Galway: the condensed edition

Between being horribly sick and the fact that co-op is rapidly coming to an end (read: I've worked on my research statistical analysis and final writeup every day for the past two weeks, including Sundays, bank holidays, and days when I didn't leave my bed), I'll admit that I've done absolutely nothing adventurous or interesting over the past week. Instead, this week's post will be a condensed, illustrated edition of all of the blog posts I considered writing but didn't end up going with. Enjoy.

NOTE: I TRULY APOLOGIZE FOR THE FONT SIZE. NO MATTER HOW MANY TIMES I EDIT THIS POST, THE FONT KEEPS REVERTING TO EIGHT-POINT. PLEASE USE THE ZOOM FUNCTION ACCORDINGLY.

Political activism in Galway: a religious country, but still very much a college town.

The best signs, posters, and advertisements I saw posted in the lab building: a contextless compilation.

Biking and pedestrian-ing in Galway, or: this big-city girl spent weeks trying to discern the nonsensical rules of traffic here, only to realize that people literally just obey the road signs.

Dogs I saw in Galway: an incomplete list (not an especially career-relevant post, but an important one)

Life in the lab: science in Ireland versus the US (it's the same. It's exactly the same. There are weird magnets on the lab fridge, a quirky lab tech, and that one funny thing about the building that takes a while to get used to. For example, a break room/kitchen that doubles as a mini-museum for all the preserved giant woodland animals. Just a hypothetical.)

Pastries of Ireland: I had a great plan to try muffins, danishes, pain au chocolate, everything, from all six of the cafes and stores on the walk between my house and the lab. This turned out to be too ambitious even for me, but this peach thing I got today was fantastic.

American Thanksgiving

In the words of a friend back in the US who will remain nameless, "do you not get the day off from work for Thanksgiving?" In fact we do not, and now that I think about it, that's probably the most pronounced difference I've seen between Boston and Ireland. (After growing up in a state where stores stay open on Thanksgiving and fireworks are illegal, I'm continuously impressed by how hard Boston goes when it comes to patriotic holidays.) That didn't stop American Thanksgiving last week, though. A few pointers:

In a place where squash and potatoes are abundant but there's not much use for pumpkins, don't expect there to be much of a market for canned pumpkin.

Objectively speaking, cranberry sauce is kind of a strange concept--take the least sweet berry you can find, make it as sweet as you can, and then aim for just the right mix of gelatinous and soupy. It is not surprising that other countries haven't jumped on board.

Bread rolls for 15 people: they can fit in your backpack if you're really determined, but they'll show up at the Thanksgiving table a little worse for the wear.

The more things change...

This past Wednesday I got an "On This Day" reminder from Facebook, telling me that it had been one year since the day I posted about my major switch to Marine Biology and plans to finally pursue my dream of heading back to the West Coast to get my PhD, and all the comments on the post along the lines of "FINALLY." And this past Monday and I had a long-overdue phone conversation with my academic advisor, pressed submit on an online form, and as of January, I'll be an Environmental Science major with a concentration in Marine Science.

Again.

I've been told that co-op is good for building your resume and figuring out what you want to do with your life, but that more than that, it's good for figuring out what you don't want to do with your life. It's easy to have a really idealized version of what a career in (business/journalism/nuclear physics) would be like, and to think that because you love something in the classroom, or because you've done a part-time stint working in it, you'd be happy doing it for the rest of your life. I came into Northeastern as a biology major, quickly realized that I don't enjoy anything where you're not allowed to poke the experiment, and quickly switched to Environmental Science with a Marine Science concentration because I like when work takes me outdoors. 

I did my first co-op in the environmental field, working on renewable energy, and genuinely enjoyed it. (Do you want to hear about acceptable shadow flicker thresholds for wind turbines, Renewable Energy Credits, or required tidal velocity for hydropower to be feasible? No, you probably don't.) I didn't, though, feel insanely passionate about it or completely in love with my job, and I think my generation has somehow gotten the message that if that's not how you feel about your work, then you're not doing the right thing. So I switched my major to Marine Biology, with the intention of pursuing a research career. That led to a two-month internship this summer and then to this co-op, which lead to realizing that this wasn't the right path for me. 

I do genuinely enjoy research. It's exciting, it takes you all over the world, and there are moments of absolute triumph when things work out. But I had the chance to have some conversations with people who were very candid about the ups and downs of taking on research as a career. And I've realized that the downs--the stress, the unpredictability, the uncertainty--outweigh the ups. For me. They don't for everyone, and that's great, because we desperately need people doing that work. But I've realized that the kind of happiness I had while I was on my first co-op is pretty unusual for an entry-level job. I loved the company culture and the people at my office; people who work in environmental science all seem to share some common traits. I could see my work making an impact quickly. It wasn't over-the-top stressful, there was no need to spent weeks applying for grants every time I wanted to pursue a new project, and the hours were predictable. I had the time and the financial security to hang out with friends after work, train for 10Ks, leave work at the door at 5:11 pm. 

(This may be a case of rose-colored glasses, because friends tell me I was permanently exhausted and always busy during those six months, which may have had something to do with the part-time jobs as a freelance writer, environmental science tutor, and climate action web content developer I was juggling. This wasn't my job's fault, though; this was the fault of being a college student in a town where my contribution of the rent to our three-person apartment is more than the total rent for the three-person apartment where one of my best friends from high schools lives in Washington. Boston is a wild place to go to school.)

