Pictures

Gatineau Park

'Canada' geese (aka ducks if you're Cori)

D. C. Look at the fantastic ductile structures in the fountain!

My room and the view from my room. These are about a month old, so the trees are much barer now.

Catching up!

I might be the world's worst blogger, since I haven't posted anything for 2 months, so here's a quick summary of the past 2 months:
The first weekend in October, I went to Appleton for my grandparent's 50th anniversary, and I visited LU. My flight out of Appleton was over-booked, so I got to spend an extra day there (fun stuff) and missed class, learning how to crush rock, and the due date for a scholarship application. Luckily, my advisor submitted most of my application, so I was still eligible to apply.
The next weekend was a metamorphic petrology field trip. I'm not taking or TA-ing the class, but my advisor teaches it, and he needed people to drive. It was a lot of fun, and it made me realize that driving in Ottawa is really not as scary as it looks. Plus, there are some really fantastically deformed Grenville rocks basically in my backyard, and I saw some crazy high-grade mineral assemblages (olivine spinel marble, silliminite amphibolite, amphibolites with garnets as big as your head, and a skarn with megacrysts of calcite, hornblende and cpx. There may have also been a charnokite (opx-bearing granite)).
That weekend was also Canadian Thanksgiving. One of my roommates loves to cook, so she prepared an elaborated feast with ~10 dishes. It was extravagant, but delicious, and the turkey turned out beautifully. She also had a bunch of friends over, and we watched American football, so it was much like Thanksgiving back home.
The following weekend, I wrote a paper and made a presentation for class and went on a hike in Gatineau Park with the international student office. I fooled everyone into thinking I was Canadian with my superior mastery of Canadian English. Gantineau Park is a national park just across the Ottawa River from Ottawa. It's technically in Quebec, but it is only a few miles outside of Ottawa.
That week, I went to see the National Ballet of Canada performing a collection of short, modern ballets, and it was very good. I got an incredible seat (10 rows from the orchestra and dead centre) through the student rush program, which was very good.
The following week (Oct. 25-29) was reading week, essentially a bigger, beefier version of reading period. It was really nice to have the week off, and I got a lot of research-related work done since I didn't have class or TA duties.
On Friday of reading week, I left for Washington, D.C., because I decided to go the the Daily Show/ Colbert Report's Rally to Restore Fear and/ or Sanity. I was planning on meeting up with some people from LU, but my Canadian cell phone had horrible reception, and it didn't work out. It was also really difficult to see or hear the speakers because there were so many people there. The rally was still fun though, mostly because of the signs that people made, but I also met some people who had connections to LU and WI, so I talked to them for a bit. Going to D.C. made me a bit homesick, because things were similar (US money and speed limit signs), but still not quite the same. It was beautiful, though. I went to all of the important monuments on and around the mall, and I spent several hours in the Natural History Museum. They had some very impressive rocks, including some huge slices of Jasper Knob, Ediacarin fossils and fist-sized zircons (I have zircons on the brain). I was disappointed in their eclogites, though. Maybe I've just been spoiled by the fantastic Holsnøy eclogites at LU, but I have to believe the the Smithsonian has some prettier eclogites. I was quite impressed that there were a lot of rocks that visitors were encouraged to touch, since I firmly believe that you can't really appreciate rocks behind glass.
Since the D.C. trip, things have been quieter. I've been doing a lot of school work (mostly research-related, since I only have one class), and soon I'll have some more substantial quantitative data. I've crushed 8 samples, run them though the disk mill, and sieved them to find zircons, and all I have to do with them yet is sink them in heavy liquids (the dense minerals will fall to the bottom, and zircons are dense, so they should fall out) and then pick out good zircons, plus pray that I get 20 good zircons from each sample, or I will have wasted ~8 hours per sample. I'm starting to get samples prepped for doing XRF (this is less time-consuming, because I just need to cut off the weathered bits of the rock, crush it, and grind some pieces into powder, but it is more sensitive to contamination). This Friday, I'm going to Carleton to use their microprobe to measure the Al in hornblende, which will tell me the depths that my magmas were intruded at, which will help constrain their interaction with the rest of the greenstone belt. It's very busy, but it's exciting that all of my work is finally about to get me some data.
The last bit of news is that I love TA-ing. We are done with field trips now, so the students are doing indoor labs, like reading maps and learning rocks and minerals. The indoor exercises are ok, but they're a lot more tiring and a lot less fun than field trips. TA's in Canada do a lot less than those in the US. We are only allowed to work 10 hours a week, maximum 130 hours a semester, and we're not allowed to teach, only assist (after all, that's what the A stands for...). On field trips, for example, I might work with a small group of students doing something like learning to use a compass or explaining some features in the field, but the lab instructor is always there, even though he might be some place else explaining something else. When we come back as a group, he usually goes over what we saw, but in a very cursory way. I did some grading (actually, the Canadians call it marking, and I only had to mark 2 labs (150 reports per lab), and now I'm done), but I am not doing much more than I did lab assisting at LU, and I make nearly 5x's as much per hour. There are some TA's who just mark and some who basically have a ton of office hours (like my office mate). At first, I felt like I didn't have anything to do, because I was only taking one class and working only 10 hours a week, but now that I have more research-related things to do, I've been a bit busier, but it's nothing like last year at LU.
Ok. That's it for text, the next post (tomorrow, since I have to get my pictures off my camera yet) will be pictures.

