I’ve just come down to the lobby in New York’s biggest International Hostel YHA and possibly the world. Yeah, it’s pretty big. I constantly have no idea what time it is and I believe it’s now a Friday night. After having travelled through so many time zones, time ceases to be meaningful. Thankfully I am a creature who lives by the sun cycle. It must be past mid-night now but my dorm room got invaded by a bunch of Thai people on a mission to do some kind of rally tomorrow. I didn’t quite follow what they were going on about but im sure my Belgian colleage would pick up a thing or two.

So lets see… things are pretty good here. I havent done any sight seeing yet but I’ve met some nice random people. As soon as I arrived on Tuesday night I was nackered. The flight from Sydney – Fiji – Los Angeles was long, boring and exhausting. But thankfully, my accommodation in Minneapolis is perfect. A nice room to myself and wireless internet for free. The following day I immediately went to the Uni of Minnesota to drop off my samples and the Furnace. That on its own is a whole different story. In short, the border and security guards were curiously interested what the object was. Luckily I had good documentation to prove it was (mostly) harmless.

I did some exploring on the uni campus. It is unbelievably big! Maybe two times the size of the ANU campus with heaps of big old buildings, some even featuring greek pillars. Yeah i liked that a lot. I went to the Pillsbury hall where I found Prof. David Kohlstedt. I immediately liked the old guy and he showed me around a little before we went to another building on the other side of the campus to show me around the rock deformation lab. Not much bigger than at RSES but nicely packed with stuff and the apparatus i will be using to deform my rock specimens in torsion.

Then the following day (Thursday) I was supposed to fly to New York (La Guardia) but after waiting for like 6 hours my flight got cancelled. It turned out the plane needed servicing and thus was send back to Atlanta…sigh. Luckily tho’ us NYC people got compensated with free accommodation at a nice expensive hotel with a free meal and a free return flight coupon with AirTran airways. Interestingly one of their flights goes to Cancun, Mehico! Sadly tho, i have no time and it expires in a year. So if anyone is interested, let me know!!!

Anyhow, today I did get to NYC and I will do some sight seeing until I move on to New Haven on Sunday arvo. Then on Monday I will present my research at Yale in front of the Geology and Geophysics department. It will be huge so im pretty anxious but also excited.

Cheers all