I love research in the way I love camping. You travel all over! Crazy things happen! You fall in the mud and can't figure out where to go to the bathroom and you come back with lots of great stories! But that doesn't mean I want to camp all year round. I like knowing that eventually I'll come home and sleep in my own bed, instead of sharing a deflating air mattress inside a collapsing tent. I like my indoor bathroom, even though it's the size of a toaster oven and something in it breaks every couple of months. And even though food tastes much better when it's cooked outside, someone always lights someone's clothes on fire with their s'more, and I wouldn't want to do that for every meal. It's a great adventure, but I wouldn't want to do it for the rest of my life. Marine biology is a major designed to lead to a research career; environmental science can lead in more directions than you might expect. I know a few that I might want to follow. There are a lot of choices ahead. 

Exhibit A, because I haven't posted a picture in a while: I wouldn't want to camp for the rest of my life. A rafting trip on the Buffalo National River two summers ago. We had to relocate from our planned campsite because in the aftermath of a hurricane, the site we booked was a swamp. You can see me in the background in a teal shirt, looking sulky because we hadn't eaten lunch yet.

A couple people have asked me whether I'll still be doing the Three Seas Program next year. I waffled on that for a while, but landed on a solid yes. I'll get graduate-level training in statistics, experimental design, conservation biology, and marine and terrestrial ecology. That'll serve me no matter where I go. Plus, my five-year high-school reunion is coming up, and "I just got back from scuba diving every day in Panama, studying tropical coral reef ecology. And how are you?" is a pretty solid answer to "What've you been up to?"

So this Thanksgiving (stories about American Thanksgiving in Ireland coming up next week, because I've talked your ears off enough), I'm grateful for the adventures that come with research, and for having the chance to change my mind.

Shaking things up

After last week's post, which apparently resonated a lot with people, I wanted to go for something more lighthearted this week. While packing up my bag on Monday night for Tuesday's early-morning field day, it occurred to me the sheer number of similarities between fieldwork and racing (for anyone who doesn't know me--if I'm not in the lab, I'm probably running). And there's a definite overlap between people in the marine and environmental sciences, and people who run and race. Maybe it's an outdoorsy thing, or an endurance thing (which you need a lot of for science), or a willingness to get messy thing. Which brings me to: a comparative analysis of race days versus fieldwork.

Race days: can't fall asleep the night before because of excitement and anxiety.

Fieldwork: can't fall asleep the night before because you're wondering whether you remembered to pack that thing that you were worried you were going to forget--or that other thing, or...

Race days: an unpleasantly early wake-up call.

Fieldwork: an unpleasantly early wake-up call.

Race days: start drinking Gatorade as soon as you wake up so that you don't cramp out at mile five.

Fieldwork: start drinking Gatorade as soon as you wake up so that you don't get heatstroke, which can really ruin a day.

Race days: the entire tone of the day is set by whether you get the right caffeine-to-sugar ratio in your 5am coffee.

Fieldwork: the entire tone of the day is set by whether there's a Dunkin stop on the way to the field site.

Race days: get lost in thought during the middle miles. Who designed the streets in Boston? Was this worth $40? I don't really like this iPod playlist I made. WHY IS IT SO HOT?

Fieldwork: get lost in thought while waiting for the tide to move out or the pH meter to calibrate. How old is this equipment, really? Do I have any idea what I'm doing? This looks like a good spot for wind turbines. WHY IS IT SO HOT?

Race days: it's like the pirate code--anyone who falls behind, stays behind.

Fieldwork: anyone who falls behind gets pulled out of the mud or dragged back into the canoe.

Race days: you will probably trip over another runner and land on your face.

Fieldwork: you will probably trip over your equipment/slip on a rock/get a foot stuck in the mud and land on your face.

Race days: you will not look good in the race photos. Don't even try to force a smile.

Fieldwork: you will not look good in the photos taken for the lab website. Smile and wave anyway.

Race days: may involve vomiting into a bush at the finish line.

Fieldwork: seasickness is a real possibility.

Race days: free snacks at the end!

Fieldwork: a sketchy-looking slice of pizza from the only restaurant within walking distance of the commuter rail stop where you'll be waiting for the next two hours. No free snacks.

Race days: if you run fast, you get to stand on a podium and feel awkward while they mispronounce your name!

Fieldwork: there are no prizes.

Race days: strangers on the T judge you on your way home, because you're in spandex with disheveled hair and look terrible.

Fieldwork: strangers on the T judge you on your way home, because you're covered in (mud/sand/dried salt) and smell terrible.

Race days: the culmination of months of training.

Fieldwork: the beginning of months of sitting at your computer.

When you wish you were home

I'm not predisposed to homesickness, but it's been a rough week.

In the aftermath of the US presidential election on Tuesday (in case you didn't know that was happening), it seems like Ireland is just as fascinated with the outcome as the US media is. So by default, American expats have become the authority--and people have a lot of questions to ask us. This isn't a political blog, so it isn't the place for my own feelings about the outcome--but the entire world has a lot of feelings about it, and they want to ask anyone with an American accent to explain it to them. Which is exhausting. (I'm going somewhere with all of this moping, I promise.)

