Fords Down Under

Saturday was a really rainy day which prevented us from practicing the day before our final. Sunday came and the team met for breakfast at 8am. We played our semi-final game against Whitley which was a good team. We won a set, then relaxed our game and lost a set. Our coach chided us and we promptly won another two sets to put us in the final against no other than Ormond college. The Ormond team was definitely not the same one we played against in our first game: they were much stronger, better, and possibly taller. Their serves and spikes were very powerful and hard to return. We were intimidated before we even started playing. We lost the first set by ten points.

They had a lot of fans who were going crazy and who hung a huge banner from the grand stands which read “Get Wet, Go Hard, Go Ormond.” They also had a huge bee mascot. Our mascot was under renovations apparently and we did not have a banner but we did have many amazing fans who refused to sit in the grand stands in order to be closer to the players. They were on the sidelines, almost on the court it seemed. They kept up our moral and filled out ears with cheers. It was wonderful to look at them and just see smiles flashing back at us.

After the first set we regrouped and played three more sets. Every point was well played and was returned at least four times by each team. For one point we had the same six players (three from each team) touch the ball in the same order three times in row! It really felt like déjà vu. We ended up wining all three sets making us the volleyball champions! Our fans went crazy. It was great. They got to chant one last time what they chanted at the end of all our games this season “Three cheers for IH: Hip Hip Hurray! Hip Hip Hurray! Hip Hip Hurray!”

Thanks to Alex, you have had a taste of sports at Melbourne University. Like Alex, I am also on a sports team. I’m playing volleyball (not rugby because I like being in one piece too much). Unlike Alex, I’m on a college team that is comprised of all students, all of which do not necessarily go to the University of Melbourne but have to reside in a college. Let me explain.

The University of Melbourne has all the academic buildings and sports facilities. Housing, however, is slightly separated from the University itself because most students live at home with their parents and commute to Uni while others prefer to live in apartments nearby and the rest live in colleges. The University of Melbourne is affiliated with eleven undergraduate colleges. Each of these colleges are self-governed and provide students living there with housing, meals, educational support (tutorials are required for first years), events and activities, including sports. Students do not have to attend the University of Melbourne to live there. Colleges offer many sports such as Australian football (or footy), netball, soccer, basketball, volleyball, badminton and many others. The college’s sports teams compete against each other.

I am on the International House volleyball team. We played our two first games the week of the 5^th of May. Our games were unfortunately at 7am, meaning we had to get up at 5:45am. I, like many other players, could not believe we actually made it to the games. Each game was played out of three sets (best of three wins). We played against Ormond college and Newman college, both of which we beat. This allowed us to get to the quarter finals. All final matches (quarter, semi and real finals) are played out of five sets. We played Queens college for our quarter finals which we beat three sets to nothing in 40 minutes. Luckily this was the last game we would have to wake up at 5:45am to play. Our semi-final game will be held on Sunday the 18^th of May against Whitley college and provided we beat them, we will move on to the finals that afternoon. On Friday the 16^th we found out that the team we were most apprehensive to play was eliminated by no other than Ormond college (the first team we beat). Apparently Ormond college has stepped up its game and we think we will have to play them again in the finals, provided we both make it. These girls are pretty intimidating in that their shortest player is the size of our tallest player. I’ll keep you updated on the outcome of our games! Wish us luck! =)

Saturday was one of the greatest days I’ve spent in Melbourne. After a long night out celebrating two friends’ birthdays, I slept in. After a restful night, my friends and I went downtown to Melbourne Central where we were to meet a tour. But not any kind of tour: a chocoholic tour of Melbourne.

The chocolate tour was lead by a woman who reminded us of Mary Poppins because she was holding an open umbrella the whole time (it wasn’t raining) that had lots of chocolates on it and had a flower decorated bag from which she kept pulling out chocolates for us.

Her name was Isabel. Isabel would bring us from chocolate shop to chocolate shop, telling us about their history, the way they made their chocolate and most importantly she would bring out freshly made chocolates from the store. She must have gotten a liking to us because any left over she would give to us. Also the store owners and sometimes the chef themselves would tell us about what we were eating, in which order to eat it and how to eat it. This tour made me feel like I was touring Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. We ended the tour at a café where we were served freshly baked chocolate muffins and any drink of our choice. I usually have a great tolerance for chocolate intake but I’m pretty sure I had reached my limit.

