Week 2: A day in the life of Emory in Oz

OK, so I’m about as bad with this blog thing as I am with email. Not a daily thing, and it definitely goes in spurts. Anyway, remember how I said the point of this trip was to do research? Right? Ok. Anyway, since blogging what I do each day at work would be fantastically boring, I am going to give you just one blog about a typical day in the life of Emory in Australia.

So every day, I wake up to the annoying tones of my handy travel alarm clock, usually with a sniffle, because even though it’s Brisbane, it’s still freeeeeeeezing in the morning. Mostly because I live in this house that’s kind-of-but-not-exactly in this architectural style called a “Queenslander.” That’s short for, “it’s lifted up on stilts and has lots of holes in the walls to make life cooler in the 110 degree summers, but it’s realllllly bad at keeping the cold wind out in the winter.” This style, oddly enough, is unique to Queensland because no one else is silly enough to build houses like this. I mean, Queensland folks have actually invented a new kind of reverse insulation which makes it colder in the house in the morning than it is outside. Anyway, another weird thing about my house is that the toilet is separate from the bath/shower room. The toilet is way in the back of the house on the ground level while the rest of the house is raised up so the wind can go up its skirt. Anyway, so the toilet is kind of like an afterthought – it’s walls are pretty much plywood planks. It’s almost as if people used to go outside until the 80’s, when someone decided they were going to enclose their patio and throw in a toilet just for kicks. I won’t go on about the toilet itself – I’ve got a rant about the lack of good, solid American Standard toilets that counts back to my days visiting China.
So the bathroom, as in where we take showers but not go wee wee, is a room in the middle of the house, surrounded by the other rooms with great reverence. The bathroom has two doors on opposite sides, just in case you really, really have to take a shower real bad.

Anyhow, after making myself nice and clean, I drag myself to work. My house in Dutton Park is on the opposite side of the Brisbane River from the University of Queensland’s St. Lucia campus, so I take the ferry across the river every day. The ferry ride takes only about 3 minutes, but with waiting and walking, it takes about 30 minutes to get to work every day. From the ferry, I get to watch the bridge being built from Dutton Park to UQ, but alas, it finishes a few months after I leave.

The Green Bridge under construction

After stepping off the ferry intact (isn’t there some parable or mind puzzle involving a ferry operator, a thief, and someone’s wife?), I stroll through the lush, lagoon-orific UQ campus on my way to the Chemical Engineering department.

The walk through the lagoon

Some building on campus

“What?” you say, “since when did you become an engineer?” Well, that’s kind of the point. I’m not an engineer, so I figured it would be good to learn stuff from them. My host group is the Tissue Engineering & Microfluidics group, led by Prof. Justin Cooper-White. Everybody in the group is pretty mellow and smart, and the lab is chock full o’ interesting characters. The lab is pretty populated (25 people) and cramped because they’re waiting to move into some spacious new digs in a new biotech/nano building that will, you guessed it, be done right after I leave.

Anyway, people in my lab work hard, but the whole American nights/weekends thing is not too popular. People rather wake up early, probably because nothing is open late. People are also a lot more efficient than us Berkeley types, who… well, you know how it is. And the UQ has an insane bureaucracy which really cracks down on the whole using your fast internet connection at work for non-work related purposes. Anyway, the whole normal hours thing means I actually get into work at 9 am or so, which is not that hard for me, given the 15 hr time difference with California…

At the end of the work day, I do the reverse commute, and I get to see the twinkling lights of the city as I walk down my street at dusk.

The walk home

I cook a simple dinner and then think about writing my blog, then put if off, figuring everyone gave up on it a long time ago. I think about actually writing my thesis, then put it off. I think about planning what to do the coming weekend, and maybe make some progress on that. Maybe I do some laundry, too, in our ridiculous 50’s era washer that has separate tubs for washing and spinning your clothes. Most houses don’t have dryers, so that puts a crimp in my “wash tonight, wear tomorrow” lifestyle. And Laundromats are pretty expensive, too ($7 for a wash/dry load).

After struggling with my really bad internet connection for a while, I huddle under my blankets and doze off to sleep until another adventurous day in the life of Emory in Oz.