Go Green.

Aah today was so so good!! Knock on wood, my days keep getting better as I learn new things and explore new places. I scored not one, not two, but THREE goals in foosball and they were not flukes!! I even exclaimed "NIIICE" out loud after my third one, lol! Yea, I was totally impressed with myself. I think I must've made my brother proud. I want to master this game in 3 months now. No, don't underestimate me, it's possible. One of the newer PhD intakes in our lab just joined this April. His name is Berouz and he is from Iran and he keeps saying "Ya ha." (Sorry, random trivia about him! :-P) He picked up the game in the last two months and he is one of the top players at the lab now!

Movie frame: nucleus in a cell

The fitted circle is the red line on the black  nucleus

On the work front, I completed my project in 2-D. So, for all the inquisitive people out there, I have some pictures here from lab. I get my data as a video file and I convert it into frames using MATLAB, that look like the top blue picture. It represents the nucleus of a yeast cell. I have to then fit a perfect circle on that nucleus which I do in Fig 2. I use this to get the equation and radius of the circle - and hence the nucleus. I don't want to go in depth into why I exactly I need those parameters. Just ask me separately, if you're that curious. Next step is to go 3-D cuz hey these things are ultimately 3 dimensional, right?
I've been eating a lot, I found out. Moreover, my supervisors and colleagues eat more than me! They have breakfast at 8.30am, lunch at 12.30pm and snacks at 3.30pm. I'm not even including the espresso coffee shots they have about 4 times in this time frame. Haha, yeah being an undergraduate in the university has the potential to pretty much screw up your eating schedule. Pizza for breakfast? Hell yeah!!

Pizza reminds me, my Nepali flatmate, Srijana, took me to this store called Kaufland - a la D-Mart or Target. I can't express how good it felt to actually go inside such a big departmental store here in Tuebingen!! I think that statement alone surmises all the doubts any of you might have had about how small this town actually is. I actually felt excited upon entering a Target/D-Mart. I bought frozen pizza from this place and I'm just waiting for a really hunger stricken night to award myself with it! Srijana even took me to this dingy little store in the town owned by an African man. The store sold all the spices and masalas (read: Badshah, MDH, Everest and the likes) for Indian cooking and incidentally it also sold Haldiram's Soan Papdi for 2.99 euros. Lol, quoting the price was so gujju! :-P

I think the buses are longer than the Chicago ones.

Oh and on the bus back, I finally bumped into Conrad - the German flatmate who I still hadn't met cuz he was out of town. Conrad studies Rhetoric at the University. Rhetoric?! No, wait seriously, did I just hear that?! I'm sorry but it took me quite some time to digest that someone can possibly want to major in ONLY Rhetoric. Hey, I'm just being Indian. I don't think most Indian parents would ever agree to majoring in Rhetoric, however interesting that may sound. Well, he has a minor in Economics but I think he said he doesn't like it. Apparently, after graduation with a rhetoric degree, he can train people for public speaking. Hmmm...imagine getting to say that I trained Obama to speak like that! As my dear friend would call it - intewesting.
Later, I went to the forest to run with my flatmates! Tuebingen has many forest trails but the one near our dorms is the largest. They have about 4 trails with increasing distances starting from 4.6 km - which I ran. Oh, the back aches that I have now! :-P The forest here is just like a national park - only without wild animals.  It makes for a beautiful long evening/morning walk. There are students running, jogging, the few old people walking, talking. It feels great to return back to nature. I don't remember the last time I was so close to nature but I definitely liked the forest for all the greenery around. I always wondered why Thane/Mumbai never did anything for the environment. We have such great weather all year round and we should definitely use it to our advantage. I dream of a city where all the roads will be lined with tall trees, pathways lined with the season's most colorful flowers, sit-out restaurants and cafes demarcated with flowerpots and the ruling party actually giving a damn about the environment. The current ruling political party of Germany is called The Green Party and they were strong in Tuebingen since a long time. That's probably one of the reasons why this place is so green and well maintained. People dig cleanliness and I hear some even go to the extent of cleaning the moss from between the floor tiles of their parking lot!

On the right is this AWESOME BMW convertible that I saw and just had to fish out my camera. Mark my words, I'm definitely going to buy myself a convertible some day. Blogger, you stand testimony to that. On the right is just a route on my way to lab. It looked really pristine today with the wind blowing and the trees canopying on the path. I felt lucky. Knock on wood! :-D I also took pictures of my dorm room and the town view that I get from my balcony. Here they are:

View from the balcony. My room is on the 8th floor.

That's my room. It faces the west and hence the blinds.

The kitchen. Try to correlate the 'day' light outside with the time stamp!

I'm gonna watch the UEFA final - Man Utd v/s Barcelona on Saturday, who's joining me? :) Also, I reserved my ticket for Berlin today. Unless something super exciting happens in the interim, my next blog post will be from Berlin! =D

Cheers!