So I've been pretty worn down all week. And Thursday night was the final straw: I was walking across a cobblestone bridge near the university, stumbled over a crack, and my ankle twisted in a pretty impressive fashion. Growing up dancing and then running, I've had my fair share of spraining every joint in my lower body, but this one was bad. End result--me, who's usually a pro at keeping it together while I'm traveling, sobbing on a bench holding my ankle and really, really wanting to be in a city where I had the easiest transit routes to get home memorized, I could call an Uber, I could walk into UHCS and get my ankle looked at, and I knew where to buy an Ace bandage. I wanted to call a friend in Boston--where people have known me for years and are far past judging me for breaking down--but the time difference meant that everyone was still at work or in class, and realistically, the only person who could do anything about it was right there sobbing on a park bench. It was probably the most frustrated I've ever felt while traveling. And making it worse was the knowledge that next week's field day--climbing over slippery rocks that I'm not great on even with two working feet--was the last plausible field day of the season, and may just have become out of the question.

These moments happen. They happened when I started high school in the maze that is the center of one of the largest cities on the West Coast, before Google Maps; they happened when I moved 3000 miles away for college; over the next year, I'm headed to the San Juan Islands and to Bocas del Torro, Panama, and those moments will happen. Nowhere on my predeparture checklist was "stop being a klutz for the next five months, because the consequences will be harder to deal with when you're alone in a foreign country." But as cliched as it is, they're the moments you look back on when you're struggling with something more mundane. Okay, my eardrum just ruptured at work and UHCS is closed, but remember that time I broke my foot before I even knew where the urgent-care place in Brookline is? Okay, our wifi is down and I need to submit an essay in five minutes, but remember the time I landed in a foreign country alone and had no phone service? I think every kid hates the phrase "it builds character"--but it turns out it does.

Oops, I forgot to be a tourist.

This week I realized a major plot hole in my trip so far: if you're following my blog, you're probably thinking that I haven't visited a single one of those beautiful landscapes I talked about in my first post. Oops. Luckily, wrong answer: I hit plenty of the (admittedly tourist-y but still amazing) spots on my Dialogue last summer. That's been a mixed blessing of coming back to Ireland instead of going somewhere else: I've had more time to actually get to know the city of Galway and feel like I'm really living here, but haven't been too interested in repeating the exact trips I've already been on. So with that, all the photos your adventurous little hearts could desire of popular travel sites near Galway. (Some of these I have saved on my phone but definitely did not take; no copyright infringement intended! Thanks to the lovely humans on my Dialogue who took these.)

Inishmore, the largest of the Aran Islands off the West Coast:

The Cliffs of Moher, the windiest and most visited spot in Ireland:

In which I'm in a love-hate relationship with software. VOTE!

It’s been brought to my attention that nowhere on my blog have I actually explained what my job is—or, because “differential settling and recruitment between barnacle species due to intra- and interspecific competition” sounds obscure and specific, but it’s a broader topic than you might think, which tells you a lot about marine biologists—nowhere and never have I explained what I actually do all day. So with that, I give you—task-of-the-day highlights from this week.

Monday:

In preparation for starting some area analysis using ImageJ, go through all of the photo files and make sure that 1) they’re all accurately named; 2) there are clean copies of all of them in a separate folder, that I haven’t scribbled all over in Paint yet; 3) they’re accurately named in a way that will still make sense to me a month from now. You’d be amazed how much labeling is involved in science, seriously. I have labeled slides, beakers, test tubes, photos, foil tins, plastic bags, live samples, definitely my own hand a few times by mistake, and I’m only stopping this list because it’s starting to stress me out. I have developed my own opinions on labeling strategies (use abbreviations for months, not numerical values; dashes are superior to underscores; avoid grease pencils at all costs, because I am a messy person). While I was interning at the Marine Science Center this past summer, I once turned around on the van ride home to see another intern very intently using a label-maker machine in the backseat. I think I came into science believing that packing and cleaning and labeling and feeding the experiment were grunt-work tasks that you grew out of. This is not the case.

Tuesday:

Spent a while sitting in the Garda Naturalization and Immigration Bureau. Being a researcher instead of a student means I get a special authorization to work in the country, rather than a student Visa—so I get to jump through all the fun hoops that people permanently immigrating here do. I also experienced a minor heart attack while getting fingerprinted, when the machine let out a really ominous noise of the “fingerprint of an internationally wanted criminal detected” variety. Turns out that my fingerprint was just too small for the machine to read; I have ridiculously small hands.

Tuesday was also the last date to request an absentee ballot for the upcoming election in several states! I’ve posted about this on my other social media channels, but you absolutely can still vote if you’re studying abroad or co-oping internationally. If you haven’t requested your ballot yet, check your state’s requirements, because there still may be time to do it. And if you requested it but it hasn’t arrived, you can use the Federal Write-in Absentee Ballot! The Overseas Vote Foundation has some really helpful links and explanations to guide you through the process.

Scoured the ImageJ software manual and played with the program tools for a few hours, trying to remember how to do a certain calculation on some photos. I figured out how to do this calculation a couple of weeks ago, and thought “oh, this was so much simpler than I thought it would be. I’ll totally remember how to do it—no need to write it down.”

Whoops.

Wednesday:

It’s the two-month anniversary of my arrival in Ireland! My body celebrated by bringing back the virus I’ve been fighting for approximately one month and twenty-one days. I worked from home doing some tinkering with ImageJ before I slept for about ten hours.

Thursday:

Were you expecting excitement and variety? That’s hilarious. Continuing to pound away at ImageJ.

