Oooops... I accumulated so much stuff during one single year! There's craigslist which is an online portal where you can basically sell anything, but I didn't have time for that, so I just posted things on facebook and I got rid of it super easily. The donation box for clothes in Isla Vista is "open-air" (there is no roof! It's not a container, it's just a box) which confused me at first, but I dropped of some items. Fortunately, I managed to take all my books home to Germany (but they're heavy; maybe it's a good advice to try to buy books you don't need asap in your home country when you come back).
It's also important to hand on your research knowledge to your colleagues - thus, I trained a colleague for a day which was completely new to me because I had always been the one being instructed. But, our experiment and the hand-over went very well!
As I didn't want to spend my last minute in Santa Barbara in lab, I went goodbye-kayaking:
... since I have left Germany, and to be precise, it's been a year and a month already. The year just passed by, but some people are thirty and say, those years also just passed by. And there were and are times when experiments don't work which feel very slow ;-)
But now I'm a "second-year" and the new first-years came and they take the courses I took a year ago and it's just all exactly going over the same way it took a year ago. There was a volleyball match against faculty, there are the social events in the graduate student housing etc. And the campus is so full again. The graduate students are only a few, but the undergraduate freshmen (first-years) are thousands!
I've got about a week left to do experiments and collect data for my thesis. But in the last few days our system is working as good as we can make it right now and I can finally start taking data and not only pretty images.
What did I learn during this year? It feels like all three years of my undergraduate education squeezed into one (I couldn't pipette properly when I came here...). Mh, well, maybe that's wrong and I just learned so much practical stuff that it feels like those three year of homework.
If you ever have the opportunity to spend a year abroad, do it! And go to school, do research and other fun stuff.
San Francisco is a great city, even if you visit it for the second time; however, it becomes a bit less magical and every city has its not-that-pretty-parts. The Golden Gate Bridge was the same and we biked it again, but this time we had a lot more fog which was just above us and the peaks of the bridge pylons so you could see the top, but not the part in between which was a very nice effect (same for the sky scrapers in SF).
As SF lies between the bay and the ocean, the fog and clouds are blocked by the mountains and its nice and warm on the Eastern bay side and rather foggy and cold on the ocean side. Some people even speak of "micro-climate areas" in SF because the weather varies a lot between different different parts of the city.
We biked from downtown SF over to Golden Gate Bridge to Sausalito and visited one of the villages which gave us a nice view on the bay. We rode back and also visited the Golden Gate Park which is a huge park in SF (maybe 2 miles by 5 miles). By then, we were done. Our total distance was only about 15 miles, but since SF is a lot of up- and downhil, so we were even too tired to return the bikes where we borrowed them (6$ extra charge...). But I can only recommend biking SF! It's safe, you get to see a lot more and you don't have to bother with traffic.
After the day trip to the Channel Islands (you can also camp there over night if you like), we drove to the Sequoia National Park. It took like five hours with a stop at the elephant seal vista point (here are more elephant seals from a trip in March). The drive took the entire day and especially the serpentines in the Sequoia National Park during the night were a bit hard to drive.
You might notice traces of fire in the last two images. The Sequoia tree has a special bark that protects it from fire while all others, usually smaller plants around it, die. The Sequoias profit from the more fertile soil after the fire.
As we started hiking, I was excited, that the trail we took was empty and we could enjoy the quiet, huge forest. But as we came close to the highest overview point of the park, Moro Rock, a huge amount of people appeared. You can drive to most important elements in the park and Moro Rock had a large space for parking. You're basically left with 340 steps to go up and don't have bother about hiking to any point. It's the same for the tree with the largest diameter in the world and the largest volume ("General Sherman Tree").
Of course, no matter if you drive your car or hike, the view is amazing! So there's way more then just trees in the Sequoia National Park. The King's Canyon National Park is very close, but because of the mountains it takes three hour to drive there!
Meadows are special in the park (they got names, too! Although they're just an area without trees); they grow on more humid areas.
A few days ago, I finally made it to the Channel Island Santa Cruz, which is part of the National Park Channel Islands South of Santa Barbara and Ventura. You only see a silhouette of the islands from Santa Barbara and indeed, it takes 1 h 15 min to get their with a catamaran boat. It's easy to book a ticket to the islands, but depending on the date you have to do it up to three weeks in advance! The boat trip itself is about 60$, but kayaking is a lot more pricey and starts with 120$ per person; you'd kayak for maybe 1.5-2 h. I was highly surprised that snorkeling is on top of that with 180$ (probably because of the equipment). Since the Channel Islands are famous for their sea caves, kayaking might be worth its money, but we "just" went hiking which was fantastic as well:
Sometimes, whales can be seen from the boat, but we "only" saw dolphins and seals. But there are foxes on the island! They look for food and even steal money from purses, so you have to watch out.
A few days ago, I finally made it to the Channel Island Santa Cruz, which is part of the National Park Channel Islands South of Santa Barbara and Ventura. You only see a silhouette of the islands from Santa Barbara and indeed, it takes 1 h 15 min to get their with a catamaran boat. It's easy to book a ticket to the islands, but depending on the date you have to do it up to three weeks in advance! The boat trip itself is about 60$, but kayaking is a lot more pricey and starts with 120$ per person; you'd kayak for maybe 1.5-2 h. I was highly surprised that snorkeling is on top of that with 180$ (probably because of the equipment). Since the Channel Islands are famous for their sea caves, kayaking might be worth its money, but we "just" went hiking which was fantastic as well:
We were sitting in a restaurant in Monterey, a town on the Pacific coast about an hour South of San Francisco. I was talking to another German physicist about a lecture and we mentioned the word "Navier Stokes Equation" which is a fundamental equation in fluid dynamics. Two people who were sitting behind us left, but one turned towards us and said he knew the Navier Stokes Equation pretty well, too. It turned out, they were German physicists as well, apparently attending a conference about fluid dynamics or something like this in Monterey or around there.
