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.