Since my last entry a lot of stuff has been happening and I've been doing so much stuff my heads going to explode (In a good way - that sounds weird but you get what I mean).
The house I'm staying in is awesome and everyone here is down to earth and I already have made friends with a really nice group of people so thats a good start. We went to a Stanford basketball game on saturday! It was ridiculous, yet highly entertaining. It was everything I expected of an American college sport event. Eccentric crazy people dancing and screaming all over the place, huge foam gloves waving in the air and the college marching band going crazy with every time-out. The game was between Stanford university and Utah state university and I have to admit I did get quite into it towards the end. I was temporarily Americanised and started wooping and shouting "Go Stanford!" along with the rest of the crowd, the atmosphere at these sporting events is really mental and I look forward to attending an American football game in April!
Lately I've been kept busy with a variety of tasks. My supervisor wanted to give me a variety of things to do so that if I got stuck on something I could shift to the other project.
The tasks I was assigned included...
. To visit Yosemite national park in the Sierra Nevada mountains.
. To visit Santa Cruz geophysical department.
. Attend lectures and seminars on geographical and geological related topics at Stanford and Berkeley Universities.
. Create a powerpoint presentation on the geology, geography, people and political situation of the
Red Sea region.
. Create a presentation on the San francisco bay area and its natural hazards background and how the inhabitants of the Bay area deal with the risks.
. Visit San Jose and go to the tech innovation museum.
. Evaluating the performance of Seismometers in Saudi Arabia as a part of the USGS's newly established Saudi Arabian seismic programme.
. To carry out a risk assessment of the Eureka earthquake that occured yesterday by travelling up to Eureka and observing the damage of the earthquake (6.9).
. A GIS (Geographical information systems) tutorial (which I'm trying to prioritise as it would be amazing on my CV).
So yes at the minute I am particularly busy. Enjoying it though, despite a bit of homesickness haha.
I may be going to Eureka in a day or two, depends on the damage report, if there's barely any damage to the city they may not want me to go up, so it's all in the air at the minute.
I'm planning on going to Yosemite with a couple of friends, and will hopefully camp instead of staying in a motel! There are buses that run from San Francisco so that should make getting there easy. I'll be taking the nikon camera the USGS have supplied me with.
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