It starts...

I’m here! It’s real! My intended “gap” year of 2008-2009 is officially extended… for THREE MORE YEARS!!! Bliss.

I spent last week feeling like a spy, attending a paleontology conference in Bristol more to observe the paleontologists (or more specifically, the people who prepare fossils for the paleontologists to study) than to listen to talks about dinosaur biomechanics. Meta, right? Bristol is a really pretty university town built on one gigantic hill, and woe upon you if your location and your destination are at opposite altitudes. Luckily for my calves, my hostel was at sea level and the conference rooms were at Everest level. Yikes. Nothing like training for rowing early, I guess.

So after each day of fossil talks and schmoozing with fossil celebrities (Jack Horner! Matt Brown! Amy Davidson! “Fossil” celebrities in subject matter only, of course…), I hiked back to my shockingly cheap bedroom, shared with 15 other people (including boys!). I can sleep anywhere, so the noise and bedbugs (theoretical only) were no problem but the hostel did create a bizarre situation when the boy sleeping in his underwear across from me turned out to be a conference attendee too. He thought we were pals, but I had a really hard time talking to him at the conference without imagining him in his knickers. Awkward.

When the analyses of Pleistocene mammal phylogenies got to be too much for me, I took an afternoon off to be a historian instead of a scientist. I visited Bristol Cathedral, which has great tongue-sticking-out gargoyles and an incredible number of monkey statues (Apparently the 13^th-century architect put monkeys on everything he built. An evolutionist before his time?). I also visited one of Britain’s first suspension bridges, built over the River Avon just outside Bristol.

The conference wrap party was an ethnographic opportunity in itself. The big cool thing to do was to swap your conference nametag for the nametag of someone “better”, i.e. Jack Horner, or someone with a special ribbon that says “Conference Chair” or “Committee Member” or even “Speaker”. People were adamant about it, and soon no one had their own nametag on, which made for awkward “I know I met you but…” situations. I was totally failing to convince anyone to take my nametag until I met a student from the University of Bristol who was a conference volunteer (i.e. HAD A RIBBON SAYING “VOLUNTEER”- goldmine), and he said, “Wylie?! What a brilliant name! Wanna swap?” So I became nametagged as “Nick Crimpton, Volunteer,” and my night was made.

After one more sweaty traverse of Bristol’s hill (this time dragging my 80 pounds of luggage), I climbed gratefully and with delight onto buses to London and then to Cambridge. I was THRILLED to be finally heading to Cam.

I went to the pub with a bunch of other PhD students and ignored their complaints about how awful it is to do a PhD and reveled in their nerdy jokes. My bike tires were almost totally flat so I had to pay the bike shop 50p for air. Half my room’s balcony is roofed and half is not, so I can sit out there in the rain AND grow plants at the same time. (AWESOME.) I spent a morning teaching 6^th graders in a nearby school to build circuits, as part of a student club that does science outreach programs. The kids knew EVERYTHING – We asked, “What do you need to make a circuit?” They answered, “A battery!” “Wires!” “A switch!” “A capacitor?”

Let’s just say I learned a lot more about electricity than they did. No one got electrocuted and my group successfully built a mini burglar alarm, so it was a great day.

New students arrive this weekend. Classes start on Tuesday. Rowing starts Sunday. I’m sleeping in head-to-toe fleece. Papers are scattered all over my floor. I'm heading to the library.

Life is good.