One week.
I have been back for one week. Scarily fast.Well, the past year has basically flew by. So this was relatively alright comparatively.
Lab was slack... have not worked in such a slack place for a very long time (last time was when I was a TSS in SMM - or SMTI now). My supervisor is bringing me through every single thing that I have learnt before; I am glad to re-learn everything again because this means that I don't have to do actual work :P
The French guys in my lab are really fun. Yesterday during the pizza party (held because they just had a paper published) Sebestian was telling me about how interesting the Renaissance paintings in the Louvre are and enlightened me on the location of the inverted pyramid. Hmms no wonder I didn't see it...
Hopefully I can pick up some French from Youcef. Well, it cannot be always me teaching him English; it has to work the other way round too! :P
(I saw one really interesting painting from the Renaissance period in the National Gallery in London too; it has a skull which is drawn such that you can only see it when you view the painting from the right (or was it left?). No idea about those in the Louvre (and in the Vatican as he pointed out) before he told me :P)
My PI gave me 4 papers to read for the weekend though. This means work is going to start soon. Anyway, learnt that p53 has 2 cousins called p63 and p73 which have a rather high level of structural homology to p53 but not so much in terms of function :P
Haha anyway, I discovered that the language that I am the most comfortable with is Singaporean Chinese; I grew up with it! I have no chance to use it at all when I am overseas; well, as long as I see my friends it just flowed. Of course, it has to be in the right context... It is strange (or just not right) to speak English with Songyu and gang, and it feels strange too when GCS forced me to use Chinese with him.
Of course Cantonese also... Songyu is trying to learn it from Ka Yi and me. You can almost guess what he made us teach him.
Though it is kind of sad that I cannot express myself properly in Chinese when it comes to more complicated ideas. When I was talking to Marcus in lab today I switched to English naturally when I was explaining things... How do you say 'The 1910s - 1930s is the heyday of classical genetics because of Thomas Hunt Morgan's drosophila experiments and it being the progressive era in the United States' in Chinese, or even Singaporean Chinese? Impossible :P
I was, hmmms, really embarrassed when I couldn't ask for a glass of warm water in Mandarin last Sunday in a restaurant. Argh.
Labels: Life
