Engraving next to the entrance of my lab The building where my lab is located

Trinity College--side view. It's so pretty!

Entrance into Grafton Street, which seems to be one of the most affluent streets in Dublin. This is a main shopping street, and a lot of designer shops are located on this street.

Entrance into O'Connell Street. Probably one of the most famous streets in Dublin.

Overlooking O'Connell Bridge.

The IRA tried to blow this statue up a few years back.

Chuckled quite a bit when I saw this. They love Obama here, especially since he took a trip here. OBAMA!

Amerian made, Irish perfected: a two story Burger King.

This is a pole thing..but don't call it a pole. I was made fun of for that. It really doesn't have a significance; it's just in the middle of O'Connell Street

Local government building

Back of local governemnt building

So week one: I have already eaten 4 different types of cakes on four different occaisons...two were last night. Ahh, and two of them were from lab. I'm telling you man...the Irish have it down great. Once cake a week in lab--heck yes! Amanda, we nee dto get on it:) Even though I've only been here a week, I think I've gained weight because I've been eating nutella and bread almost every ngiht before I go to bed; it's quite tasty! You know what they say: When in Dublin. This past weekend I just wandered the city, bought some souveniers, fell asleep in a park (on accident), and went to a pub. Good weekend :) I also switched aparments yesterday; I wasn't really comfortable/geeling the one I was in before, but I love the on I'm in now. It's only a 10 min walk to Trinity, which is nice.

Lab work is starting to pick up. We had to teach ourselves how to do photobleaching. We were abving a bit of trouble with the FRAP (fluorescence recover after photobleaching) assays. I think we were frying the poor pelt because we weren't getting any fluorescence recovery at all. Hah. We were using the same methods spelled out in a paper from this other lab, but it was too much: they cranked the laser up to 100% , which is just so crazy! I think I perfected it a little bit better today, though, because I got recovery after I started bleaching! YAY. Can't wait to tell Adrian about it tomorrow. I think I'm now used to using the confocal here. We had a two hour lab meeting this morning. Who knew lab meetings were so long? I must admit, I like the way Sanyal (my PI at Emory does it). Haha--no lab meetings is nice, but I think it's easier for us to do it that way since my lab back at Emory is a lot smaller than the one here; we are able to keep up with what each other is doing a lot easier.

So yesterday Adrian adn I were on the confocal, then around like 4:30 he was like okay, it's about time for coffee. I was like what? and he was like yeah, afternoon coffee break. So we got up from the confocal and just had our afternoon coffee. It's pretty awesome. Everyone should do this. It makes your day more stress free. You get a break to just chill for a bit and wind down, and you feel more energized and motivated to get back to work. I think I became a pro at the coffee break thing today because I was on the confocal, and I had to do another dissection because I couldn't see any of the boutons on any of the muscle groups on the pelt I was working with. I went to go talk to Adrian about it, and I said, "Well, I decided just to do another dissection because this one doesn't seem any good...but I will do that after our coffee break. Johsn was like nice Sara: spoken like a true Irishman:) Then I went to the other room to wash my hands, and Isabell was like, Coffee break? and I was like heck yeah!

Grocery stores are different here. I went to like 3 different ones and still didn't find any ginger. They also don't carry a lot of brands like the ones do back home. I had only peanut butter brand choice...Panda. That will take some time getting used to.

I will be doing a lot of traveling in the next month! Tomorrow I am off to the Giant's Causeway. It's supposed to be absolutely beautiful. There's also a roped bridge that connects one side of the cliffs to another, and I wanna walk across that:) I'm going to Donegal next weekend, Galway and the Cliffs of Moher the weekend after that, then Cork and Killarney the weekend after that with Ashley and Brittany (can't wait to see them)...then THE WESTERN EUROPE TRIP!!! YAYAYAYAYAYAY.

More pictures will be coming:) Until then.