what was going on over the past few days

the weekend once again was lovely with the weather, and everything else as well. Friday I went over to Neil's after dinner and we enjoyed the nice weather and when it got to cold we watched an episode of Green Wing. It is so funny, the best way to describe it would be to say that it is a British version of Scrubs, but the humour is very different, very british I guess. But we were laughing so much... I also spent most of Saturday with Neil, with a short time at home in between to drop off my things, as we were going to meet with some friends at Georges in the evening before Neil was off to play poker with the Exeter Poker Club people. Yesterday I didn't do very much, went into town briefly in the morning to avoid the crowds and then mainly tried to stay cool for the rest of the afternoon.

Today we had the PG conference which was organised by two of the other PhD students in the department. As much as I hated the idea of being bullied into presenting my work, it was quite a good day. Mainly I liked hearing about other people's research interests and projects, because even though we are in the psychology department we don't really mix and mingle with people outside of our research groups. So I guess this was a success, and I got to practise my talk for Edinburgh (but Jonathan emailed me some suggestions for changes... so more work needs to be done). It was nice too, Brian came up to me during lunch and said that someone approached him and said that his PhD student (i.e. me!!!) did very well presenting. I really don't understand it, everyone said I seemed very relaxed and confident, but I felt the complete opposite. I was totally nervous, and had to remind myself to breathe properly all the way through... but I guess it is a good thing that I don't portray it outward. Hopefully that will also be true for the "real" conference in a couple of weeks...

It was a long day though of sitting and listening to talks, which is quite hard in the stuffy weather... so as a fun thing for the evening we went to the new WAGAMAMA restaurant in town. It is so nice to have one here now. The two things I had been missing from London were Starbucks and Wagamama, and now we have both of them here in Exeter as well. I really enjoy the the food there, they say it is a japanese noodle bar, but they serve rice dishes as well. I had something called Chicken Katsu Curry... VERY YUMMY!