It doesn’t matter what university your’e attending- anything involving the words “international” and “food” is always guaranteed to be good. Every year at Caltech during third term, there’s an international food fair where, for a dollar, you can sample foods from all over the world. I always come back to my room completely stuffed and ready to food coma. When I heard about the international reception this week, I definitely jumped at the opportunity to get a free meal comprised of yummy exotic foods, just like any good college student. The most interesting thing I noticed that was different between the one here, and the one at tech, was the countries represented. At tech, basically everyAsianculture was represented, making up the majority of the fair, while at Edinburgh we got to try things from Poland, Slovenia and many more European countries. Meanwhile at the Korean table, I could hear the Korean Student Association club member exasperatingly explaining to everyone who walked by how they weren’t serving sushi, but kimbap, and that there wasa difference. I felt bad for him. It makes sense that the two food fairs had focuses on different continents though, considering the demographic spread of the universities themselves. Enough about that though… onto the food! (: I didn’t take too many pictures… but here’s a good one to get your mouths watering.

Last weekend, completely unrelated to the Halloween festivities, I decided to go on a day trip with some friends and flatmates to Glasgow, about a one hour’s drive away from Edinburgh. None of us really planned anything for the trip, but luckily one of my flatmates transferred from Glasgow University last year, and knew the area very well. Glasgow is the largest city in Scotland, with the third highest population in the UK. It’s also where all the Scots go for shopping. ;D You can imagine how excited I was when I found that last part out. So naturally, this was our first stop:

Hello everyone, For my first post, I thought I would write a short little introduction just to get a feel for the process.

Tonight was our Halloween party this year. More specifically, tongight was Page’s Interhouse party. The theme was “The Flying Dutchman.” So there was an elevated dance floor surrounded by water that had lights running through it, as well as a miniature version of the Dutchman that housed the DJ while he played music. The party looked okay, although it is not even close to some of the extreme construction we’ve seen in the past (or will see later in the year).

Halloween is my favorite holiday, next to Christmas. I love dressing up and going trick or treating, carving pumpkins and bingeing on candy corn till I’m sick. Coming to Edinburgh though, I heard that Halloween wasn’t really a big deal in the UK, much to my disappointment. I learned later that it depends more on where in Scotland you are though. My flatmate told me the other day that in Glasgow, which is about an hour’s drive from Edinburgh, Halloween is even bigger than Christmas. Whatttt?! I still don’t really know what that means though. This part of the city, at least, isn’t very trick or treat friendly- most of the buildings are just student flats, uni buildings and restaurants, none of which advertised any sort of trick or treating. What sucks the most though is…. they don’t have candy corn here!!! ):

One of my biggest reasons for wanting to study abroad was the chance to be in a city where appreciation of the arts was easily accessible. With so many museums within walking distance, it’s easily one of my favorite things about Edinburgh. The National Galleries of Scotland are spread throughout the city, and many of them are free. This weekend, I decided to visit the Royal Scottish Academy Building, where they were holding the Impressionist Gardens, an exhibit devoted to, not surpisingly, the Impressionist garden. As luck would have it, this was the last weekend of the exhibit! I’m so glad I decided to go this weekend instead of procrastinating… (:

Whew! I’ve been pretty busy so far this week, and I’m just going to keep getting busier. I had my first sets due on Wednesday—one for physics, and one for orgo. The physics set took me ages and ages to do. I started working on it over the weekend, spent a few hours working on it on Monday, and then I more or less did physics through all of Tuesday. It was pretty painful. I definitely spent more time on it than should have been necessary, but at least now I understand what’s going on and will be ready for the upcoming quiz! The orgo set, thankfully, was really easy and only took an hour or so. Now that I turned in those two sets, I have an orgo quiz in tomorrow’s lecture, and my first ACM set is also due the same day. Then I have a set in ChE 64 due on Monday. Then the first math set and physics quiz due on Tuesday. And then the cycle starts all over again! Anyways, that’s enough about schoolwork. We need to have some fun! The weekend was quite awesome. On Friday night, a lot of the houses hosted different activities: Page House had “fight night,” Lloyd had a dance party, Fleming had a paint party, and Ricketts had open mic night. I attended Ricketts’ open mic, which they hold once a term. The fall term performance coincides with the end of rotation, the winter term varies, and the spring open mic is during Prefrosh Weekend. It is, by far, one of my favorite events at Caltech. For the hour or two that I was there, we got quite a variety of performances! Open mic is usually dominated by upperclassmen performing, but this time around, a good number of prefrosh came up to the mic! One played a beautiful cover of a song by The Tallest Man On Earth; another performed a song that he wrote himself; and quite a few more came up to tell [really, really bad] jokes.