Friday:

See above, but this time with more sleepiness. I stayed up last night to watch the live stream of a lecture on GMOs given by a Nobel Laureate at Northeastern. It was awesome. It also ended at 1 in the morning my time.

So after this week, have I fully figured out and feel totally competent with the software? Absolutely not. I have a new problem: I have to hold down the Shift key in order to do a certain very important part of the image analysis process, but every time I hold it down for more than four seconds, a little box pops up asking whether I want to turn on a keyboard shortcut. And, because I am the queen technophobe of technophobes, I’ll probably spend a good part of next week figuring that one out.

A thousand sheep and absolutely no lettuce

It’s officially fall in Galway—as evidenced by the crunchy leaves, the lab being on a horrible hot/cold/hot/cold cycle as the radiator gets too excited and you crack open a window only to let in a torrent of cold, rain, and sadness, and the fact that as I write this in my room, I keep making typos because my fingers are so cold. (Sleeping in a blanket burrito and a wool hat is actually kind of nice, though—up until you have to roll out of bed in the morning.)

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about getting sick—the first common fear that people talked about at my Dialogue orientation session. The second fear was food. Specifically, these worries came from people who were traveling with food restrictions, everything from not eating meat to gluten intolerance to life-threatening allergies.

I’ve wondered if I subconsciously chose Ireland just for the food. I’ve been vegetarian since I was eight, which makes a few regions pretty implausible; my face swells up about 20% of the times I eat tomato sauce (I still haven’t figured this one out), so the Mediterranean area seems ill-advised; and I’ve always been interested in the Middle East, but the slightest trace of chickpeas sends my body into apocalypse mode, and spending a semester in the Middle East avoiding hummus and falafel just seems unrealistic. Ireland, on the other hand, heavily features potatoes, carrots, and cows. This is good. Root vegetables and dairy, I can work with.

I actually know several people who’ve come to Ireland with multiple food allergies and survived. When people think about eating in a foreign country, I think what comes to mind is food carts and restaurants—when the reality is that if you’re staying for an extended period of time, you’ll be spending less time ordering off a menu where you can’t pronounce anything and more time wandering the aisles of the grocery store, trying to find the flour and figure out whether green vegetables exist. (Spoiler alert: they don’t. Ireland is an island filled with sheep. There is no room to grow lettuce here.) My diet here is pretty much the same as it is in Boston. It’s called muesli and not granola; I eat less fruit because it’s crazy expensive (see: this isle is full of sheep—shoutout to anyone who gets the literary reference); I eat carrots every day instead of broccoli every day, because they cost next to nothing. But on an extended trip like study-abroad or co-op, you have a lot of control over what you eat. The only thing I can’t accept here is the baked beans. They come canned in tomato sauce. What is that?

You also have the option of finding at least one thing you can eat that’s easily available where you are, and eating exclusively that—functional, if not ideal. During the week we lived in a hostel on my Dialogue before moving into our dorm apartments, we ate most of our meals at restaurants, and I pretty much ate potatoes, bread, and soup three times a day. (If you’re looking to crash-diet, this would be an awesome approach, because I lost five pounds that week; otherwise, you might want to diversify.)

tl;dr (I don’t blame you—I really never shut up)? If you’re letting concerns about food hold you back from going abroad, don’t.

Except for the baked beans. I will never understand the baked beans.

#WrongWayRenner

I wrote previously about finding a way to do things that feel familiar in a new place—not in order to stay within your comfort zone, but as a way of grounding yourself and making sure your life still feels like, well, your life. To that end, I’ll be running the Croi Galway Night Run this Friday. The route goes up and down the beautiful Galway Bay in Salthill from Mutton Island to Blackrock, and all the proceeds go to the Croi Heart and Stroke Center.

My old running injuries never seem to want me to race, and tend to flare up right before a race, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed on that one. The bigger concern is that it’s a night run. I know there are people reading this who’ve traveled with me and who know that my sense of direction is slightly inferior to that of a golden retriever puppy. I once got lost on a completely straight route on which, as one of my friends pointed out, if you sent a potato rolling with enough strength, the potato would successfully navigate that route. I was defeated by a root vegetable. So, as I’m trying to make it through the dark, I’m hoping there’s not a repeat of #WrongWayRenner2k11. (I’m openly offering myself up for mocking with this article, but it deserves better than languishing in the OregonLive archieves). Cross your fingers for me.

Fears about abroad life: 1.0

Throughout college, I've been to so many orientation sessions that at this point I'm not sure what direction I'm oriented in. One I went to during my sophomore year, though, stands out, in part because it was a predeparture orientation session for my Dialogue of Civilizations. It was actually more memorable for the fact that a minor incident in the lab earlier that day had led to my hoodie, hair, and ears getting full of live ants, so I had to leave partway through to stick my ear under a bathroom faucet. (Hey, if you're reading a research blog, you need to be prepared to hear it all.)

At one point during the session, we had to write down what we were most excited about and most worried about for our trips, and the Post-Its we wrote on were stuck up on the wall. By far the most common worry was getting sick, which is a more than understandable concern--and it's also what most of my co-op has been like so far.

My first semester of college, I got sick every other weekend like clockwork--I'd wake up on Saturday morning with a fever, cough, raging headache, and general inability to move, and be more or less functional by Monday. This time, though, it's been more like every weekend, and I regain functionality around Wednesday if I do at all. I've spent more time without a voice than with one, and spent so much time violently coughing that there's now a muscle or something in my chest that makes a vaguely worrying cracking sound whenever I stretch. And every time I stay up late, get soaked in the rain, or get through a hard workout, I wake up sick again the next morning.

