It's been a long time since I last posted...

Okay, so I’ve been very, very lazy with blogging... and my crazy hours plus inefficiency doing experiments doesn’t seem to help much. – which I will write about later. First thing first...
Last Wednesday the lab had a feast, because one of our researchers, 4 weeks before her due date, was going on maternity leave – which I kept on making the mistake of calling it a “holiday”, and getting funny looks from her. So we decided we should have a session to feed her and the baby.
So one PhD booked the Teaching Lab room, where we had almost all the Sem 5 pracs, for lunch, and everyone in our lab brought something along. Plates and trays and plastic containers piled with different foods lined up desk/bench in the room, where Sandra used to neatly line up the microscopes and petri dishes. Hmm enticing...
Nonetheless, food was abundant, and mostly interesting and tasting very nice, with a gross oversupply of desserts.
The most interesting dish was probably the some dish called Saaq....something, made by the Iranian PhD. It was long, thin-grained rice (not a familiar species to me since I’m used to the short, oval-grained northern Chinese grown rice) with a spinach/onion puree. The rice is slightly harder and drier than the ones I usually have, and with a different aroma, and the puree was slightly sour tasting.
Then there were Indian , which were brown, pyramid shaped pastry with hard shells and a spicy curry pea and potato filling. Slightly too spicy for my liking. Another PhD student from India bought the Indian version of the spring roll, with exactly the same type of pastry, but curry fillings, and unfortunately I forgot to ask her the name of the dish.
And of course, there were the party pies and sausage rolls brought by the organising PhD student, that everyone seemed to have ignored in the face of all the other delicacies... then there were savoury Chinese pancakes with carrot and radish fillings made by the other Chinese in the lab, who was a senior researcher, and the soup-filled buns that I bought and steamed.
Onto the desserts. Regrettably there were too many varieties... Home-made muffins, yo-yos, coconut biscuits and a DELICIOUS lemon tart (made by our Dutch-born, part-time vet, king-of-structural-immunology; the cooking prowess of this 50yo+ man puts me to shame... but then again, everyone’s cooking would put me to shame) were amongst the favourites. But people also bought chocolate-coated teddy bears biscuits and a custard-filled-chocolate-coated pastry thing (please excuse Hong’s shocking Western culinary vocab), and a very curious “cookie” that resembles a walnut, with hard cookie ball-shaped shell and soft caramel core.
Most bizarre of all was that someone even brought their homegrown lemons, which were tiny and tasted like a crossbreed between lemons and oranges. Despite their looks, they actually proved to be excellent after-meal fruits, especially when everyone was bursting with food. So much for feeding Luda.
A few random amusements took place during the lunch. Not only were people from other labs peering into the room and giving us sad looks when being informed that it was a McCluskey Lab only lunch, but in fact people in the tea room started nibbling our goods while they were heated up in the stove or in transit from the tearoom fridge to the Lab across. Then there was a professor of medicine from WA visiting Jim, our lab head who's originally from WA. So yet another stranger came to enjoy our free feast, and got his clinical judgement quizzed over Luda's "condition" which will prevent her from working. Interestingly, Jim is a double specialist in Pathology and Rheumatology (plus subspecialty in clinical immunology, of course), but he used to work as a Royal Flying Doctor in WA ages ago... Makes me wonder how old this guy really is...