Boston: cheguei! : O Crominho do Técnico

I have sucessfully arrived at boston. Trip was alright, everyone speaking a mixture of portuguese and “american”, or alternating between the two. It was fun :)

The worst part was staying 1h at azores. I was expecting not to have to leave the plane, but I had to. After 1h, I got into the same plane, same seat. A new experience.

Another re-hash experience has been the (lack of) quality of cab drivers. I asked him to get me to a street which is not THAT obscure, since it starts from Cambridge Street… the guy kept up looking in a book (how about a MAP ??) that supposedly told him to go to the street, but we ended up in the wrong part of the city. He then decided to call Ines on the cell phone and we drove to the house correctly :) Of course, all this time the meter was running. He asked for 41 bucks, I handed him a 50 and he decided to keep the rest as tips. This is the best part, he did an awful job in getting me there and still thought he deserved to earn this 20% tip. Another new experience :) I was so tired and had so many bags that I decided to let myself be ripped off.

Ines Baptista has been the nicest person earth – more precisely in boston – and has let me stay at her very nice house until I find a place of my own. btw, I’m typing this on her mac – I am now sure I want to get one too: great interface and unix-based. Can’t get better than this.

The next weeks will be spent taking care of the bureaucracy (I’ve commited myself to learn how to write this word perfectly!) and getting up to speed on the lab. I am eager to get back to wet biology from purely computational work, since i’ve always loved it in university and now will regain the pleasure of having my own results. Hopefully, if my head doesn’t explode, I will try to combine some computational approaches to wet lab experiments. Lots of work to be done in the area, but not the easiest things in the world.

On the down side, it’s been raining like hell since I’ve arrived. Well, I lie. It didn’t rain until I left the cab and got into the house. After that, it hasn’t stopped yet. Oh well, I’ve aways loved rain anyway.

Here’s my short story, more news to come, while getting used to this american mac keyboard.