Friday, January 20, 2017

A few things I didn't expect...

I have less time that I expected.  I cannot entirely figure out where my time is going right now!  Some of it is probably the commute - while not long, I am used to a 5 minute commute.  There are likely many small things (making hot water for tea) that are taking a bit more time since they are not (yet) integrated into my routine and are slightly more difficult than what I am used to.  I am also getting a reasonable amount of sleep, which removes about 2 hours from my useful hours.  Then there is the food shopping, which I am doing much more frequently (every day or two), compared to once a month in Atlanta.

It also doesn't help that I hadn't "worked" for the past month, so my brain is comparing "day spent working" to "winter break", rather than "teaching during the semester".  My current schedule is way more relaxed than during semesters, but I had overestimated my free time when I was here.  For instance,  I have no idea how I could schedule Tibetan lessons, as I had hoped to - if I am traveling on the weekends.

Everyone in my office is female (almost).  I sit in a room with other medical physicists - many of them split their time between clinical work and research, so the people there really varies.  The first day there was one guy in the office, but he wasn't there yesterday or today.  Everyone else is female.  There are some other offices in the Health Physics section, and they are mostly male.  Yet this isn't a case of me being "put with the women" - this is where the simulation computer is!  Eventually I will figure out what role, position, and specialty everyone has, and maybe there are gendered patterns.  But at least I am meeting a bunch of (scientific!) women who are about my age.  Today the group at lunch was 8 of us.

I may be a tad overdressed for my workplace.  I am carefully watching how people dress here.  My neighborhood is more immigrant/working class than designer, but I see a mix of people on the Metro and at OSR.  Some people are certainly dressed well, either in a "fashionable" or classy sense.  The gentleman at the cell phone store was wearing a jacket, sweater,  button down shirt, and tie.  At OSR, many people are in scrubs.  There are many young (20ish) people in sneakers and jeans - I assume they are students.  The women I share an office with are at a level or two above jeans - put together, but they wouldn't stand out at an American mall, for instance.

I am walking less.  It is hard to get to 10k steps in a day!  At Agnes, much of my job involved walking short distances repeatedly.  I had to walk across the building for the printer, I paced during lecture, I walked to meetings in other buildings.  Now, I stay at a desk at OSR and everything is right there.  My walk to the metro station is fairly short, and there metro network is very good in the city - I'm never that far from a station.  Since it is so cold, I am not motivated to walk when I could take transit.  It is possible to walk between the Metro stop and the hospital, rather than taking the light rail, which I might start doing.    

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