All of this has made it pretty difficult to blog--not because I'm incapable of typing from my bed, but because I've felt like I have nothing to write about. I've cancelled more than a couple of weekend trips, spent more time sleeping than adventuring, and substituted trying new foods for eating the same three things I can stomach when I'm sick. It's frustrating on a lot of levels. It's also a reality of life abroad--the life part comes with you, and sometimes parts of that are not fun. I've had to reexamine some of my expectations about what a successful trip abroad entails. It's not always getting as many Instagram photos of old buildings as you can--it's about making sure you're experiencing life, even when that doesn't mean as much as you hoped it would.

(As for the title--there'll be a post at a later date about what the next-most common worry about abroad life was! It's not ants, but it probably should be.)

*aggressive sneezing*

This week I did my first workout with the university’s triathlon club. While I’ve been racing 5 and 10Ks regularly throughout college, triathlons always fell under the category of “I should try that sometime, I swim a lot and bike a lot and run a lot, but it sounds like it takes a lot of equipment I definitely don’t own.” (I have not one but two wetsuits, and neither of them are triathlon-appropriate.) But the NUI team’s racing season is in the spring, I have an unprecedented amount of free time (during my last co-op I was working two jobs on the side—why do you have to sell your firstborn to afford rent in Boston?), and the pool at the university gym is really nice. So on Wednesday night I jogged over to the gym, where the team met up and ran through a seriously Lord of the Rings-esque forest to a nearby track to do speedwork. 

As a former cross-country kid, any distance shorter than 3K makes dungeon sound effects start playing in my head, so the phrase “ten by 400-meter sprints” is never one I’m thrilled to hear. Add that to a determination to establish an athletic reputation, and I haven’t had a workout pound me into the ground that hard since my first day running stairs at the Harvard Stadium. The freezing rain, driving wind, and truly epic mud puddles were pretty reminiscent of high school track and field in Oregon. Running with a pack of Irish boys, not quite as reminiscent of my all-girls school. It was the most fun I’ve had so far in Ireland, and I paid for it with 24 hours of sneezing and the most painful stretching session I’ve had in months. But when the tours and the nights out are done, it’s nice to find something that feels like home.

I have no pictures of this, a little bit because my phone would’ve fried after ten seconds in that rain, and a lot because by the end of the tenth lap I looked like a drowned raccoon. It’s nothing you’d want to see.

Bees?

This week I managed to stop sneezing long enough to drive out to Spiddal, a small town near Galway pretty ideally suited to setting up field sites—I’ve never seen so many miles of undisturbed rock. The goal was to find the several square meters out of those miles where we set up the experimental plots (more details on that in a future post, which will likely include videos of dancing cats to distract any of you who find it mind-numbingly boring). It was freezing cold. It was windy. Climbing and jumping over boulders and ledges is something that hasn’t gotten any less nerve-wracking since my eleventh birthday at marine biology camp in the San Juan Islands, when I took a fairly dramatic fall down a boulder onto a patch of barnacles, giving me a nasty scar over a good part of my left arm. (Sorry, Mom, I know you read these posts—I’m more careful now, I promise.) But for every day in the field there are weeks of image analysis, statistical work, staring at the screen when the statistics aren’t telling you what they want them to, redoing the statistical work by hand, writing your own code to redo the statistical work, and refilling your coffee mug—so I try to keep a general attitude of “you will enjoy this field day if it’s the last thing you do.”

I was going to edit out the less-picturesque shot of the rocks, but I think it adds a certain realism. Also, my tech skills are lackluster, and I couldn't figure out how.

My fluorescent safety vest was definitely the most important part of the day.

All in all, it probably broke down to about 20% hauling equipment, 40% scrambling back and forth across the rocks trying to find the experiment sites (one problem with studying barnacles is that any given rock covered in barnacles looks exactly like any other given rock covered in barnacles), 10% struggling not to slip down the rocks (with varying degrees of success), and 30% frantically trying to take photos before the electronics died. The latter two incited a fair amount of frustration, but a good degree of laughing too.

And science can, honestly, be pretty funny, or maybe we just fill in the moments of frustration with humor. There are some sentences in papers that have stood out to me as inadvertently hilarious. From my Evolutionary Biology textbook: “Data was unavailable to test for one lineage of bees.” What happened to the bees? More concerning, what happened to the researcher responsible for the bees? And from arguably the most influential paper on barnacles ever written, by Joseph Connell in 1961: “On Stone 14a, the survival of Chthamalus without Balanus was much better until January when a starfish, Asterias rubens L., entered the cage and ate the barnacles.” The passive voice, the scientific stoicism with which it’s written completely belies the moment of stumbling through tidepools to your field site, arms full of gear, after months of preparatory work, and discovering that someone has eaten your experiment. Rude.

Science, though, is funny and full of stories and very, very human. As we were scrambling back over the rocks towards the car, my PI pointed out a stretch of rock almost completely clean of barnacles, and said that the sea snails had really been munching on them. (This particular sea snail is of the predatory, carnivorous variety—scared yet?—and is alternately known as the dog whelk, the dogwhelk, Nucella lapillus, or the Atlantic dogwinkle. Are you getting a sense of why memorizing classification systems is so difficult?)

