First off, UC-Santa Barbara is a beautiful campus located, as I mentioned yesterday, right on the ocean. Secondly, Drs. Orias and Coyne, who are bigwigs in my field and who organized this conference, are totally awesome. Third, the other 21 attendees are terrific and we're having a great time running around the lab like undergrads who don't know what they're doing. Even those who are long-time faculty researchers. Actually, especially them. It's amazing how different the most basic things are from one lab to another. But we're having a great time. Fourth, they never quit feeding us. It's pretty amazing, yet almost ridiculous. And delicious. I took a picture of my supper last night.
It was awesome. We get three meals a day in the awesome dining commons (waaaay better than dorm food of yore), plus they give us morning snack and afternoon snacks in the lab. Thursday they're taking us out to dinner at a nice restaurant in town. Crazy. But awesome. I guess we need a lot of good food so we learn up all this stuff real good. :)
So after supper last night I walked all around campus and pretty much wore myself out (I'd been up for 20 hours). I saw these awesome trees, but I don't know what kind they are.
They have these big lesion-looking things on their trunks that are pretty bizarre.
I know nothing about trees, but these are pretty cool.
Then I had to go view the ocean from the top of the cliffs that I saw from the bottom earlier. You can see more of Santa Barbara off in the distance there.
I don't know what we'll do this evening, but it may involve more beach walking. I promise not to just post picture after picture of the ocean. However, I do not promise not to post more pictures of food. Tee hee.
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2 comments:
WOW -- Sounds like a great and fun experience so far! Isn't academia enriching? (Well, for me it's "em-pooring," too, but I love being a student!) I won't get tired of seeing your ocean pictures!
Hey Susan ~ Cool pictures! I'm glad you're having a good time! I asked Adam what kind of tree that was, but since he is not familiar with what grows there, zones, etc, he wasn't sure....he had a good guess though...he called it a Bannion(sp?), common in rainforests. He also said that the weird bumps/lesions are from improper pruning. And the bumps around the base are to prevent erosion in the rain forest... but that was all just a guess!!! Luv Ya!!!
Becca
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