Asechopo Edinburgh

"Asechopo" means "I have arrived" in Dholuo. It also means my language lessons are paying off! A bit.

Anyway, arriving in the UK was a bit of a shocking transition, flying in, seeing all the bright lights that indicate a city, and realizing that everyone here has electricity all of the time! Wow! Also, it's cold, and the morning takes a long time to get bright. I'm staying with Jo and Amy, vet epi people that work in Kenya, and we are next door to a Waitrose supermarket and a Chinese restaurant and across the street from a pub. We have a washing machine but no dryer, and I'll be doing my own laundry again! And I went shopping at the supermarket and got SOOOOOOOO excited, I bought all my favorite British vegan items.

I've spent a lot of time in the UK and I feel very comfortable here and am used to British money and British queueing and all of those things, but I still really feel the contrast between here and Kenya which I didn't feel when I was home for Christmas. For example, I got excited about the potable tap water! And the availability of certain delicious food items, and the bus system! I think the difference in feeling comes from the fact that when I go home, it's just home, and I know and expect things to be the way that they have always been. But Scotland is not quite home, and I'm staying in a flat I've never been in before, and so all of the exciting things about being back in a developed country actually stand out.

I also realized that Edinburgh has approximately the same population size as Kisumu. Which is crazy, considering it feels like a big city and Kisumu most definitely does not. Edinburgh also doesn't have slums and the population isn't half children and the children that there are don't yell in excitement when you walk down the street. But it's not hot and sunny every day and people don't always ask you how you are and everything is expensive.

So anyway, this morning I bought food and unpacked a bit and then took the bus up to the Roslin Institute, where I'll be based for the month that I'm here. My very brief tour of the building was "that's where they cloned Dolly the sheep" and "in this hallway they deal with TSEs" and "they make a lot of things fluorescent here." Pretty cool place to be! We had a brief lunch meeting where it was determined that the data I will be working with isn't ready to be worked with and the code that I need to adapt we don't have yet. But that's okay, it will all happen eventually, and hopefully the fact that I've actually arrived will lead to more things happening, and I'm going to Vienna this weekend for a conference and I have plenty of things to teach myself in order to be able to use the data anyway (what I'll be doing, fyi, is using the data from a study that these guys did in Kenya to improve and expand an existing diagnostic support tool for cattle and making it so it can be used on a smartphone). Hopefully.