But it reminded me of why I fell in love with science in the first place. To the untrained eye, the naked rock is tabula rasa, a blank page. But eyes that have spent countless hours in dimly lit lecture halls, peeled apart those same animals on a lab bench, mapped out an evolutionary tree by hand—those eyes fill in the blanks and see a whole story, prelude to beginning to the middle, and they wonder about the end.

Galway: 3, Jules: 0

Anyone who knows me knows that I’m a big fan of packing lists, to do lists, and backup plans, and less of a fan of putting things in the universe’s hands. Now that I’m over the initial shock of the arrival, though, and more or less going about a normal working life, the past week has been an exercise in ‘you’ll drive yourself crazy trying to avoid every possible failure and indignity.’ A new city will surprise you, play tricks on you, and sweep you off your feet in every possible sense of the phrase.

Completely predictable embarrassment number one: the first real wind- and rainstorm hit this weekend, and blew me off my bike. No cars, pedestrians, or cows were harmed in this incident, and I incurred only a minor scrape. It’s actually comforting to know that some things don’t change between continents, and my being aerodynamic is apparently one of those things. Throwback to my freshman year, when I was blown off my crutches and down the steps of the Ruggles T station.

Embarrassment number two: I take a lot of pride in the fact that I’ve never lost a push-up contest, so when I had the chance to win €100 if I could hang from a bar for 85 seconds, I rolled up my sleeves and hopped on, and got an unpleasant surprise when I realized that this bar happened to spin. Luckily my roommate caught all of the flailing on video: if you look closely, you can see an air of overconfidence and impending doom. Shoutout to the outfit that the guy running the game was wearing. Where do I get a hat like that?

The final and most unexpected triumph of Galway over my carefully planned adventure came in the form of an older woman who struck up a conversation with me on the bus. The Irish are both very chatty and very blunt, which is actually refreshing, although it takes some adjustment. When she asked what I was doing here and I mentioned barnacles, she actually had the same reaction that a master’s student in my lab encountered multiple times: telling me about barnacle soup. This legendary soup is actually made from limpets, which are significantly bigger than barnacles and the bane of my research—they bulldoze barnacles that have already settled on rocks, take up bare rock space that the barnacles (my barnacles? Can I say that?) could’ve occupied, and lead to my doing a lot more math than I’d like to. I don’t know how an attempt at barnacle soup would turn out, but I think it’s one of those things that just because you theoretically could attempt it, really doesn’t mean you should. But it’s considered impolite to correct strangers’ taxonomic knowledge on public transit, so when she asked whether I’d tried the soup, I just said I hadn’t. The conversation ended when she got off the bus, but not before I’d been informed that I won’t be qualified to write about barnacles until I’ve stewed and eaten them. You win some, you lose some.

Brace yourself: I'm about to criticize Dunkin.

I have a distinct tendency to get sick after final exams. The timing has ranged from a raging headache coming on during a molecular biology final, which led to some answers about molecular cloning that probably would’ve been a medical ethics violation, to spiking a fever in the Dallas airport while waiting for a connecting flight, but it’s been a constant throughout my college years: adrenaline-fueled week followed by an adrenaline crash, resulting in a totally sidelined semi-human. So completely predictably, I got home on Friday from my first week of co-op, lay down on my bed, and within a few hours was feverish and coughing my lungs out.

A reminder: when you’re talking to someone who learned English in a different country than you, think hard before you use slang or figures of speech that might seem obvious to you. Objectively speaking, the phrase “my roommate picked up a bug in a hostel and gave it to me”? Not all that clear. Actually a little alarming. Another phrase that’s caused confusion in a house with a Minnesotan roommate, a Dutch, and a Chilean: the rotary half a mile from our house, which can come up in daily conversation because it gives a great morning dose of “oh God, this is how I die” on the bike ride to the university. In some places in the U.S. it’s a roundabout; in some places it’s a traffic circle; in our house, it’s “the thing with all the cars” and then some vague hand gestures. Another puzzling, albeit less dangerous, part of the morning commute? A sign at a gas station advertising Seattle’s Best Coffee, which I drank all through high school on the West Coast and missed desperately when I came to Boston (read: I’m on a one-person boycott mission of Dunkin. There is no Dunkin where I come from—which, incidentally, is another phrase, like ‘traffic circle,’ that lifelong East Coasters don’t seem to fully grasp).  

Hopefully once I’m a fully functioning person again, these updates will get more interesting. For now I’ll tell you that one of Ireland’s most popular drinks is carbonated lemon-orange juice, which is everything I didn’t know I needed when I was sick, and that cough drops here are more than just artificial honey flavor in lozenge form, so you really can’t pop them like Halls. It took a few hours of being woozy out of my mind on cough medicine, and an admonition from my European roommate, before I realized what was going on. Next week I should be more alive-awake-alert-enthusiastic and ready to start taking on Ireland for real; right now, I’m gonna take another nap.

It's (not) like riding a bicycle.

Dia duit o Gaillimh. Hi from Galway! (I seriously hope Google Translate didn’t fail me here, because my Gaelic skills aren’t quite up to this yet.)

I’m normally an ace with languages, and I’ve started to pick up on some common words and the sentence structure, but the pronunciation is totally beyond me. English is the main language here, but signs are often in both English and Gaelic, and some university buildings have Gaelic names. Working in the lab has added an interesting, if not especially useful, assortment of phrases to my vocabulary: chemical waste disposal protocol, Freshers Orientation Week, evacuation in case of fire. I’m going to stash those ones under ‘things to pull out to fill a lull in conversation.’

