My time here has been really nice so far, though life in Copenhagen has taken a bit of adjusting to. The first couple days I found myself feeling a bit anxious. I think it was a mixture of encountering so many changes all at once and having to adapt to them with very little sleep. I am living in a flat just outside of central Copenhagen and it is about a 25 min bike ride from work. The guy I'm renting from is a biologist, and you can tell because in his living room he has a bookshelf full of insect models, bird skulls and stuffed animals (and I'm talking taxidermy, not cute fuzzy, hugable synthetic creatures). It is too bad he is not into biochemistry. I would much rather stare at the structure of a protein than a large femur from who knows what.
The lab I work in is quite large; however, out of the 20 people in the Schwartz, there are only two other bachelors students. I enjoy everyone I work with, though I think it will take some time to build relationships with them. It seems that in Denmark coworkers do not tend to socialize with one another outside of the work place. My research is going very well so far. While Dr. Hruby's lab focuses more on peptide/protein chemistry, the Schwartz lab specializes in molecular biology. It has been great because almost every technique I have learned is new to me. For now I am working with another bachelors student who is teaching me general techniques, and in the next week or so I will be working independently. I think it is neat that science is universal and even though I come from a different culture, we can meet each other half way in the lab. Maybe that sounds cheesy, but there is my profound, or perhaps not so profound, thought for the day.