Hey everyone! I’m back at Tech! I’m going to use the amazing high speed internet here to share more photos and videos that I couldn’t post while I was in Malawi. Enjoy!

I finally got to act like a tourist this weekend! It seems a bit odd, but turns out I spent most of my first two weeks trying to settle in and living like a normal uni student instead of going sightseeing and doing all the touristy stuff. Earlier this week a girl I befriended at the airport in London invited me on a day tour of the highlands, so I thought, sure why not? Our tour guide / driver for the day was hilarious and had a serious case of DSL aka Deep Scottish Love. You could definitely tell he knew what he was talking about, and truly loves this country. The main attraction for the day was visiting the Loch Ness, home to the mythical Loch Ness monster, Nessie. The loch itself was incredibly beautiful. The awesome part was Nessie even rose up and said hi to us while we were admiring the scenery!! … okay just kidding. We didn’t see Nessie. There are people who 100% believe she’s real though and research the loch year round trying to find her. The highlight of my day wasn’t the loch though, ironically. It was getting to see Highland Cows (or as they pronounce it, heilan coos). They are seriously the cutest cows ever. My friend and I were probably the only two people on the tour group who were extremely excited about this… but we actually got to feed Hamish and Heather, the two cows!! :D

Between having to wake up 2 hours before my first class just to catch a bus there and freaking out over what’s going on with my course schedule this week, I was lucky enough that my Wednesdays are completely free. It’s struck me as really random at first, especially since almost all my friends also have Wednesdays off, but I see it now more as a nice little break in the middle of the week, so on this week’s “mini weekend”, my friends and I decided to do a little more exploring- this time, Harry Potter themed. Our first stop was the graveyard, Greyfriars Kirk. One of my friends read that Tom Riddle’s grave was here. I don’t mean like a fake tombstone made in honor of the Harry Potter series, but the burial place of the actual person whose name inspired JK Rowling when she was writing the books. The graveyard itself was absolutely beautiful, so we weren’t in a huge rush to find it, but eventually while scanning through all the names, I finally found it!

Having grown up in Texas, returning after being in California for so long brought back many memories of growing up. Well, maybe not of growing up per se, but just visiting the same places I had always gone to was a nice change of pace to the constant “exploration” that I did while in Pasadena. First stop? Panera! My lovely employer the summer before coming to Caltech. My mom gave me the firm ultimatum that I will do a non-Caltech like job to get some “real world” work experience before I got entangled in academia. And let me say the sweeping, the mopping, the bathroom cleaning wasn’t exactly the peachy perfect kind of work experience (I must say, though culturing bacteria got rather dull at times, it was better than that kind of physical labor). But it was still a good life experience… I guess. At least I got to meet many people!!

Half of Project Peanut Butter spent Wednesday night at Namandaje village, north of Blantyre.We go their once a fortnight (yes, people say fortnight in Malawi) as a home away from home when we go to very distant villages. It allows us to treat three health centers in two days that are much too far from Blantyre to otherwise serve. We stay with a Catholic priest who has done amazing work in his village! I was so impressed by the medical and educational facilities he was able to support and expand on. Here is Ben (pictured right), a Peace Corp volunteer posted in Namandaje, explaining the latrine project he worked on to me and Ricky (pictured left), a medical student working for Project Peanut Butter.

Making the connecting flight to Edinburgh was actually a lot easier than I thought (well then again, I kept thinking of the worst possible scenarios since I never flew internationally by myself before, and it was freaking me out). In fact, I ended up meeting a girl while we waited for our flight who was also studying at Edinburgh for the fall from UCSB! :D I felt a lot better after that, and a little less alone. Apparently both of us already started thinking in a British accent since I’ve only seen her once since then, but just being able to meet someone going through the same thing as me was a huge relief that day. The rest of my day, after setting foot in Edinburgh, Scotland, was tiring, very sore, and incredibly overwhelming. I got lost trying to get back to my flat from Princes Street, one of the main roads with lots of popular clothing stores etc, with my flatmate because both of us forgot to bring a map. Despite it taking us over an hour to get somewhere only 10 minutes away though, getting lost was a great way to explore everything around us. There’s so much more I could say, but it’d probably be a bore for you to read through all of it if I haven’t lost your attention already. Classes don’t start for another week, since it’s Freshers Week right now (kind of the equivalent of frosh camp). I’m sure by the end of the week I’ll have tons of more interesting things to tell you guys about, so until next time! (:

Hey,First of all, guess what? I hate the little flies that could! I’ll get back to that in a while. Now for the rest of the post.So, I find it funny how I hardly have that much to do now that I’m home, yet I still haven’t caught you guys up with my summer! I just feel super lazy all the time and have been devoting my time to catch up with the TV shows that I wasn’t able to watch during the school year. Fringe, House, Bones, Lie to Me, Big Bang Theory, Eureka, Warehouse 13, OCD Project (haha), and Jersey Shore (hah again). Umph. Anyways, here’s what happened during the week of8/9- 8/13. Ahh, so long ago! But yeah, this week was a pretty chill one. Some of the kids finished up their homework a bit early and needed someone to help them get into the tunnels. Okay, underneath Caltech, there are tons of tunnels. Techers have been navigating the tunnels for decades and along the walls and stuff, there a murals and bits of wisdom. I know a few people who are pros in the tunnels. I, on the other hand, know nothing. I went on a tour when I was a prefrosh and that’s basically it. But, since the kids wanted to go and they needed a counselor, I was down. First, we tried getting into the tunnels one way, but failed. And then, we entered a different way and were successful. Woo. Hah. Here’s a pic of us walking down one of the them.

I spent my weekend in the staggeringly beautiful Mulanje District of Malawi. The district saddles up right next to Mozambique, grows oodles of tea, and generally busies itself being gorgeous. The area is famous for its mountains and tea. I went there to spend time with Bri, a Peace Corps volunteer, and new friend. She lives about a 10 minute walk from one of the Chiponde Clinic sites, Muloza. Her house is in the traditional village style, being made of brick, with a cement floor and tin roof. It has three small rooms that serve as kitchen, bedroom, and storage. There is also an outhouse, a hut, and a room for bathing. After the grand tour of the premises, she has a beautiful garden, and chatting with the friendly neighbors that came to investigate about a person driving a car all the way to Bri’s house we were off to hike on Mt. Mulanje. Bri, Amy -Bri’s good friend and fellow volunteer- and I hiked to this waterfall:

Before I left California for home I had one last thing left to do: attend SMTown ‘10. SM Entertainment is one of Korea’s largest entertainment company and every year they put on a concert of their most popular artists, called SMTown. But this year wasn’t just any other ordinary year. This year was the first year that they had a concert overseas in LA (as well as Tokyo and Shanghai) and I most definitely wasn’t going to let this chance slip away!!

The last week of my whirlwind SURF experience found me learning many new things and doing many new things in a short period of time. From the packing to the mastering new protocols, I was swamped! I remember feeling rather sheepish when my mentor’s listing of all the things he wished to do in one week prompted me to gently remind him that it was my last week, only for him to reply that he knew. I guess I’m glad he had the confidence that I could do so much in such a short amount of time? The first of many new protocols to learn? The M9 media shift protocol. Though I had been using the fermentor for most of my SURF project to grow cells and express protein, we decided to use a different kind of method that allowed us to incorporate non-natural amino acids into our protein sequence – something that the professor I did my SURF under is famous for. Thankfully instead of working with 10L of culture, I only had to work with 1L, although the in between steps are much more tedious. After working with the fermentor which is specially built to grow cells super fast, using the conventional method seemed like it took forever for the cells to grow… Let’s just say I didn’t enjoy the 6 hour waiting period filled with constant checking and adjusting followed by another 4 hour waiting period.

I spent my Sunday at Liwonde National Park on safari!

Bricks, they are quite controversial.

This past weekend I saw another year come and go as I turned another year older. Though most of my friends had already finished SURF and had left, I still had plenty of fun spending it with those still around and pigging out. And also because…

Since the next big thing after the start of preseason is the start of classes, I shall fulfill my promise now and talk about a few things that Prefrosh should expect when they get here. First and foremost, Prefrosh, don’t bring a lot of things with you on your first trip here! You will go through Orientation and Rotation and you’ll be living in random temporary rooms until Rotation ends. Then, if you’re lucky you’ll move right into your permanent room in your House but some Houses put their Prefrosh into yet another temporary room until permanent room assignments are figured out. I brought just enough to get me through two weeks and then my parents came down with the rest of my boxes that I had before leaving. I’m lucky that my parents can drive to campus but other friends who live on the other coast have had their things shipped to them after their final move. I’d say shipping costs are worth it. Some parents have been asking about how to equip rooms. Once again, I’d say to wait on any big things until you move into your permanent room. Also, it’s probably a good idea to have parents visit a few weeks into your time here not only to stabilize you but they will most likely have good ideas about setting your room up and whether you realize it or not, you’ll miss each other a lot, especially as time goes on.