We then went to the city museum for an exhibit on myths of Melbourne which was really weird. We also took a look at the exhibits on the history of Melbourne, at the gold vaults used during the Gold Rush and at the Governor’s attendant’s home and lifestyle. The hallways of the museum were also filled with political cartoons which were explained for people like us who know nothing about Australian politics. We learned so much! After that, we strolled through the Fitzroy Gardens where we saw twelve brides with their party. It was beautiful out and between the beautiful flora and the brides I felt like I was in the middle of a photo shoot.

We then went to the Docklands which is the area along the Yarra River lined with fancy restaurants, beautiful yachts and a modern art sculpture competition. After some time by the water, we went back inland on Lygon St which is always busy because it is packed with stores, restaurants and gelato shops. We ate dinner at a Lebanese restaurant. The food was delicious and they provided customers with entertainment. There was a belly dancer with long black hair in a blue outfit decorated with white beads that was going from table to table. We had been there for about twenty minutes when the belly dancer comes over to our table for the third time but this time she asked me to dance with her. I tried talking my way out of it but she would not take no for an answer. So I started belly dancing with her, following her instructions. People started clapping to the beat of the music while we were dancing. It was so much fun! The food was delicious and filling but we still had room for gelato as always. I got Baccio (hazelnut and chocolate) and Arabic coffee but there are innumerable flavors: nutella, passion fruit, lychee, tiramisu, honeycomb, nougat, anything you could think of they had. We then headed home where we spent the rest of the night hanging out and talking.

So one of my main reasons for coming to study in Australia was my love of the sports they play here. Back at Haverford I play both cricket and rugby, and I really wanted to experience living in country where those sports were understood and enjoyed. I’ve had the opportunity to visit a number of professional matches since I’ve been down here, including an AFL (aussie rules football) match, an NRL (rugby league) match, and a Super 14 (rugby union) match.

The rugby union (the code I play) game was in Wellington, NZ over spring (technically fall here) break; I’ll cover that trip in more detail soon. It was between the Crusaders and Hurricanes, which are both from New Zealand (although the league covers NZ, Aus, and South Africa), and it was an absolutely amazing experience for me, because the Crusaders are the team that I have been following for the past 3 years since I picked up rugby. We had 4th row seats, right behind the try zone, and to see all the players in person that I’ve been watching play online for so long was absolutely unforgettable.

I also have tickets to see the Australian national rugby union team, The Wallabies, play Ireland next month in an international tour match. That should also be phenomenal, especially since I’m going with a very diverse crowd of rugby players from all over the world who I met down here while playing for the Melbourne Uni team.

Before I arrived, I emailed the recruiting director of University of Melbourne’s rugby team, and made sure that I could play, and ever since my second day in the Southern Hemisphere, I’ve been playing some of the most competitive and educational rugby of my short career. The team is mindboggling; at Haverford we’re lucky to field the requisite 15 for any given match, last weekend, we had an A side, a B side, two C sides, and an under 21 side (which I’m playing for), with a total of nearly 100 players getting game time. That’s not to say that they are all students, the club is associated with the University, but being a student is not required, and most people on the team have nothing to do with the school, just live nearby. In fact, I was surprised to find out that college sports down here are seriously de-emphasized, especially when you consider that the school has 40,000 or so students.

Nonetheless, playing for the squad has been a great learning experinece. Not only is the standard of play much higher than in the states (because people have been playing the game since they could walk, rather than picking it up in college), but the teams resources are incredible. The coaching staff is as big as a D1 football team would have, and it includes several ex-international players, including 1 guy who was an integral part of Australia’s World Cup finals team in 2003. I’ve actually been getting regular playing time, starting 4 matches, and only coming off the bench for 1 so far, and although the players are better and the game is more ingrained in their subconscience, they are really not THAT much different than players in the US at the college level.

I’m looking forward to the next 7 weeks of the season, as long as my body holds up (I have a soft tissue injury in my knee, a bruised AC joint, more bruises than I can count, and a pretty serious bump on my nose), and I’m especially excited to bring what I’ve learned back to the Haverford team next season.

So this post is rather delayed, but Andrew has been threatening me with a very painful death if I don’t post soon, so I figured I may as well start from the beginning.

One of the great things about studying abroad in Australia, is that because of its southern hemisphere location, their seasons are swapped around. This has a couple of great effects. Firstly, I get to skip spring, for which my allergies are eternally grateful. And secondly, winter break was nearly two months long.

