Laboratory Life

Most of my day-to-day existence is based in a basement laboratory at Hebrew University. Given that this setting is what I see for most daylight hours on most days, and despite how dull you might think lab work is, I'm going to tell you all about it. I often walk to and from campus everyday, a trek that takes 30-35 minutes each way. This and non-work related walking is the only exercise I get. My arrival at the campus gate is greeted by security. Here I'm supposed to show a HU student card or Israel government issued ID card, but I just flash my Ontario driver's license, which with one exception gets me though to the metal detector and backpack checking folks. Once I pass this threshold, I walk across a big plaza which ends with the nice fountain you see in the bottom photo. A few hundred feets ahead is the building I work in. This is the Berman Building you see in the middle photo. It looks like the Bermans are/were from Montreal (read fine print). This is the location of the Department of Ecology, Systematics and Zoology. I then walk down a hall where professors have tacked their journal articles on walls beside their offices. One seems to be a big expert on honey bees. So I pass the bee guy, walk down a spiral staircase into the depths of the Berman Building where the National Zoololgical Collections of Hebrew University are housed. The top photo shows my desk and some the reference books I can use. The lab is actually much larger than this. In fact, it is massive. Perhaps when nobody's around, I'll take some more pictures and tell you all about the dinosaur fossils they have. As you can tell I need some more storylines to blog about.