It's been a year...

... since I have left Germany, and to be precise, it's been a year and a month already. The year just passed by, but some people are thirty and say, those years also just passed by. And there were and are times when experiments don't work which feel very slow ;-)

But now I'm a "second-year" and the new first-years came and they take the courses I took a year ago and it's just all exactly going over the same way it took a year ago. There was a volleyball match against faculty, there are the social events in the graduate student housing etc. And the campus is so full again. The graduate students are only a few, but the undergraduate freshmen (first-years) are thousands!

I've got about a week left to do experiments and collect data for my thesis. But in the last few days our system is working as good as we can make it right now and I can finally start taking data and not only pretty images.

What did I learn during this year? It feels like all three years of my undergraduate education squeezed into one (I couldn't pipette properly when I came here...). Mh, well, maybe that's wrong and I just learned so much practical stuff that it feels like those three year of homework.
If you ever have the opportunity to spend a year abroad, do it! And go to school, do research and other fun stuff.

San Francisco and its fog

San Francisco is a great city, even if you visit it for the second time; however, it becomes a bit less magical and every city has its not-that-pretty-parts. The Golden Gate Bridge was the same and we biked it again, but this time we had a lot more fog which was just above us and the peaks of the bridge pylons so you could see the top, but not the part in between which was a very nice effect (same for the sky scrapers in SF).

As SF lies between the bay and the ocean, the fog and clouds are blocked by the mountains and its nice and warm on the Eastern bay side and rather foggy and cold on the ocean side. Some people even speak of "micro-climate areas" in SF because the weather varies a lot between different different parts of the city.

We biked from downtown SF over to Golden Gate Bridge to Sausalito and visited one of the villages which gave us a nice view on the bay. We rode back and also visited the Golden Gate Park which is a huge park in SF (maybe 2 miles by 5 miles). By then, we were done. Our total distance was only about 15 miles, but since SF is a lot of up- and downhil, so we were even too tired to return the bikes where we borrowed them (6$ extra charge...). But I can only recommend biking SF! It's safe, you get to see a lot more and you don't have to bother with traffic.

Sequoia National Park

After the day trip to the Channel Islands (you can also camp there over night if you like), we drove to the Sequoia National Park. It took like five hours with a stop at the elephant seal vista point (here are more elephant seals from a trip in March). The drive took the entire day and especially the serpentines in the Sequoia National Park during the night were a bit hard to drive.

You might notice traces of fire in the last two images. The Sequoia tree has a special bark that protects it from fire while all others, usually smaller plants around it, die. The Sequoias profit from the more fertile soil after the fire.

As we started hiking, I was excited, that the trail we took was empty and we could enjoy the quiet, huge forest. But as we came close to the highest overview point of the park, Moro Rock, a huge amount of people appeared. You can drive to most important elements in the park and Moro Rock had a large space for parking. You're basically left with 340 steps to go up and don't have bother about hiking to any point. It's the same for the tree with the largest diameter in the world and the largest volume ("General Sherman Tree"). 

Of course, no matter if you drive your car or hike, the view is amazing! So there's way more then just trees in the Sequoia National Park. The King's Canyon National Park is very close, but because of the mountains it takes three hour to drive there!

Meadows are special in the park (they got names, too! Although they're just an area without trees); they grow on more humid areas.

Channel Islands

A few days ago, I finally made it to the Channel Island Santa Cruz, which is part of the National Park Channel Islands South of Santa Barbara and Ventura. You only see a silhouette of the islands from Santa Barbara and indeed, it takes 1 h 15 min to get their with a catamaran boat. It's easy to book a ticket to the islands, but depending on the date you have to do it up to three weeks in advance! The boat trip itself is about 60$, but kayaking is a lot more pricey and starts with 120$ per person; you'd kayak for maybe 1.5-2 h. I was highly surprised that snorkeling is on top of that with 180$ (probably because of the equipment). Since the Channel Islands are famous for their sea caves, kayaking might be worth its money, but we "just" went hiking which was fantastic as well:

 

Sometimes, whales can be seen from the boat, but we "only" saw dolphins and seals. But there are foxes on the island! They look for food and even steal money from purses, so you have to watch out.

Channel Islands

A few days ago, I finally made it to the Channel Island Santa Cruz, which is part of the National Park Channel Islands South of Santa Barbara and Ventura. You only see a silhouette of the islands from Santa Barbara and indeed, it takes 1 h 15 min to get their with a catamaran boat. It's easy to book a ticket to the islands, but depending on the date you have to do it up to three weeks in advance! The boat trip itself is about 60$, but kayaking is a lot more pricey and starts with 120$ per person; you'd kayak for maybe 1.5-2 h. I was highly surprised that snorkeling is on top of that with 180$ (probably because of the equipment). Since the Channel Islands are famous for their sea caves, kayaking might be worth its money, but we "just" went hiking which was fantastic as well:

 

Just a dinner conversation

We were sitting in a restaurant in Monterey, a town on the Pacific coast about an hour South of San Francisco. I was talking to another German physicist about a lecture and we mentioned the word "Navier Stokes Equation" which is a fundamental equation in fluid dynamics. Two people who were sitting behind us left, but one turned towards us and said he knew the Navier Stokes Equation pretty well, too. It turned out, they were German physicists as well, apparently attending a conference about fluid dynamics or something like this in Monterey or around there.

