TO DUBLIN!

My advisor got back this week from vacation/ a conference in Brussels so.. I finally started doing my own work (instead of just learning and watching procedures)! I really like having something to do all the time and being more independent! I've been doing more immunohistochemistry stuff and haven't been doing any electrophysiology yet (the work i do at Emory)... I've been staining and actually dissecting out the central nervous system (brain and spinal cord) of the Xenopus tadpoles so you can observe the neuron cell bodies and dendrites (different staining technique than my previous post)...I've been doing this at 2 different stages in development in order to see if there are more cell bodies or just more dendrites at the later stage of development... this work is supposed to complement one of the grad students in my labs work who is doing more of the electrophysiology side of things.. seeing how neurons differentiate at different stages in development...



this past weekend i traveled down to London by train and then with my friends in London to Paris! We got to see most of the famous sites and definitely got a feel for Paris! I thought it was a beautiful city and the food was sooo yummy... my friends and i had some great finds in terms of food.. we found a cute little crepe place - i loved the food crepes better than the sweet crepes! i got a crepe with tomato and goat cheese and a crepe with nutella banana and strawberry ice cream!, a cute little place that had amazing baguettes and pastries! (we went to a supermarket to buy some cheap wine to go with them and ate in front of the Eiffel tower), a more upscale bakery where my friend got a few macaroons for free from the cute french guy that was helping us!, and a giant outside food/clothes etc market haha!... but the city was dirty (at least when i was there) ... even the monuments were unkept and there was garbage everywhere! On the subways and near the monuments, there were also tons of people asking for money and selling souvenirs... although i did enjoy when the homeless played music in the subways.. there was a group of people who got together and played their instruments which i thought was nice...and this one man got onto the subway car and set up a curtain so he could do a puppet show for us!...Also, the people in Paris weren't very friendly... you had to make sure you tried to speak in french first and even then they didn't treat you well :/ .... and it was HOT! compared to Scotland at least... 95 and no air conditioning anywhere!...the hostel/hotel we stayed in wasn't horrible.. it was definitely very dirty and not in the greatest area of Paris (i would definitely say where you stay makes a difference in Paris!), but the sheets were clean and the staff were friendly enough.. although the people in Paris are slightly on the creepy side... and everything was sooo expensive there!!...the Louvre was definitely my favorite site! it was so beautiful inside and out and it was tremendous! i got in free because of my St. Andrews card too :) it made me wish i took art history classes so i could appreciate the art more! the only bad thing about the Louvre is that all of the descriptions are only in french! you have to pay for a headset to get audio.. i really wanted to but we were in a rush to get to see everything... i also liked the notre dame church a lot - it was gorgeous inside! and the building we went to which had a park (in my pics).. there was a band on tour playing there from the states which i really enjoyed!..the catacombs were definitely not what i expected.. we had to wait on a fairly large line to get in because there was a limited amount of people aloud in at a time.. after getting in we had to go down a huge flight of windy stairs to get to the bottom.. there under the subway systems and everything! way underground!... it was a little creepy we had to go through long hallways which were only dimly lit and it was freezing under there! i though we were going to see bodies but there were just stone caskets and other memorial stuff and there were bones everywhere piled up! it was kind of weird.. and when we finally got out they had to check our bags to see if we stole any bones! i don't know why anyone would ever steal bones!....anyway my computer is running out of battery and i forgot to bring my charger with me to work (had some down time to write this post), but as you probably already know im going to Dublin this weekend with Alex, Austin, and Ogy and will write next week all about it and another week in the lab!