While I could have sat around at home and and watched TV for 8 weeks (which I would have loved), or gotten a job to earn money to spend down here (which in retrospect would have been nice), I (as Theo and Andrew and several other students did) chose to travel. However, instead of coming to Australia and exploring the vast landscape that was to be my home for the coming semester, I instead traveled around Europe.

I spent a total of about 3 weeks in France, Spain, Italy, and Holland with two of my best friends, one from high school, and one from college. The logistics were made easier by the fact that my parents had recently moved to London, so I had a base of operations in the right part of the globe.

We started off in Paris for New Years Eve, and we met up with another couple of friends who were traveling around for what was an amazing start to the new year. We spent the whole day on the 1st visiting various places around the city, only to find that unfortunately, many of them were closed for New Years Day, but we enjoyed ourselves and sampled Parisian culture nonetheless. We then took a train to Madrid, by way of a few hours in San Sebastian, a Basque town on the north coast (where there was actually a bombing a few days ago, luckily no one was hurt). We had two whirlwind days in Madrid, during which we saw Guernica, visited the Palacio Real and the Plaza del Sol, and ate dinner at the thoroughly Spanish time of 12:30 am, and then we took another train down to Seville. More palaces, more plazas, more Spanish culture, and some very strange things (like a giant rocket ship, a monorail, and a Christmas parade on January 4th) all added up to make the city one of my favorites in Spain. We then flew to Barcelona where we spent 6 reasonably lazy days hiking around the city, touring unfinished churches, and reuniting with more friends who are studying abroad there. On January 12th we returned to London, and my companions returned to classes.

But I wasn’t done traveling yet. I discovered that European airfares are insanely cheap, and when I found a return trip to Venice for £14 a weekend trp was absolutely required. The city was incredible, unlike anywhere else I’ve been, the way the canals criss-crossed the little alleyways was awesome, and all the squares and churches were a treat to find. The buildings were almost as beautiful as my travel companion, and all the people were incredibly… well, Italian. We visited a couple of other islands in the area, and took a bus-boat from place to place. The weekend was amazing overall.

The following week, another friend studying in Europe came to visit my in London, and we spent a few days really exploring London and a few other sites around England (including Bath and Stonehenge). On the weekend, along with a pair of Haverfordians studying in England, we took a trip to Amsterdam. The canals couldn’t really compare to Venice, but some of the cultural aspects of the city were very interesting to observe. I have to say the food was also rather good (pancakes and French fries… what’s not to like?).

Unfortunatley, my aimless travels couldn’t continue forever, and on February 18th, I turned my world upside down and flew to Australia.

I promise to make the time between this and my next post shorter than last time, and also to figure out how to upload pictures before then.

Talk to you soon!

Alex

A few weeks ago I posted about research I am doing while abroad at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research (left). This research aims to understand how dendritic cells, an immune system cell type principally responsible for presenting antigen to other cell types, influence the induction of regulatory T cells in mice. Our first experiment took about three weeks to complete and lead to some intriguing results while also revealing some difficulties with our experimental design. These difficulties must be eliminated before we can be sure our results are real. Each experiment consists of about one hundred different cell cultures that must be analyzed, and since this was the first time this particular experiment has been carried out, it is not surprising that our results were somewhat ambiguous.

So, as is not altogether uncommon in science, we are repeating the experiment. But this time we are using a strain of mice with a different immunological background, something that can affect the way these mice’s cells grow in culture and interact with the antibodies we use to distinguish them. Therefore we are hoping this new experiment will either validate or disprove the results of our previous experiment.

These cell cultures are set up with the help of fluorescence-activated cell sorting flow cytometry. FACS machines, somewhat more sophisticated than their homophonic counterparts, work by detecting fluorescent markers on the surface of cells and then applying different charges to each of these cells according to which markers are attached to them. These cells then travel one by one through an electrostatic deflection system that diverts differently marked cells into different collection tubes, physically separating them from what was a heterogeneous mixture. Some of these FACS machines are capable of sorting thousands of cells per second with very little error, applying different charges to each cell for time intervals that are hard to imagine. Without these machines experiments like the ones we have been doing would be many times more tedious and perhaps impossible.

Over Easter Break in March I went on a ten-day camping trip across Western Australia with the Melbourne University Outdoors Program. There were 23 international students on this trip from all over the world, yet strangely enough I found myself one of five students on the trip from Haverford. Before leaving Haverford those of us coming to Australia figured we would rarely bump into each other by chance in a city of millions at a school many times the area of Haverford with tens of thousands of students. We were wrong - instead I have seen someone from Haverford by chance almost every day. But sitting in a desert in the middle of Western Australia - about as far from Haverford as one can get and remain on Earth - surrounded by people from Haverford definitely pushed our coincidental encounters with each other into the range of comical.

