, I got kind of bored just wandering around looking at stuff, although reading about the history of some of the places was cool. That night we went and watched Germany play Austria at the pub with 2 of Tom’s friends. Drinking, watching football and talking to friendly German girls – I could get used to that shit. Given that it was past 12 and hence technically my birthday they insisted on buying a round of champagne. I unwisely chose to check my emails when I got home, so if you got any incoherent emails from me, my apologies.

On Tuesday I hunted down some record stores to get myself some birthday tunes. The first place I went to was almost all vinyl, which was lucky because if they’d had all that music on CD I would have spent all my money.

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At this stage I got kind of motion sick and stopped writing, so I'm finishing this back in Sydney. The main things to say are that Berlin is a great city and to thank Tom for letting me crash on his floor and keeping me amused. I literally pretty much tripled the amount of shit in his room when I arrived, so thanks again dude, very much appreciated.

Belgium

I'm sitting in Brussels Airport with my quest for decent coffee in Europe unfulfilled. Well, that's not true, the stuff in Fontainebleau was great, but other than that the best coffee I've found was in Starbucks at Heathrow. Mind you, looking for good coffee in an airport cafe called "Flying Tigers Diner" is fairly unlikely to pay off. I bet Sir Arthur and the Grail Knights never looked for the chalice of Christ in an airport - I think there's a lesson there somewhere.

Leuven is a cool town. Unfortunately the fact that I am toting the best part of 40kg worth of luggage means that I am cooling my heels rather than checking out Leuven and Brussels, but I liked what I saw. My major impression of Belgium is that it's really, really green. Probably this is because it seems to rain a lot, but no matter.

Last night was spent watching Austria play Poland in the football, while drinking astoundingly good beer. The Poles will no doubt be disappointed with the 1-1 result, but it was deserved. Did I mention the beer was good? The beer was good.

My meeting this morning was brief. I think we talked for about 40 minutes, and they definitely got a lot more out of me than I got out of them, but hell, if I want a job (and I'm not so certain anymore that I do) then I suppose that's not so bad. The main attraction of Leuven is it's proximity to Font, but if I stay in research then I want to do metabolomics type research, and I don't think that's something I'd be able to do in Leuven. Anyway, we'll see - I need to write a thesis first...

I'll finish with a youtube video my brother sent me that I found amusing, maybe you will too.

Leaving Cambridge

So my course at the EBI was pretty good. I learnt the following, among other things:

• the maths and stuff behind bioinformatics is pretty cool, and a basic understanding does help you search better
• Phillips, as in the Phillips who made your tv, stereo and microwave, are diversifying into molecular diagnostics. Proteomics in other words; competing with companies like Roche and Bio-Rad. Craziness.
  
• just because you are a third year PhD. student from Oxford, doesn't mean that you aren't a complete waste of time, space and energy.
  

Now I'm on to the part of my travels that makes for more interesting blog posts - the actual travel part. Hell, maybe I'll get ripped off by another monk and you can all email me (again) and tell me what a retard I am. There's something to look forward to.

Leaving the lab

This will likely be a bit of a mish-mash kind of post because it's been a while since I wrote anything, and quite a bit has happened. Let's start with science. So, while I didn't get to do the lipid analysis stuff that I was planning to do, I do have a shitload of NMR data - at least a thesis chapter's worth. Rad. The lipid analysis was always going to be difficult (I had to explain the meaning of the phrase "pushing shit uphill"), especially as we were essentially trying to develop a method from scratch. Reza, who is the NMR guru who helped me with my NMR stuff said that it was a very good data set, and he asked to use it to prepare a poster for a conference he's going to in September. Juan also asked if he could use it for a poster he's preparing for a conference in July, so good news all around on that front. Next week I'm at a course at the EBI called "Recognising similarities and differences in biological data", which should be good.

On Wednesday we had a dinner at a local Chinese restaurant, partly as a farewell for me and partly to welcome Laura, a French undergrad student who is spending the next couple of months in Steve's lab. On Friday I bought a few bottles of Coopers Pale and Sparkling, and we had a few beers and talked rubbish for a bit (pics on facebook). It's amazing how much you can learn over a pint or two.

We also set up a sweep for Euro 2008 - I got Russia and Holland. Nianshu managed to get Germany and France. Juan sent around a draw saying who was playing who, and I'm playing him tomorrow night (Holland vs Italy), so we plan to meet up and watch the game at the pub.

I'm kind of losing interest in this, so I'll leave it there.