My second day of work began at around 8:40 AM, when I arrived at the Institut de Recerca. To my surprise, all of my colleagues were hard at work already, so I sat down and started reading articles for my literature review. There are a LOT of kidney transplants, let me tell you. I also helped Ignasi to reformat the NMR machine, which we did casually but which would probably cause hernias in the senior faculty if we tried it at Yale. When my labmates congregated and went to lunch, we were treated to beautiful weather. The strange cold spell of the last few days had broken and it was sunny and glorious. I also got to try Spanish tortilla, which is not a piece of bread but a thick and fluffy potato-chunk omelet. Ignasi tries desperately to make me feel included, such as during the lunch discussion today when Mareia, one of the medical doctors in the lab, was discussing the morbidly obese patients that she had worked with at the hospital who didn't fit in any of the scanners. He turned to me and asked if I had any experience with this in the States, then realized that our country is fat as all get out. But he's well-intentioned and I did my best to answer.
After lunch, Ignasi gave me my first information about my specific samples. It was basically patient records, with their names whited out. Probably not enough information to abide by HIPAA in the US, but sufficient in Spain. I created tables of patient data and figured out where all the problems/holes were so that I can get in touch with the hospitals and fill them in before my NMR time in two weeks. I also got... all the details for this weekend's cardiovascular department excursion! It's going to take basically all day - meet at 8 am and probably get back at 7 pm to the hospital - but it'll be a nice chance to get outside the city and hike, and I guess to meet cardiovascular surgeon/doctor types from the hospital side of the facility. Obviously, I'll keep you guys posted.
For dinner, I had plans to meet Naaman, another Yalie doing research in Barcelona this summer. She works in a neuroscience lab studying action potentials. We have been e-mailing for about a month now, and finally met for the first time last night. We wandered around Passeig de Gracia, one of the main streets, and ended up in a pretty touristy restaurant. I got a stuffed eggplant dish and she ordered 1/4 of a chicken, which the waitress promised was "just a breast or thigh" (for good measure, she grabbed her own chest and haunches as she said this). It was not. It was a sprawling expanse of chicken. But we had a good laugh and a wonderful dinner. Around sunset,
we headed over to Las Ramblas, known for its market and million shops/hostels/bars catering to tourists, where Naaman's three friends were staying as they backpacked through Spain and Germany. Lena, Max, and Paul were all wonderful. We meandered and stopped at a pasta bar to satisfy the ever-hungry Paul.
I think that Naaman and I wanted a much more low-key night than they did, so our experience involved a lot of wandering and chatting. This assumption is based on the pride with which the two boys described their hostel, Kabul, which claims to be "The Most Hard-Partying Hostel in all of Europe."
Every night, the people from the hostel get taken out to various places to drink and then get free admission to a club at around 2 am. At 11:30, Naaman and I split off and met up with my EF friends from Sunday (Dhammika and Ramon) and some of their classmates. They wanted to just hang out at a bar, so we found one with outdoor seating and I chatted with them while they sipped their assorted beverages. The group was incredibly diverse: 2 girls from Belgium (one from the Flemish north, another from the French south), Dhammika from Sweden, another boy from Belgium, one from Ibiza, Ramon from Denmark (?), Alex from the US (she goes to BU), and Sergio from the Basque region of Spain. The two guys from Spain are working in Barcelona this summer and met the EF people by living in the same building. They were all so wonderful and we had a lovely evening just talking.
Naaman and I parted ways with our new friends around 12:30 to drag our sleepy bodies home, only to discover that the metro closes at midnight. Luckily, Naaman spotted a taxi almost immediately and we sped home. To tell you the truth, it was a beautiful night and I would have been happy to wander my way back to my apartment.
New favorite activity: helping American tourists (or any English-speaking tourists, I guess) who are lost. This happened several times this afternoon, and I didn't even have to consult a map to help them!
Spotted: a scientific paper with 305 sources listed in the References section. For a 3-4 page paper. As Ignasi said, "Come on, nobody actually
reads more than 100."
No comments:
Post a Comment