First week

So far, things have not been too terribly exciting. Classes started last week, but I didn't have any responsibilities until yesterday, so I've been spending a lot of time reading. Mostly about migmatites and granites. As it turns out, granites are way more controversial than I'd ever expected, which I guess is good since that's what I'm studying for the next 2 years, but it's also bothersome, because it's hard to apply uniformitarianism if we don't understand modern processes.

Even though I haven't been especially busy, there's been a lot going on in Ottawa. Last weekend, there was a hot air balloon festival in Gatineau, which is on the other side (Québec) of the Ottawa river, and we could see lots of cool balloons from our apartment.




There was also some organizational stuff, and I now have a desk in an office I share with one other person. It's a pretty nice space--we have a lot of room and a sink-- but it's in the sub-basement, so there's no sun. The room is actually called "The Lair".



I will be putting up some picts of my apartment when I get around to taking them.

O Canada!

Greetings from the north, sort-of. Ottawa is actually almost the same latitude as LU, so I didn't really move north, just east.
So far, everything is going fine. I've moved into my apartment, and I'm getting the know the city and the university.
This year could be fun, eh?
Cheers!

Trip Home

My trip home was quite exciting. I left my apartment at 6am, and even though I was only a few blocks from the bus station, I called a taxi (my first time calling a taxi in Salamanca) to take me there because I had 2 suitcases, a carry-on bag, and my backpack. One of my suitcases was full of rocks and books, and although it was very small, it weighed over 100lbs. A few weeks before I left, I found out that there was a new bus service to the Madrid that went directly from Salamanca to the airport, which was excellent, because I had way too many bags to worry about. When I got to the airport, I found out that my small bag was too heavy to legally fly, so I switched a chunk of eclogite with a pair a sneakers, and that did the trick. The person who ended up checking my bags was in a hurry, and didn't charge me any over-weight luggage fees, even though both of my bags were over-weight. It was really annoying when I was at the counter getting ready to leave, and the people started speaking English to me as soon as they saw my passport, because their English was hard to understand, but I wouldn't have had any trouble understanding their Spanish.
The flight to the states was pretty uneventful. The person I was sitting next to was really friendly, and it was a pretty pleasant trip for 9 hours in an airplane. We left an hour late, which is perfectly normal when you're flying out of Spain, and had to change our flight path to avoid a big storm, so we ended up getting to Dallas 2 hours late. It took forever to go through customs, and by time I was ready, my flight had left. I was really tired from my trip, and I didn't know what to do, so I ended up at the information desk looking lost a bewildered. Fortunately, there was the really nice woman named Dianne who helped me figure out what to do. I ended-up flying flying to Minneapolis, but there was a mechanical problem with the plane, so that flight was delayed an hour. When I finally got to Minneapolis, the airport was nearly empty, and my flight to Madison was going to leave in 20 min. I ran through the airport, and got there just as they were boarding the final passengers. I got to Madison after midnight, and got home at 1am, after more than 24 hours of traveling. My bags didn't make it with me, but they got home the next day. So it was a successful trip. 8 months and 30 days, and it was quite a challenge, but exceptionally rewarding.

