May Day

I find it impossible to believe that today is May 1. The past month has positively flown by, and I have no idea where it went. I've been working on image analysis (as always), playing with data (no surprise there), and waiting for the weather to calm down so I can start my summer experiment (yep).

Last night, I actually went to dinner with my fellow labmates. Craig, my adviser, called the dinner because one of his former students, now a professor at a different university, was coming to visit and deliver a seminar at OIMB. Craig is a gold mine of networking opportunities with former students all over the world, and he takes every chance to introduce us to one another.

I joked with another student in Craig's lab that our meeting was essentially an academic family dinner. Our older sister was in town, so Dad wanted to get us all around one table. Of course I wasn't serious, but there is a grain of truth to genealogy metaphor. Jorge Cham, the genius behind Ph.D. Comics, explains the concept in a way that is scary accurate. Check it out here.

Right now, I'm actually in the middle of a 3-hour layover, and I'm going to make you guess where I'm going.

1) I'm traveling to a conference.
2) My destination is in a country I've never been to before.
3) It's also on a continent I've never been to before.
4) I had to get a visa to enter this country.
5) My destination is in the southern hemisphere.
6) I didn't pack any coats - or socks, for that matter.

Any ideas? Care to venture a guess? Well, maybe a few more clues:

7) My destination is in the western hemisphere.
8) The time zone for my destination is 2 hours ahead of the U.S. east coast and just 3 hours behind Greenwich.
9) This country is famous for its barbeque.
10) The people around me will be speaking Portuguese.

Got it now? I'm going to Brazil! I'm very excited but also a bit nervous, because I have never been to South America before. The conference will also be a bit different for me, since it will not be focused on pure science; representatives from industry, government, and other organizations will also be there to talk about benthic habitat mapping. I'll keep you posted on my experiences throughout the week!

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