Hey,Okay, I have a reason for being so behind with stuff. The last two weeks of SURF were pretty hard. I was in lab until 8- 10 pm each night and I had to go in on the weekends in the morning and in the night. So yeah. I have a reason for being so fail. Anyways, I still want to catch you guys up with some of the fun stuff I was able to do before my summer at Tech ended. The weekend of the 6th-8th was really fun! It was nice taking another break from lab and getting to do some fun stuff. On Friday I hung out with friends, on Saturday I went to the beach, and on Sunday I went to Little Tokyo. Fun stuff. On Friday night, I took some FSRI kids to Lloyd and I ended up talking with some friends. Some of them were baking! Here’s Sabrina (left) and Melissa (right) with their banana bread. Okay, it looks kind of burnt on the edges, but it smelled amazing. Throughout the summer, they have been perfecting their baking skills. A few days later I came back to Lloyd to see that Melissa had like 5 breads in her room. She was on a baking spree!

Last week was the official end of the SURF program and so many of my friends started packing and saying their goodbyes. Meanwhile, my roommate and I moved into our new fall assignment. Since I left for Japan right after finals week, we decided not to move in the beginning of summer, as most people did, but instead decided to move at the end of SURF. However, I nearly wished we had done so at the beginning of SURF because after waking up super early to go to lab to start a gel, running back and forth to the housing office to check into our new room and get the new combination and then checking out of our old room, and having to wake up my groggy roommate who had spent the night doing who knows what instead of packing, I was exhausted! But, many of my friends, already moved in and packed up, offered us a helping hand and it went much faster than expected! So here’s a shot of our newly moved into room…. Trust me, this is nothing compared to how bad it looked when we first moved in. What with the housekeeper trying to clean and vacuum our room and my thousands of boxes piled everywhere and my roommate’s thousands of books stacked everywhere and all the random items the previous owner decided to leave behind (namely one dirty sock, a bottle of aloe, and many many coat hangers as well as two pillows and a rather dingy looking towel), there was hardly any space to walk around at first. That and my roommate and I were too exhausted at first from moving everything downstairs to unpack anything. We joked that we should have just kept our room in that state for the whole year. But, of course, after lunch and some resting, we set off on the even more tedious task of unpacking. I took this shot only after I could find my camera, which was after unpacking and organizing at least half of our stuff.

This week in Malawi the health centers are overflowing with children getting their measles vaccine. The Malawian government is trying to get every child without a vaccine to get one by tomorrow! Here is a quote from a Google News article: “Measles has claimed 195 lives since January [2010] in the impoverished southern African country, prompting authorities to launch a USD 4.2 million (Euro 3.3 million) campaign to vaccinate 6 million children. Kabuluzi said Malawi is facing “the worst outbreak in a decade”, with nearly 77 000 measles cases reported, mainly in cities and towns.” I’ve definitely seen children at Chiponde Clinic with measles. One of the problems with the measles vaccine is that children in Malawi are supposed to get their vaccine at 9 months and a booster at 4 years, but few seem to get the vaccines at the correct ages, leaving the children susceptible. Here are some photos from the measles campaign at Makwira Health Center:

Hola,So yeah, basically the title says it all. My normal week. Saving people and then after doing so, eating a bunch. Hah. Well, at least the latter is true! Last week the Red Cross came and I decided to give blood. This was my second time giving blood. The first time was also at Caltech, earlier in the school year. I really don’t mind giving blood and it feels good knowing I’m helping someone, but the people at the Red Cross are always calling me telling me to donate. And I always tell them the same thing…that it’s too hard to donate unless the bus comes to Tech. But I stay true to my word and if I have room in my day, I make an appointment.

As the seventh busy week of my SURF project came and went, I found myself experiencing a serious case of déjà vu. How so you might ask? By taking a visit to Tokyo! Well, to be precise, Little Tokyo. This past weekend was the 70th annual Nisei Week (“nisei” meaning second-generation in Japanese). So, my friends and I decided to head down to Little Tokyo to check out the festivities and eat some delicious food.

A chitenje is the multipurpose, can’t-do-without, colorful piece of cloth every Malawian woman has got! It’s a rectangular piece of fabric used as a wrap over a skirt, to carry children, as a shawl in the cold or rain, and as a head wrapping. All the village women wear them, they are far less common in the city as professional women wear uniforms or current western fashions.

These past couple of weeks have been filled with all sorts of reporting from writing an abstract to publish in the CURJ – the Caltech Undergraduate Research Journal – to giving a presentation at group meeting as well as writing another progress report.