Since my last post detailing all the ways in which things had gone off the rails, plenty more things have gone wrong and right. That piece of diving equipment was delivered on time, and I made my flight without incident. I landed in Dublin Friday morning, jet-lagged out of my mind, and was immediately met by Minor Disaster #2: a nonfunctioning phone. Fortunately, the guy at the airport store that sold SIM cards seemed to recognize how panicked and exhausted I was, and was kind enough to help me get through my technophobia and get cell service. After what felt like forever sitting on the floor of the Dublin airport, I boarded a bus for the three-hour ride to Galway, stayed awake long enough to snap a photo of the road and make my first cheesy Instagram post…and then fell asleep so hard that I woke up with bruises from where my hip was pressed against the armrest.

One photo for the road before passing out.

It’s been eight days, and I’m starting (starting!) to get into the swing of things. It happened a lot more quickly than I expected, I think in large part because I made establishing normalcy here a priority. After I fell into my bed and didn’t move for approximately 14 hours, we set out to do some legitimate errands—buying credit for the gas and electric meters, grocery shopping (I bought not only potatoes, but two kinds of carrots), renting bikes for the semester. I scoped out a couple of potential running routes and we more or less found our way around the university campus. (Challenging: there are no straight roads in Ireland. The campus is no exception).

 

It looks like Hogwarts, though. 

I’ll end on a practical note, with the most important thing I’ve learned so far. I got used to biking on the left side of the road pretty quickly. Biking in the city is pretty much the same everywhere: a constant exercise in terror, but efficient and weirdly fun. But there’s another left-right reversal here that I was unaware of. On American bikes, the left hand brake controls the front wheel, and the right hand brake the back wheel. It’s the opposite here. As anyone who’s ever ridden a bike or has a rudimentary understanding of physics knows, if you brake with just the back wheel, the entire bike stops; if you break with the front wheel, the back of the bike goes from moving forward to moving upward, and very efficiently catapults the rider over the handlebars. Just food for thought.

Disaster preparedness

Whenever I travel, I try to leave time, money, and mental fortitude to allow for things to go wrong. It's an inevitable part of trying to pull so many logistical details together: there will be annoyances, minor hiccups, and occasionally a disaster with the potential to derail your plans in a major way.

So, with my flight leaving at 9 tonight, here you have it: Things That Have Gone Wrong in the Final 48 Hours.

Missing gear. I ordered a piece of scuba equipment that I need to bring with me, and it was supposed to arrive yesterday. It didn't, and as we speak, I'm waiting for a phone call from the scuba shop to see whether it comes today. This may or may not culminate in a mad dash to the shop at the absolute last minute. Lesson learned: order or buy anything you need to bring with you WAY ahead of time.

Technology is not my friend. Seriously--my younger sister has had to show me how to use the remote more times than I'll admit. So with so much of travel logistics happening online, there were bound to be some frustrations. The highlights have been an airline check-in system that I couldn't for the life of me figure out, and a malfunctioning printer. Lesson learned: getting angry at inanimate objects is less helpful than phoning someone from a younger generation.

The big thing that goes wrong at the last minute. Seven hours before I was supposed to leave, an ATM ate my debit card while I was trying to withdraw cash to exchange for Euros at the airport. Cue panic, horror, and tears. Did I mention my phone was dead? One borrowed phone and a literal sprint to the bank later, things are just fine, although I'm a bit traumatized. Lesson learned: I was probably right not to trust technology in the first place.

So why am I sharing all this, if I'm trying to make the case that international co-ops are a great opportunity that you should absolutely go for if you get the chance? Well, because this was what I fretted about for months: all of the things that can go wrong. And it turns out I was right. Not everything went according to plan. There were annoyances, technical hiccups, and some moments of genuine panic. But here I am, sitting in the middle of a pile of luggage, eating the last of the snacks left in my apartment and waiting for my friend to come pick me and my overwhelmingly heavy bags up. It all works out.

Packing for the apocalypse

With ten days left until I leave, my packing list becomes longer, and then get cuts down, and then longer, and things get assigned to different bags, and then things get dragged back out of storage boxes, and soon enough I don't want to deal with it and you don't want to read about it. I started my packing list a month before my departure date, and it's gotten more refined; it's now color-coded based on what's going in which bag, and sub-organized based on what's going in the smaller containers within each bag. (Toothbrush and travel-size going in my toiletry case in my carry-on versus toothpaste going in my suitcase; SCUBA boots, gloves, and hood going in a mesh bag in my dive bag to cushion my fins.) Everyone has their tactics for minimizing travel anxiety. For some people, it's showing up to the airport three hours early, leaving time for every possible thing to go wrong. For some it's packing everything you could possibly need, ever--bug spray for a trip to Antarctica, anyone? My dad manages it by waking up early to pack in the half-hour before he leaves for the airport, then strolling through security twenty minutes before his flight takes off. I should add that I think his sheer confidence scares the universe into cooperating, because I've never known him to miss a flight. For me, it's overplanning. It usually works out pretty well--I've had many a potential incident averted because I had an extra copy of my ticket or knew exactly where everything was in my carry-on bag. But preparing to leave the country for longer than I ever have, I'm coming up against the same problem I did when I moved 3,000 miles from home for college: the urge to stock up on enough of everything to last the trip.

