A Bit of Tourism - Cheltenham, Sep. 4

Apparently my time zone adjustment isn't going as well as I'd hoped. I slept great the first night, went to bed around 10pm and woke up around 10am. However last night I couldn't fall asleep until about 7:30am, maybe I slept too much the first night. Regardless, I only got about 2 hours of actual sleep, but I'm forcing myself to be up during normal hours to hopefully get acclimated more quickly.

We did try visiting the Cheese Rolling Hill yesterday, but it's not very easy to get to. We got close, and instead decided to visit the Gloucester Cathedral. I personally don't much care for historic tourist attractions, but I at least took one photo to put up here. I didn't take any other photos, since there are better ones online anyways.

Once we got back, we had dinner, then browsed through some old photos of my older relatives (we got up to great-great-grandparents, these photos go back a long ways). Nothing else major happened, was a bit of a slow day for people to get acclimated.

This morning we took our Day 2 COVID tests. The tests I've done before are either saliva samples or nose swabs, however this one was a combined throat and nasal swab. So we first had to gag on a stick, then shove it up our noses and sneeze. Fun time! It's a bit weird shoving saliva into your nose, but it's probably better than shoving boogers into your mouth.

Since this post is a bit short so far, I can give some more insight into what I'll be doing in the next countries. As I said in the first post, I'm wanting to move to Europe, so this trip is to give me a sense of what it's like to live in these places. However I'm only going to be staying in each place for a few days, which really isn't enough time to fully learn what that place is like. So I'm going to instead focus on looking at universities in which to do a PhD.

I've been open to the possibility of doing a PhD, but never had any project in mind until now. For the last couple years, I've been a research assistant for a project involving shooting lasers at asteroids (dramatically oversimplified), which would actually be a great PhD project. I've quite enjoyed doing it (when it works...), so I think it would work well for me.

Doing a PhD in Europe for a few years would allow me to get a much better sense of what it's like to live here, since I'd be able to easily visit places I'm interested in during breaks. I've also heard that PhDs in Europe are shorter since there's no classes to take, unlike in the US. And since I've already been working on this project for a while, I might be able to finish in even less time than normal.

So that's the plan! I've got a list of universities to look at while I'm here, though I still need to get my exact route planned. I was intending to take the Eurostar from England to the Netherlands, however current travel restrictions require me to quarantine while I'm there, which defeats the purpose of me going. So I'll instead first go to the north half of Germany for a couple weeks, then to the Netherlands, then to the south half of Germany, then Switzerland. I'm intending to mostly take trains between places, but there are several options for getting to mainland Europe.

As the travel restrictions stand right now, I wouldn't have to quarantine at any point if I follow that route. I'm also trying to go from north to south so the weather doesn't get really cold. Plus I've heard that Switzerland in the fall looks really nice with all the trees changing colors, so that'll be something to look forward to. I would like to just book all my travel now and commit to something, but with how quickly travel restrictions change, I think it's better to stay flexible.