Adios España

Madrid (ballet and geology)

The weekend before I went to Costa del Sol, I took a short trip to Madrid to help my flatmate move home. She wasn't taking any classes at the university, so she was done, and I wanted to go to the ballet and the geology museums in Madrid, so we decided to go the night before she left, go the the ballet, and then after she left, I would spend the day in Madrid and go home for dinner. When we got to Madrid, we decided to take a taxi to our hostel, because my flatmate had all of her earthly belongings with her, and we didn't want to risk her bags to the Madrid metro. There was a big outdoor concert on the street that our hostel was on, so we had to walk a bit, but we figured it out without too much trouble. Our hostel was really close to the Teatro Real (royal theater), so walking was easy. We saw Romeo and Juliet by Ballet Stuttgart (they are from Germany). The dancing was good, but I didn't really like the color scheme. I was also really surprised by how small the theater was. The floor area was quite small, and the balconies were really steep, but it was lavishly decorated, and there was royal box for the King and family (they weren't there). After the ballet, we got Turkish fast food, since the tapas in Madrid were horrendously expensive.
The next day, I went to the airport with my flatmate, and then went to visit the geology museums in Madrid. There are two: The Royal Geologic Museum, which is housed in the same complex as a whole slew of other natural science museums, and the Geologic and Mine Institute of Spain's museum, which is smaller, so I went there first. Since the museum is in the same building as the offices for the Geologic and Mine Institute of Spain, I needed to show ID to get into the museum, but that was fine. The museum was a little old, but really well-organized, and it showed how Spain changed over geologic time and highlighted the mineral wealth of the different provinces in Spain. I spent more than 2 hours there, and it definitely exceeded my expectations. The Royal Geologic museum was a little more of a disappointment. The geology museum was closed because they were renovating the biology museum that was in the same building, and the main exhibit was about Darwin's time in Spain, but they were dismantling it when I was there. They did however have a really cool exhibit on the Mediterranean, and a really good outdoor geology museum, plus they didn't charge admission because so much was closed, but it was still disappointing that the main geology museum was closed. Those silly biologists.
The trip back to Salamanca was uneventful, and, because I didn't spend much time at the geology museum, I got home with plenty of time to study for my exams the following week.

The ceiling at the Geologic and Mine Institute of Spain.

Costa del Sol

My last weekend in Spain, I took a trip to southern Spain, to the popular tourist location known as the Costa del Sol (the coast of the sun). It is on the Mediterranean Sea, and the area I visited has the largest ultra-mafic body (the Ronda peridotites) in the world.
I stayed in a very touritsty town on the coast, but the first place I visited was a small town in the mountains where I had good access to the lherzolites and dunites. This town, Istán, is one of the white hill towns of Andalucia, and it was very quaint.
The town is well-known for its artisian wells that are all over the town, and you can hear the water running under the streets from all of the fountains.

This sign says "Don't forget, behind a ball there is always a child."

Despite its closeness to the Mediterranean, this part of Spain is really dry, and the landscape looked very dessert-like.


This was a cave that was below the town. There were some of these caves that looked like tree houses.

I also say a pair of doves just outside of the town.

Marbella, the town I was staying in was full of resorts, and there were beautiful beaches. It was also perfect beach weather while I was there, so it was pleasant for studying.

The weather was wonderful, and it was surprisingly clear, and, I could actually see Africa.

They also had a bonsai museum in Marbella, and some of the trees were more than 500 years old. Marbella was interesting culturally, because it was so touristy. There was actually a really large Russian population there while I was, and I heard nearly as much Russian that weekend as I did Spanish.