Week 2 is now over, and in this short time, I have become quite familiar with the campus. My current ride is a sturdy Trek Mountain bike, which allows me to get from my apartment to lab, without ever breaking a sweat!
Before I get into the adventuring, I will explain how working in the lab is. My supervisor is a really cool and nice Colombian girl who is doing her PhD in the Red Sea Research Center. She works on a group of Bacteria named SAR11, which make up 50% of the ocean's bacteria, are really tiny, and don't enjoy living in the laboratory. Goal is to make these bacteria feel comfortable in a glass beacon, so that they can be studied. My main project is setting up this complicated device called a bioreactor, which would allow transcriptomic studies using continuous culturing. Let's see how that goes.
On a sampling excursion into the Red Sea to obtain water samples (including SAR11) at a 20 meter depth. During this trip, 3 of 6 scientists got seasick. Thankfully, I was spared.
All in all, the lab group I am working in is made up of Chinese, Indonesians, Japanese, Mexicans, Colombians, Kenyans, Egyptians, and me, the German. They are an awesome group and I enjoy working there.
Yesterday was Thursday, which means that it is actually a Saturday and the start of the weekend. All week we had been planning for that day. I had found a blog on the web that described a location in the desert where there were, supposedly, the remains of an Ottoman Castle.
After seeing that there were actually some features visible in Google Maps, Sou (Japanese Lab Member) and I invited 9 people and rented two cars for Thursday. We started the day off slowly, leaving KAUST at 11 to go get some fish at economic city.
Back on the road, one of the group members said that he knew the location of an oasis, not far from the castle. I think everyone was down for some cooling off, before hiking in the desert, especially with the current temperature of 45°C.
Wadi (Oasis) from afar.
Upon getting there, and finding it even hotter than at lunch, a swim sounded like a great idea. Oddly enough, while I was swimming, it always felt like there was stuff biting my feet and legs. I asked the other guys whether I was going crazy, but they were feeling it as well...
I could hardly believe it! Upon closer inspection, there were hundreds of fish in the Wadi, and they were hungry! I then had the one time experience of having my feet nibbled by loads of little, and sometimes medium sized, fish.
Enough Wadi, the day was growing late. Half an hour later, covering 5 kilometer of dirt road leading straight into the desert, we finally arrived at this Ottoman stronghold. We parked the cars, and entered the desert heat.
I found it a bit hard to reason out, why the Ottomans would build a castle in the middle of the desert. Where was the water source? They had even made mortar to hold the stones together.
But hey, if Lizards could make it, why not Ottoman horse warriors?
We got back to the King Abdullah University at 1900, tired and satisfied.
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