The first weekend after iGEM

I'm back in Sweden and things seem to be back on track again.

The day I came home, I slept for over 12 hours and woke up at 1pm the day after. I was going to have lunch with an old friend at BMC that day. But since I overslept so much, there was nothing to it. I have had a few very unproductive days recently. In my opinion, I should deserve some of that for working so hard before the Boston trip.

The iGEM Uppsala was not entirely hopeless. We received bronze medal, as I found out once MIT posted the result on their iGEM website. Forgetting to write down the safety questions on wiki wasn't that detrimental to getting the bronze. However, considering most of the teams got gold and there were fewer silver, fewer bronze, and even fewer non-medalists, the bronze is well-deserved but not something I would brandish.

Aside from the academic experience, I met with quite a few Boston-residents that I planned to meet. Allen, Sophia, Mengxiao, and of course my mother's old colleague Jifa. I'm still glad I managed to meet everyone of them during this short visit. After having lunch with Mengxiao in a Harvard dining hall I went shopping. Macy's was a gold mine. Copleys Place and Prudential Center sold mostly expensive stuff for the rich. In the end, I bought a pair of Converse for 45 USD, two shirts and two pairs of pants for 120 USD in total. On top of that I had great food in New England: clam chowder, 1-1/4 lbs lobster times two, great Chinese food, Mexican burritos, and more. In fact food almost got me miss my flight back home. I went away from the boarding gate at Boston Logan airport to buy some takeaway from Panda Express. By the time I was walking back all the way with my fried noodle, kung pao chicken and walnut prawns, my name was called by the staff. They said if I failed to board the plane within 5 minutes, they'd leave without me. I had to rush with my 5 kilo bag and finally made it in time. Although the food was so good it certainly made up for every second of stress I went through.

Back home, Sweden was covered in snow. Compared to Boston's autumn colors, one could imagine how a flight trip can bring you from one season to the next within hours. Quite a few things happened when I was gone. For example, one of my friends got himself involved in quite some drama. But for me, it's time to start working on that damn report and paper. Duh.