A belated start

Welcome to my first attempt at blogging as I cover for all my trials and tribulations as I travel and toil in Hong Kong and beyond (pardon the alliteration). Although several entries will be input immediately, a few of them are days old by now. I will do my best to stay up to date on adding information, but I will promise nothing. Last summer, I attempted to keep a paper journal, which covers, I believe, the first 3 days of my trip. But maybe any regular readers, should I develop them, can yell at me through other means.

As a brief background for all interested; I am in Hong Kong not because I know the language or am familiar with the culture. Rather, I am here working on a SURF (Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship for non-Techers) project relating to Microfluidics and Electrorheological fluids. I could have SURFed at Caltech, but I decided I wanted to study abroad again, perhaps learn some of the language (as hard as I expected so far) and work on a fascinating combination of techniques that, to my knowledge, nobody else in the world, outside this lab, is using.

I am stationed at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in Clearwater Bay, Kowloon, an institution famous for, you guessed it, its and MBA program. Nevertheless, it also has stupendous nano-materials and smart-materials laboratories, and I am working in the latter, under Dr. Weijia Wen. You can check out his website by googling it and then choosing the first non-ad that comes up (I had to double check that to be sure). As I take them and upload them to my computer, I will post images of life here on campus. For now you (more likely the future me who will want this journal when I have no neurons remaining for simple memory) should be happy I'm writing at all.

For all you who are at least trilingual, I apologize for the over abundance of puns in the title. If you catch them all, you get ten bonus points.