I shall dedicate this post to my colleagues, the fellow summer program interns at the Space Telescope Science Institute for 2004. Until now, they have been part of the background of my blog, so to make up for this, I shall devote an entire post to just describing them!

The first group of interns I met were Scott, Marie, Tom and Bonnie, the first Sunday after I arrived.

Scott is an American from Massachusetts, but he studies in Vassar College in the state of New York. He's TALL, and he towers above all of us. He usually wears a blank expression on his bespectacled face, but will suddenly break into quips now and then. As he was in the summer program here last year as well, he's the guy everyone turns to when there's a questions to be asked, whether it's about the finer points of working in the Institute, or about places to visit in Baltimore. I found him rather alarming at work, because from day one he was sitting down at his computer and hammering away at it (he's continuing his project from last year, that's why). He's the resident computer whiz, and if whenever I'm stuck at something, he's the one I turn to.

Bonnie is a typical American girl, with a taste for Long Island Ice Tea. She's just finished her astronomy degree at Case Western Reserve Uni at Cleveland, Ohio, but she's from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Unlike most of us she isn't based at the S215 office, instead being domiciled at the 4th floor at a vacant office to herself! Still, she makes it a point to hang out with us as much as possible.

Marie, or Lu Xiwei, shall we say? She was born in Beijing, but her family moved over to the States when she was 5 (she says she was actually at Tiananmen Sq. during the demos in 1989, but she left before the tanks started rolling in), and her parents are currently in Houston, Texas, but she's studying political science and biology double major at University of Southern California. What the heck is she doing in the Space Telescope Science Institute then? She's actually working in the Office of Public Outreach rather than in the Science Division like the rest of us, so she actually spends a lot of her time photoshopping Hubble images rather than hard astronomy or astrophysics. She's the shortest of us, and she has this wonderful smile, filled with her braces! She's Esteban's favorite target for teasing...

Tom is probably the funniest among us all, or to be precise he's the one we seem to laugh at the most, because he's just so wound up. As I mentioned before, he looks and behaves almost exactly like Niles from Frasier. He walks around with a huge SLR digital camera when we go out, so I have the habit of letting him take the pictures and then stealing them off him. He studies at St. Andrew's University in Scotland, but he lives in France. His mother is British though, so he actually speaks with more of a British accent with a tinge of French.

I think this would take a long time, so I'd leave the rest of the interns to some other post. As for the past week, it's been a BIT easier to get things done because I've started the habit of writing myself notes on the scientific papers I read, and somehow this helps me focus much better. During lunchtime, it can take me more than an hour, because I tend to be one of the first to get to lunch, and as the other guys start to file in, I feel it's not polite to leave the table, so I tend to sit there chatting for ages!

Today, we went to Inner Harbour for the benefit of a few of our newly-arrived colleagues, Raquel, Miguel and Gara. There are some sailing ships from other countries docked at Inner Harbour, which will be taking part in the Independence Day celebrations at Washington DC tommorow. One of the first ships we saw had a Brazillian flag, and Raquel dragged us all on board, as it was open to the public. Raquel is an ethnic Japanese girl(her surname is Shida), and she looks exactly like a Japanese, but she's Brazillian, and can hardly speak any Japanese. We went around the sailing ship (called 'Cisne Branco', or 'White Swan'), and we hung out there for quite a while. After that, rationalising that if you've seen one sailing ship you've seen 'em all (other sailing ships in the harbour flew Romanian, Mexican, Portuguese flags), we decided to adjourn to a restaurant so that the Spaniards and Colombians can have their lunch (it was about 4pm by then, but these guys have their meals about 3 hours later compared with most other people). I was challenged to eat a double fudge chocolate cake with vanilla ice cream by myself (naturally, my colleagues have long ago caught on to the size of my appetite), but I shared with Tom instead. I didn't really enjoy it...I don't seem to perform well when it comes to desserts.

After lunch, we went to Federal Hill again for the benefit of the newcomers, and when Bess saw the swings at the playground, she went ape and ran straight for them. However, she quickly realised that the swings were rather high up (too high for her legs to get her moving), and she was just hanging there until a couple of young kids came along and showed her how to get swinging. Soon enough, she was swinging merrily, but more drama came when she had to get off...we were goading her to jump off, and it was a while before she managed to get off. However, she managed to retain her dignity unlike Rafael, who went on it after her, and when he jumped off he ended up face down in the grass (Scott: 'I give you 10 marks for the jump and zero marks for the landing!').

We chilled out at Federal Hill, enjoying the view and watching the world go by. Miguel, one of my Spanish flatmates, was taking the chance to call his girlfriend on his mobile phone...while roaming! The fellow has already impressed me with his ability to talk nonstop on the phone with his girlfriend, and this time he was just sitting there in the grass chatting away for half an hour.

When we decided to leave, it was about 6.30pm. Some of the guys wanted to carry on sightseeing, but me and the others went home to recuperate for tommorow's trip to Washington DC to see the 4th of July festivities....

The latest pictures are here, just to whet your appetite before my big trip to the capital!