There’s a ton of venues for hiking in the San Bernardino mountain range just north of Pasadena. Some trails start just 20 minutes from campus, up by JPL. However, if you’re looking for an adventurous all-day hike, with snow to trek through in the summer, the remains of a 1950s plane wreck along the trail, and a higher summit than any other place in Southern California, the place to go is San Gorgonio Mountain in the San Bernardinos, about a two-hour drive from Pasadena. I went there a few weeks ago with a group of friends, some of whom you can see in the picture above. We were surprised at how much snow was still on the mountain! We left Pasadena at around 9 am and started on the Fish Creek Trail, which has about 3,400 feet of elevation gain, at 11. Every so often we would run into other hikers on the trail, but there weren’t as many as I would have expected for a weekend.

There was a lot of crossing ofmosquitoes. Okay, here’s a little recap. We screen for transformants on the fluorescent microscope and out of the few hundred larvae per container, we obtain anywhere from 0-20 transformants. We then let these larvae grow into adults and then cross them with wild type ones. Here’s a box full of crosses that I had just set.

Figuratively of course. Well for me at least. This past weekend, the SURF program sponsored a trip to Santa Monica beach, so of course my friends and I, being the car-less and poor students that we are (or believe we are), decided to take full advantage of this opportunity. The morning before I went however, I checked the forecast which reported a rather gloomy high of 65 degrees. Seeing this, I decided not to wear my swim suit (I mean, if the weather was 65 degrees think about how cold the water would be!!) And at first, was I glad to have brought my jacket! When we first arrived at the beach around 11am, it was still very chilly and very gloomy looking. Some of my friends decided to brave the waters, only to come shivering back just a couple of minutes later. Well, all except for the one from Alaska, who marveled that the water was the “perfect temperature for swimming”.

Some of you may be wondering what it’s like to be in Pasadena while being a Techer. It’s true that during the year we are quite busy with work and don’t go off campus much during the week. Actually, this depends on each individual person as some people manage to go all over the place and keep on top of work. I can say that I barely went off campus on weekdays but managed to walk somewhere on the weekend, mainly for food. However, the summer is a different story. It was when summer started that I really started feeling that I’m in Southern California. First, it’s pretty hot although this year has been an unusually “cold” for the area. Second, I’ve seen much more of the surroundings in the couple weeks of summer than during the past school year so I’ll describe some of these places for you.

I hope you’re all enjoying your summer! Incoming Prefrosh, I remember that my Prefrosh summer was amazing! However, I’m not at all implying that my Techer summer is any less amazing.

Welcome to my new travel blog! After a day of snafus at the airport, it seems like I’m on track to leave the US for Malawi in just a few hours! I am bouncing-off-the-walls excited for my journey to Blantyre, Malawi.

At the end of last week I was exhausted from ten hour work days, working on weekends, and standing outside all day at amusement parks! So, I decided to take it easy this past weekend, opting out of going to yet another amusement park with my roommate (this time, she and some friends from Lloyd house went to Disneyland). After sleeping in on Saturday, I instead went with some friends to dim sum. What is dim sum you might ask? To put it loosely, it’s like Chinese-styled brunch. Most Chinese restaurants start serving dim sum in the late morning (around 10 to 11 am) until the early afternoon (around 2 to 3 pm), although some restaurants will serve dim sum for the whole day.

After a fun weekend, it was back to work. Finally it was time to see whether my purification process worked.. fingers crossed! After two weeks of alternating hot and cold centrifuge cycles, a three day process of dialyzing the liquid to rid it of any unnecessary salts, I finished off my purification with a process called “diapolizing” (not sure if that’s how it’s spelled but it’s something along those lines).

After another long week of waiting on centrifuges, broken scales, and smelly bacteria, my friends and I ambitiously decided to visit another amusement park. The park in question this time? Six Flags Magic Mountain in Santa Clarita, CA. Though a little farther than Raging Waters was (Santa Clarita is about 45 minutes from campus) we were lucky that there was hardly any traffic. I guess everyone likes sleeping in on Sunday mornings.. Including my friends:

Current Music: Beethoven’s 9^th Symphony and Verdi Requiem

Though California is known for it’s mild temperatures, things started heating up last weekend! With the temperatures soaring to the high 90’s, my friends and I decided to beat the heat by going to a water park. The water park in question? Raging Waters in San Dimas, a convenient twenty minute drive from campus.

Over the past few weeks of SURF, I have been working to purify a protein. Sounds dull? It may be pretty repetitive and tedious but it’s certainly far from boring.