I Cannot Escape The Vineyards

I really had a wonderful weekend.

On Friday, we went to New York City with the other students in my program. We had a tour of the Museum of Natural History’s labs, which was really cool, because I guess for some reason I didn’t think the Museum of Natural History had labs. They do a lot of work with conservation, and also with sequencing things that people send in- mountain lion sightings in places that they wouldn’t expect them to be, and things like that. The work that the person giving the tour was doing was on tracking mountain lions through their scat, which apparently has some cells from the large intestines so you can differentiate between different animals and track their movement through the area.

Afterwards, we went to some of the special exhibits in the museum- a planetarium show, and one on T. rex-es, and one called Unseen Oceans. It was a nice time- we didn’t have a ton of time to see the rest of the museum just due to our schedule, but I enjoyed the time we did spend there. We walked around a little, although it was hot, and had a nice dinner at a restaurant.

I feel like there’s a massive difference between New York City and, like, every other city, and I think that New York City is just too big for me. I remember when I was in Moldova, people would ask me all the time what I thought of it, and I was never too sure what to answer. Too dirty?

Yesterday I had lunch with a history teacher I’d had in high school. This is another thing that I was actually a little bit worried about- that it would be weird, or awkward, or something. Instead, it was really good. We had good conversation and I was really happy that I went and did that.

Yesterday night, I and one of my suitemates prepared our presentation for journal club tomorrow. We’re presenting on a paper about the microbiome, and we spent 8 hours straight-from 4-midnight- working on our presentation. Before that sounds too impressive, please note that at least 30% of that was working on the aesthetics of the presentation, and about halfway through we realized that we actually didn’t understand anything about the paper and had to start over. By midnight, we were a little burnt out, but I also feel very confident about explaining the graphs in our paper. Also, I haven’t laughed as hard as I did yesterday in a long time.

Today we had a lab outing. We went to a nice restaurant for lunch and ate a lot of food- including a stuffed grape leaf salad. The waitress walked by with the secret supply of Ring Pops after serving one to the small child at the table next to us, and jokingly asked if we wanted one. A good proportion of my lab is not from the U.S. and had not actually seen Ring Pops before, so we decided to take her up on that, much to her surprise.

Then we went to a winery. We were asked at the door of the vineyard why we had Ring Pops, and the answer is clearly because we wanted to see what wines would pair well with lollipops. When we told them we wanted a tour, they seemed vaguely surprised despite the signs saying that they had tours at 2 and 4 every day.  Nevertheless, they took us and a few others around to see the not-yet-ready grapes and the wine cellar. All was well and good and interesting, until the lady mentioned that the wine cured breast cancer and elaborated on this for at least 7 minutes. At this, the members of my lab were trying not to laugh. The lady may not have known to whom she was talking.

It was interesting though, because I know a lot of the people I knew in Moldova’s parents’ grow wine. I remember learning about the process from my language partner, and a lot of what the tour guide was saying I remember learning about the process.

That lab outing was a really good excursion, I think. I’ve been there long enough that I was getting comfortable with the members of my lab, so I had some good conversations with people and I feel like I belong sort of. It seems like a really incredible place to work, actually.