I know that this is pretty silly: I'm signed up for reports from the U.S. Travel Advisory system, and I haven't received any notifications about shampoo or coffee shortages in Ireland. But there's that lingering nervousness that something I rely on won't be available, and I think that's a common anxiety. So for anyone going international in the future, I thought I'd address when it's good to stockpile like you're bracing for the zombie apocalypse, and when you should take a step back and remind yourself that yes, most countries do have Advil readily available.

Bring: Prescription medications, or medication that isn't easily accessible where you're going. Bring enough of your prescriptions to last the trip, and if there are over-the-counters that you rely on, make sure you can get them easily wherever you're going. I had trouble finding Dramamine when I was in Ireland last summer, so since things with wheels are my kryptonite, I pretty much cleaned CVS out. A side note: make sure they're all legal! Some common medications in the U.S. are prohibited in other regions, so take the time to look it up.

Don't bring: Six months' worth of painkillers, allergy medication, or anything else you can find in any drugstore.

Bring: Enough basic toiletries (shampoo, toothpaste, deodorant) to last until you can find a drugstore.

Don't bring: Full-size bottles of every conditioner, body wash, and face scrub you own. If suitcase space is at a premium, it's not the worst idea to pack travel-size bottles, then buy more once you arrive.

Bring: A small amount of your favorite (nonperishable) snacks, if they're not available where you're going (again, make sure they're legal!). When you're homesick a couple of weeks into the trip, some familiar candy can legitimately help.

Don't bring: Peanut butter or Nutella, specifically. Yes, it's true that they're hard to find in Europe. Yes, I know people who've missed them while abroad. And yes, they will be confiscated at the airport.

That said, there are some things that, as I found out when I was in Dublin last summer, legitimately aren't easy to access in Ireland. Namely, iced coffee, peanut butter, and vegetables other than carrots and potatoes. I'm shamelessly stocking up on those by inhaling as much iced chai, Reese's, and spinach as I can. I plan to leave for Ireland hyped up on caffeine and full of greens, and I don't regret it for an instant.

In general? Trust that since billions of people outside of the U.S. seem to be doing just fine, you can probably bring the essentials and trust that either you can find the other things you're used to having, or you'll survive without them for a few months. When it comes to packing, that irritating mnemonic is true: when in doubt, leave it out.

And if you're packing for the zombie apocalypse? Look elsewhere for advice--you're on your own, and I won't be sharing my Reese's.

Hey all!

You probably found my blog in one of two ways: either you’re actively searching for blogs about Irish barnacles, which is awesome, or you found me through Northeastern’s Co-op Connections Beyond Boston Bloggers series. From August through December I’ll be working at the Martin Ryan Marine Science Center at the National University of Ireland in Galway. In addition to conducting field experiments looking at the distribution and density of several barnacle species, I’ll be building on work done as far back as 1961, as well as more recent research from 2012 and 2013.

If you’re not as much of a marine ecology fiend as I am, please don’t be scared off yet—Galway features some of the best of Ireland’s vibrant political and literary history, music and museums, and landscapes ranging from ancient rock ruins to cliffs to rivers running through the heart of the city. I’m out to experience as much of it as I can and bring it here for anyone who enjoys coffee, Irish bands, and landscape photos that make you want to jump through the computer screen. And for anyone considering an international co-op, I’ll be covering the logistics, excitement, and challenges of traveling to and working in another country.

This won’t be my first time in Galway. Last summer, on a literature- and film-focused Dialogue of Civilizations in Dublin, we took a day trip to Inishmore, a small island off the Western coast of Ireland near Galway. (I’m going to take a moment here to plug Northeastern’s Dialogues in Ireland—there are programs that focus on everything from art to literature to health and wellness, and I’d recommend everyone visit if you have the chance. Bring your raincoat.) Naturally I got distracted by some cool-looking barnacles on the shore, and took some photos so that I could look them up later (Chthamalus stellatus, if you’re wondering). When co-op season rolled around, I found a researcher in Galway who had done some work with them in the past. In a really great stroke of luck, she’d been itching to get back to that research, and was happy to take me on as a research assistant.

The barnacle that started it all. Yes, of course I kept the picture.

I hop a flight out of Boston the night of August 25^th, followed by a bus ride across the country from the Dublin airport to Galway. And for now…my bedroom is a tornado of storage boxes.

A few things to know if you’ll be following my trip:

I’m vegetarian and have some food restrictions, so I’ll be enjoying as much local food as I can within limits. Luckily, this is Ireland, so be prepared to see more ways to eat carrots and potatoes than you ever thought possible.

My least favorite part of our Dialogue in Dublin last summer was—no joke—the geese and magpies living on the university campus where we stayed. Anyone who knows me, knows that my love for wildlife stops at birds. Avoiding them might be my biggest challenge on this trip—further reports to come.

Next to marine science, travel is one of the things that gets me the most fired up. One of my childhood best friends will be working in Europe at the same time I will, and we’re trying to fit in as many weekend trips as we can. The shortlist of potential trips includes Berlin, Northern Ireland, Stockholm, and Glasgow—some of which might be more plausible than others. Suggestions that my friend vetoed include Moscow, Cape Town, Pompeii, and Cairo—something about “being realistic” and “there are only 48 hours in a weekend” and “we can’t rent our own high-speed jet on a college budget.”

We'll be making the best of all of it. Even the birds.

See you again next week,

Jules