Hi all,

Well, here I am! After a pretty stressful day of prep and travel, I’m halfway across the world.

I started October 31 at 6AM. A few months ago my supervisor told me I should give a seminar to the department since I’ve passed all my exams. Of course in early September I signed up for late October, thinking it was so far away, no problem! Well, turns out it was a crazy idea! I spent all day Friday preparing this presentation about my research. I’d given short, 15-minute presentations before (1 at a professional meeting and one with other graduate students), but I’ve never given an entire hour long seminar, presenting my research for the past two years too all my colleagues, friends and professors. Also since it was Halloween it was per lab tradition that we dressed up, took pictures and ate/drank together. So after practicing my talk (which I finished at 12:30AM the night before) from 7 until 10, I dressed up in my candy corn costume. I spent some more time before my talk going through my slides one last time and sitting in the room. Whenever I give a talk I like to get there early, sit and be calm until everyone gets there. There also happened to be a whiteboard and markers so I drew a bunch of Halloween doodles. I also tried to take a selfie

Seminar selfie

And yes, I wore the costume for my talk. People started to arrive. “Ugh” I thought to myself, “it’s actually going to happen”. Not too many people came, my boss and my lab members, another professor and about a dozen other graduate students that I know. Not too intimidating. Well, I talked and I talked. Questions were asked, people said I did a great job. After the talk, a professor on my thesis committee wanted to meet with me to talk about the manuscript I had written. She gave a lot of great feedback and advice. She gave a lot of advice on ways I could have improved what I had done. This is such a frustrating thing that happens so frequently in science. Most of what we’re all doing is new, if not just to us, but to the scientific community as well. Hindsight is always 20-20. I think back on when I had planned these field experiments that I’m now trying to publish. It’s so frustrating to think that if I had just gone out and asked some more experts about it, the whole project would have been so greatly improved. I guess I was just nervous to ask for help and I also didn’t really know what I was doing. I really realized that if you want something to be done well, you have to propose and get feedback from multiple people. It’s amazing how presenting your experimental idea to someone else can bring up little thing or big things you had never thought about that make is so much better. I really wish I had not been so stubborn, shy and afraid to reach out to more experts early on in this whole process. I still got a lot of good feedback in the end on how to improve what I’ve got.

            After this meeting I had 2 hours to pack. Yes, I left packing to the last minute. It makes me nervous even now, since I haven’t unpacked, that I forgot something important. I ended up bringing to large white cases as checked bags. Luckily Qantas airlines lets you check two bags for free, however….. there is a weight limit. A weight limit that I didn’t even think about until I went to roll the luggage out of the school and I thought to myself… “there is no way these are under 50lbs…”. But I wanted everything I packed in there and you never know until it gets on that scale, right? My first luggage was an entire fluorescent microscope that it taken apart into smaller parts that fit in specially cut out 3D foam. My lab manager was nice enough to give me a ride to the airport. On Friday at rush hour on F1 weekend. Upon loading the car I also realized that I have two huge cases, a roller bag that I intended to carry on and my backpack. There was no physical way I could move all of that luggage on my own.  There are also no carts at the Austin airport, conveniently. So we had to park in the garage and the two of us dragged all my luggage to the check-in gate. Guess how much these cases weighted? Just guess? The microscope case weighed ~71 pounds, the other case ~65. Both overweight. It costs $66 for one oversized bag and multiply by two. This sucks. The airline lady told me that I was able to move enough weight from one to the other I could have only one that was overweight. So I spent 20 minutes frantically repacking and weighing all the stupid little things that I packed. I had fit 3.5 weeks of clothes into a small roller carry-on bag, including 4 pairs of shoes (not cute one by any means, ones that will be wet pretty much the whole time and have holes in them. Work shoes). So basically there wasn’t any room in my carry on bag. I ended up having to throw away some black plastic bowls, a decision that I’m totally going to regret once I get there. Black plastic makes it a lot easier to see individual larvae, which are kinda an off-white color. So sad I couldn’t fit those. I ended up getting one case down to 51 and they tagged it and let it go. So I paid the $66 for the microscope case, which by this point was super heavy. One thing I will note, even though I probably shouldn’t, is that upon walking up to the security line I realized I had packed an entire, large volume of sunscreen in my carry on, I had forgotten to put it in my checked bags and they were gone. Australia is like the skin cancer capitol of the world (I believe there is a hole in the ozone over NW Australia), so sunscreen is a must! I just hoped for the best and they didn’t catch it. Whew! Made it through security. What was I thinking bringing so much stuff? How was I going to manage it all through the international airports? If there weren’t carts, I was going to have to ask strangers to help me. I boarded the plane for Los Angeles and we took off, bye bye Austin.When we arrive in LAX the pilot’s voice comes on the speaker system saying, “I’m sorry for the delay but there is a Dracula at the gate!”. Hehe, sure enough the airport workers were all dressed up for Halloween.

There is such an incredible difference between the LAX Qantas/British Airways terminal and the domestic ones. This terminal is incredibly 'lux' and dotted with Michael Kors, Gucci and a caviar restaurant. Seriously, a caviar restaurant? 