It was an early start the Thursday before Easter Break at 3.30 in the morning for a 6 o’clock flight to Perth and our meeting location. Once we were assembled we began with marathon bus driving. Western Australia is big, so to get to the really interesting places you have to drive. A lot. So that is what we did our first day for about 10 hours, but not without stopping to play in big sand dunes, which were welcome activity:

These are big - note the person way up there pondering whether or not they want to roll down (we did).

On the second day we visited a field of stromatolites that stretched as far as one could see. It was dry and oppressively hot with no clouds in the sky, and as each of us walked in our own direction I started to feel like I was on a different planet surrounded by these testaments to ancient microorganisms that lived here hundreds of millions of years ago:

These structures have taken a long beating from the wind and feel exactly like rough sandpaper. They rise up in stark defiance of the sand around them that is just a few shades courser than flour.

The third and fourth days we spent in the aptly named Coral Bay, a small town 1200km north of Perth home to coral reefs, beautiful beaches and a feeling of blissful isolation from the rest of the world. We snorkeled, swam and sat on the beach during the day and barbecued at night. Some of us kayaked out away from shore to explore the bigger reefs while others went diving with whale sharks. Coming to Melbourne, flying to Perth, driving to Coral Bay, walking to the beach, kayaking out to the reef, snorkeling out of sight from our kayaks and then diving beneath the water happened for me like a series of removes from the common experience of everyday life, culminating in the home of these creatures, courtesy of our guide who brought along an underwater camera:

These reef sharks are harmless, but they don’t look that way.

Dasyatis kuhlii.

We saw three or four sea turtles, also.

Anyone know what this is? Not I, but it is pretty magnificent inside.

After leaving Coral Bay we continued north to Exmouth, where we visited Mandu Mandu Gorge and Turquoise Bay, the latter being a beautiful series of reefs where we snorkeled from a beach littered in coral:

Across the globe, more than fifty-percent of their living counterparts will likely be dead by 2030 due to climate change.

After this we made our way inland to Karijini National Park where we spent the remainder of our trip exploring gorges shown in the pictures below, often hiking for about an hour or so to reach them, which made the fresh (and cold) water swimming even more enjoyable:

For scale, a person standing near the bottom of this waterfall would barely reach the second layer of rock.

A cyclone in the Indian Ocean meant it rained most nights while we were camping (sometimes catching us tentless and unprepared) but this was more than welcome since it kept the air cool and the dust on the ground. Inland Western Australia is blanketed in fine red dust that stains any clothes it gets on. If you are walking around Perth and see a brand new yet strangely red van know it is the affectionately named Big Red:

Just kidding, we think it mostly came off. The most uncapturable aspect of our trip were the stars we were finally treated to bushcamping on the side of the road on the last day of our trip after the rain cleared. We sat around a campfire and soaked them up before returning to Perth and finally Melbourne.

 On the week-end of my first school week I went for a day trip to Philip Island. The trip was organized by the university’s outdoor program. We were 23 students many of which lived at International House. We left early morning on Saturday and went to a sandy beach and hikes up a cliff near it to see the view. We then drove to a koala preserve. There was a boardwalk built in the trees so that we could walk around at the same level as the koalas sleeping in the trees. We got to see many of them really up close. They sleep up to 20 hours a day because their Eucalyptus leaf diet is low in nutrients and so they have very little energy. Also Eucalyptus leaves have toxins in them that very few animals can ingest but koalas have special enzymes to break the toxins down so that they do not harm koalas. Koalas have very long sharp claws that help them climb trees and even though they seem very cute and cuddly they are known to not be so friendly. We then went to a wildlife preserve where we got to feed and pet kangaroos, wallabies, wombat, swans, emus, cassowaries and many other animals. It was a huge enclosed area where the animals could just roam free and you could go right up to them, feed them and pet them. Some of the less friendly animals such as dingoes were enclosed and could not be petted . A lot of female kangaroos had joeys in their pouch which were adorable. They would pop their heads out of the pouch to see what was going on. A couple of the older joeys would be roaming around and come back to drink milk from their mother. There were also not so cute and really imposing emus that would peck at your hands even if you didn’t have any food to offer them. They would also chase you around. I did not like them very much. We also saw cassowaries which are prehistoric looking animals that have the same general shape of emus but with blue and red neck and head (you should look them up). After the preserve, we waited for sunset by the beach and once it got dark enough we saw the penguin parade. It is when fairy penguins get out of the sea and waddle onto the dunes for the night. They were very cute and small. It was the end of mating season so they were about to stay 2-3 weeks on land to grow a waterproof coat. Because they would not be able to feed during that period, they had to build fat storage and eat a lot, so most of the penguins were too full and kept stumbling and falling over or taking breaks while walking across the beach.