Roadtrip

Starting this Saturday, I'll be mainly offline going on a roadtrip as it is a typical activity in the US. We'll go to different National Parks and end up in San Francisco. I never understood, why people do so many road trips, but as I booked my flight back from SF to Santa Barbara, it turned out that this flight will be as expensive as the car we rent for five days! Thinking of trains, it takes nine hours or more to get from SF to Santa Barbara. And it's kind of impossible to reach the National Parks with trains or buses if you're not considering traveling with an agency.

The zipcar thing

To resolve my last post: It worked! I had booked a car from the car sharing company zipcar and I could unlock it with my zipcard. Fortunately, the tank was more than 1/4th filled up, because if not, you have to get gas - but the company pays for the gas, so you don't have to worry. But sometimes the car's credit cards don't work and you have to pay etc. lots of things could go wrong ;-)

The car itself was working great and it was mainly clean, too. It seemed to be useful for longer drives as well as it had a cruise control. I booked it for one hour and I returned it on time, so I didn't have to pay any additional fees. The total cost for the trip was 9.18 $. And after it took me such a long time to become a member, actually getting one of their cars is easy :-)

Zipcar

Maybe you have heard of car sharing and even zipcar. The general idea is that several people own or rent a car and use it from time to time. Zipcar is a huge international company that owns cars in lots of towns (even here in Isla Vista there are four!) and once you are registered as a member, you can book a car for about 10$/hour. You don't have to pay for gas and you don't have to reserve a car for an entire day (as car rental companies usually do it). Thus, you can easily go grocery shopping, pick up a friend, go to a party etc.

However, I had lots of trouble getting my zipcard (but I fought for it and I'll test it tomorrow). Their website service didn't work properly, so I couldn't submit my application. After I called zipcar five times, it turned out, it's a problem with the web page; during the first four calls, the people I spoke to didn't know what's wrong. Wow. If you submit your application via the website it takes about 30 (!) days to be processed. Well, that's when I'll have left the US.

So, I had to track them down at the head quarters in Los Angeles. Only a day trip, haha. Yet, I got my zipcard! You have to scan your passport and send in your driver's license to get your zipcard activated. That should take three days. Of course, nothing happened after three days and I had to call them again - and suddenly, my account was alright and I could reserve a car, yay!
The zipcard you get acts as a key to open the car; the actual keys for the motor are inside.

However, a friend told me a similar story about their service. He booked a car, but was sent to another one (0.5 miles away) because the first one was shut down due to maintenance. The car he was navigated to was also shut down. He ended up taking the bus to pick up a friend. It seems to be that the zipcar thing is great, if it's working ;-)

Cups and mugs

It took me some time to adjust to the imperial units as inches, gallons etc. as people use it here. This is not impossible! Many people complain about it, but it's doable! Instead of "a few meters away" you say "a few yards" and so on. I can kind of estimate how tall people are now and e.g.  "he's six feet" started meaning something to me. Temperatures are a lot harder to deal with, but I got the point that 30°F is kind of cold and 60-70°F is alright. 

BUT, I always thought that a cup means cup (volume measure, eight fluid ounces are one cup, 16 cups are one gallon). Thus, when I was cooking rice I took a coffee mug, filled it almost up and because the recipe said "one cup of rice goes with one cup of water" I added the same amount of water. Indeed, it wouldn't matter how large a cup is, if the ratio rice:water was 1:1, but it wasn't for some weird reason (maybe they assume that the same amount evaporates and the rice:water ratio is constant, but not actually 1:1?!). It said, if you have 2 cups of rice, take 1.75 cups of water etc. As I visited friends, they had a measuring cup (Messbecher) and I learned, that a cup is tiny! It's like a small tea cup. So my "cup" was about twice the actual cup, hups. However, my rice worked out fine ;-)

Key Lime Pie

Last week, we met for lab lunch and somebody brought a key lime pie for dessert (key lime = echte Limette). It consists of a cracker crust (or rather crumbles of a cracker crust) and a filling made of eggs, condensed milk and key lime juice.

Key lime pie at group lunch.

It was great and since I wanted to bake it as well, I searched for the recipe online and also for "lemon pie" as I thought, it's the same, just with lemon juice. But it's not! Absolutely not! For a lemon pie, people use actual dough and half the pie is made of some sugar topping.

I ended up making the crunchy cracker crust and the key lime pie filling with lemon instead of key lime juice. Of course, it worked although the taste was a bit different due to the different fruit. But when I told people I had made key lime pie with lemon juice, they were astonished that it worked! "I mean, really?!?! With lemon?!" I'm not sure if I understood the tradition of key lime pie correctly and I hope I didn't commit a cultural sin.