LA international terminal

As I walk through the terminal I look through the window and marvel at these huge international planes. They are double decker planes that are bigger that I ever imagined planes would be. This is not my first trans-Pacific flight, but I’m still in awe at how impressive these planes are and the infrastructure that supports them. We boarded at 9:40PM. I

suddenly start to become aware of how American my accent is, most of the people on board have a thick Australian accent. My seat was in row 81, back of the plane. Luckily I got an aisle seat. There was even a spiral staircase in the back of the plane that led up to business class, which was of course gated off from us ‘row 81’ peasants. This is not to say the plane wasn’t nicer than most planes. They gave us all our own pillow, blanket and headset. I was most excited about sitting there and watching movies. Of course the guilt of not doing work kinda plagued over me, but I’m trying to shake that a little and relax. That’s another thing about academic science, you have this feeling in the pit of your stomach that you should always be working. There is no end, there is no excuse for not working if you have time for it. And when you have time and don’t work, you become plagued with guilt. The magnitude of this guilt differs by graduate student, but I think we all feel it time and again. Then the plane takes off! Now I just have to sit there for 15 hours. The plane ride went pretty smoothly, I think I did end up sleeping for most of it. Oddly enough one of the bathrooms in the back got locked up and “biohazard do not enter” notes were put all over it. Dunno what happened there, I’m just glad I wasn’t the one to find it.

The Sydney airport has this crazy futuristic technology thing there. It just blew my mind. You scan your passport into some machine and it gives you a ticket. Then you go up to these lines with small gates, enter your ticket, then you look into some camera and they scan your freaking face and the machine goes, “beep boop beep” and determines if you face matches your passport face pic. Of course I didn’t know what was going on and the machine didn’t recognize my face. But you don’t get the ticket back to try again, you have to go back into the huge line to get another face scanning ticket. I instead stood in the long line to have a person see if my face was good enough to pass. They stamped my passport and sent me off to collect my bags. This is when things started to get stressful. There were hundreds of people on my flight, hundreds. I had an overweight bag and a ‘normal’/slightly overweight bag. My bags didn’t come out. I then figured, ‘ok, the overweight bags must come out somewhere else’. I was dragging this cart around looking for my bags for over an hour. I even went to the baggage services department and they said they’re probably in some other part of the airport and they’ll have to send them to me in Townsville. Ugh. By some miracle, she called one side of the airport and they had showed up! Both of them were in the ‘overweight’ bags section, but came out like an hour after all the others. Great. Now the hard part began. At this point, I am one relatively weak woman, who has ~150 pounds of luggage. I did have a cart, however maneuvering that cart with so much weight was an entire body workout for me. Got through customs and I thought I was home free! But no, this is when it got even worse. At this point, I had 1.5 hours to catch my next flight. However, I didn’t have any place to just drop off my luggage. Outside the customs was, well, the outside. End of terminal. I asked around and found out that I need to take a city bus to the domestic terminal. And the city bus costs $5 Australian dollar. Great, I have $0 Australian dollars. I go to the ATM and take some money out, of course while still pushing my 150 pounds and still in my dumpy outfit. I’m starting to panic, because I just don’t know how I’m going to get all

My massive amount of luggage, waiting for bus to domestic terminal

my luggage onto this small city bus, and they what am I going to do when I get off? Luckily the bus driver offers to get me load it on. Then when the bus makes it to the domestic terminal, which of course has no signs anywhere, I look and there aren’t carts. I ask if there are carts, but in Australia they aren’t called carts they’re called, “trolleys”. So I ask where are the trolleys. They are inside the terminal, I have to essentially run into the terminal, which wasn’t close to grab a trolley. I tried to yank one out, but alas, trollys cost $4 to use. At this point I start to panic because my luggage is still on the bus, what if the bus drives off? What if it’s just sitting there are the curb? I start crying, naturally, because I’m tired, and alone, and my whole body aches from pushing around that massively heavy cases and the time to catch my flight is about an hour and I have no idea where the terminal is or where to drop off my luggage. Luckily the bus driver took off my cases and left them on the sidewalk. Of course I had to cross 4 lanes of traffic to get to them, but someone there helped me get them on the trolly and I went inside. When I get inside there is absolutely no indication of where I am or where I should go. I asked someone and they say to take the ‘lift’ (elevator). I end up taking it down, which was wrong. I asked the people on the elevator where the Jetstar terminal was, obviously upset. Some punk kid just says to me, “Jetstar sucks”. Then they say I have to go up. I got up and instead of taking note which floor, I just got off and ran into some “do not enter” section of the airport and I just start crying. I don’t know where I am, where I’m supposed to go and I have these stupid, heavy cases and I’m lost and I’m going to miss my flight. I asked some girl working at some flower shop where the jetstar terminal is, she seemed confused, probably because I was all panicky and crying, and said it’s up one more floor. Oh, that’s not so bad. I got up there and everything looks like a normal airport terminal now. I get to the Jetstar terminal and the line is outrageously long. I go up to an attendant and she explains to me that most of the people in line have flights before mine and I have nothing to worry about. So I stand in the line and have to take my overly large cases to the overweight baggage drop off. The security there is much

Flying out of Sydney

more lax than in the US too, it’s like airport security was in the 90’s. You don’t need to show them
your boarding pass or ID. You don’t have to take off your shoes and they only care about aerosols, so strange. By the time I made it to the gate it was the last call for my flight. When I flew over Sydney, I tried really hard to find the opera house! I think I found it from a really tall height, but it’s possible that small white mark w as something else.  I finally made it to the terminal in Townsville and my

Flying away from Sydney

friend picked me up. I had to wait a whole 7 hours before I let myself go to bed, and it was the best sleep of my life.

Flying into Townsville