So I'm in Princeton now. The flight here was miraculously without incident apart from a slight delay, and I even managed to get some sleep on the flight. These past couple of days, I have mostly been sitting through the international students' orientation where they talk us through the red tape and bureaucracy that we have to wade through, followed by actually carrying out these out. All this was necessary, but hardly inspiring.

My room is slightly small and I have to share one shower cubicle with 7 other people on my floor, which made me suspect that whoever designed the place figured that grad students don't shower. However, I do have the room to myself, and I have also been busy trying to get my hands on the things needed to make the place habitable.

Apart from that, I've been meeting a lot of the other graduate students, most of them international students since we all arrived early, but the American students are beginning to arrive as well. So far it's difficult to see with whom I will have lasting friendships and whom will become 'hi, bye' acquaintances, but only time will tell.

In the meantime, the graduate students in my department appear to have a work ethic that is intimidating (several of them were seen sporting T-shirts saying 'Sleep is for the weak'), but they do seem to be enjoying what they do immensely.

In the mean time, I still have a lot of personal stuff to sort out, but within a week I'll be working my socks off as well.

Many apologies for the long hiatus since my last update. My parents, my brother and I flew out here to London over 2 weeks ago, and since then we've been out to Paris and Switzerland, and I've only had intermittent and brief internet access. We returned to London last Tuesday, and my graduation was last Friday. The run-up to the graduation involved some measure of anxiety when we went to Netherhall to collect the tickets to the ceremony which were supposed to have been posted there. Despite rummaging through all the pigeonholes and old uncollected mail, it was nowhere to be seen. Fortunately, it transpired that there was no problem getting replacement tickets as I had my confirmation letter ready. My ceremony was in the afternoon, so in the morning I showed my family around the university, and when we were in the physics department we bumped into Dr. Furniss, the astronomy tutor. When he saw me he asked, 'Have you heard the good news?', and when I gave him a blank look he told me that I had won the Granville Prize for the top student in physics or astronomy in the entire University of London. It seems that there were only two candidates this year, I and the top student from Imperial College. Both of us had good academic results, but I won it based on my project work. When we got to the venue of the ceremony at Logan Hall near Russell Square, I left my family to get my robes. The outfit involved a robe, hood (which sat on the upper back) and mortarboard, and as I wore these over my suit, it wasn't long before I (and the other graduates) started sweltering in what was a warm summer day. The ceremony started off with a particularly cringe-inducing video extolling the virtues of UCL, narrated by someone with a voice like a breathless paedophile. The provost of the university himself couldn't be arsed to turn up for our ceremony so we had to settle for a vice-provost, although we were honoured with a pre-recorded speeck by the provost. After the obligatory speeches, we the graduates were herded up one by one for a handshake with the vice-provost. Yes, no scroll, no documents, just one stinking handshake to sign off 3 or 4 years of hard work. I got slightly more time on-stage on account of being in the dean's list and having won the Granville Prize, yet it was all of 10 seconds at most. Maybe for me, the undergraduate years are just a small phase in my academic life, and I was always in it for the learning and not the piece of paper at the end, but the entire process felt massively underwhelming. In any case, my family left flown back home a couple of days back, so at the moment I'm hanging around London getting my things sorted out and saying my farewells before I fly off to Princeton on Wednesday morning. I'll be talking more about my trip and Europe and putting up my pics, and of course I'll keep everyone updated on things when I get to Princeton.