The next day we decided that after petting and feeding kangaroos we should know what they tasted like and so most of the Haverford people got together to have a big barbecue! It was nice seeing Haverford people after so long. I then went with others to see “Donnie Darko” in the last screening of the open air movie theater located in the botanical gardens.

The following week-end I went on the Great Ocean Road for the whole week-end. This trip was also organized by the Outdoors Program. But that’ll be for another blog entry! =)

In Melbourne I live in what Australians call a ‘college’ which is similar to a dormitory except that you eat there and you have your own sports teams and events. My college is International House. The University of Melbourne has twelve. During my first week there I was considered a ‘fresher’, meaning that it was my first year in that college and so I had to participate in the orientation week which is called ‘O-week’ here. It allowed freshers to get to know each other. We had some very fun events planned for us. O-Week started with a game of human fussball where we were all attached together in a huge moonbounce. It was very fun. We also ran around the city with our faces painted, yelling chants which we had been forced to learn earlier all 150 of us crammed into a 20’x16’ room! They called it room cram. It was pretty disgusting because it was so hot. We also did pub crawls, nightclub crawls, had a toga party, went to the beach, had a champagne breakfast (oddly enough our dining center has a liquor license and is allowed to serve people over 18 alcohol). We also made a deal with a dim sum restaurant to get an all you can eat dim sum meal for $10 because our group was so big. It was delicious! We had a cocktail parties, we had a bush dance where we had a band and dance instructors teach us dances from the Australian Bush areas. The university was also hosting O-week events which included the student fair which had a lot of ‘freebies’ and bungee trampoline rides. I did not attend many of their events because I was doing the ones planned by International House.

After that first week of fun and play school started. It felt very weird to go back to a fixed schedule, classes and homework after a winter break of about two and a half months. It was weird being offered so many classes. After a week of shopping classes I finally decided to take Australian Wildlife Biology which is a zoology class that studies Australian animals. It is so interesting because I learn about animals I never knew even excited and it makes me pay attention to wildlife everywhere I travel. I love every minute of that class because the Australian animals we learn about are all fascinating. I am also taking two biology classes to fulfill my Haverford biology major requirement. I am taking ‘immunology’ and ‘gene technology and protein expression’. I am also taking a management class called ‘organizational behavior’ which is very new for me but which I find interesting. I am also working in a laboratory at the Bio21 institute which is related to the university. The lab I work in studies prion diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease and ‘mad cow disease’.

Before coming over to Australia I worked in a translational research lab at the University of Pennsylvania that specializes in tumor antigen discovery and the development of novel vaccine strategies to fight cancer. This work got me interested in basic immunology inasmuch as I came to realize that cancer immunotherapeutics, something I found enthrallingly interesting, can only be as successful as our fundamental knowledge about the human immune system is extensive. The development of preventative and therapeutic cancer vaccines has thus far been largely a lesson in scientific perseverance, but holds enormous promise for the future. After all, one needs to look no further than a shortlist of the greatest achievements in modern medicine to see the power of vaccination in combating illness.

I took a quarter-long immunology class at Haverford last semester during which I was surprised by how superficial our knowledge of the immune system really is. Experimental immunology arguably began in 1890 when Emil von Behring and Shibasaburo Kitasato demonstrated the existence and function of antibodies, leading to scientists’ first conceptualization of the immune response. Yet more than a century later, for instance, the mere existence of cell types now understood to be integral to immune responses was being heatedly debated. The full significance of these cells that ‘turn off’ immune responses, known as regulatory T cells, is still unclear. Understanding how immune responses are prevented and suppressed is as important as understanding how they are initiated and perpetuated, especially within the context of autoimmune diseases such as type I diabetes and, of particular interest for me, cancer vaccine design.

At WEHI we’re trying to understand how regulatory T cells are induced by dendritic cells, another immune system cell type, in order to piece together how immunosuppression is initiated and sustained. This understanding is a small part of the body of knowledge that will ultimately be translated into novel treatment of disease. Over the next few weeks I’ll be posting about how this research is going.