The first week

Well, I decided to try and keep a blog and update friends and family online.
I hope I can persist with that - so let's give it a try...

I have just finished my first week in the Boston area. It was extremely tiring.

I landed last Saturday after a very turbulent flight and a 17 hour trip, and got straight to the B&B. It's a nice and quite residential area.
I have started the week with a very very long walk (about 5 hours) to asses the distances from Brookline (where I'm staying) to MIT and to downtown Boston. The only positive aspect of this walk was to find out that Apple opened a new store in downtown Boston, right where I need to change between the T (under/overground train) and the bus.

Monday was my first day of work - and as I entered the main building of MIT I was awe stricken with the power and size of the buildings. A nice but strange thing is that almost all labs in the MIT facility have a big window that allows everyone that walks the corridors to view what and how people are working in the lab (luckily for me - our labs are not like that).
I started by filling forms in HR and the International Scholars Office, got my MIT ID card, a bank account and started safety training - all on the first day!

The next couple of days were spent mainly on doing safety training and getting to know the mazes of the buildings. Every building here is numbered, but not consecutively!! So moving from one building to another requires a map.

Except me, there are 4 more Israelis in the Department of Chemistry. One is also in my research group. They have been extremely friendly and helpful, showing me around and giving me helpful tips to get settled in.
They also tell me horror tales about some of the professors here. About their huge ego and terrible human relations. It seems that most chemistry professors here work their groups very long hours and might even call their students names in public. Luckily for me, my professor is known as a good person, not a slave driver and the group really likes him. People at the lab come to work late (around 10-11) and leave work whenever they feel like it. No one supervises their time and work, so only the motivated people (which is the whole group) can succeed in such a setting. The only problem with the boss is that he is hardly available.

Speaking of that - I have tried to meet him this week and our meeting was postponed 7 times. I guess I will meet him next week (maybe). I don't really need to meet him, since I am starting to understand what my project is by myself. Once I start working on it I would not have to meet him. So we'll just wait and see.

I think I found an apartment, which was also a big ordeal, I saw between 10-15 apartments, most crappy. Just like Israel, the real estate agents here are pushy and not always truthful. I had to pull out of a deal in the last moment because all of a sudden the fees and payments grew and the terms agreed upon changed.
But now I found a nice apartment in Brookline, a fifth floor (with elevator) 1 bedroom apartment. I will be signing the lease on Monday (if everything goes as planned). That should take off some of the pressure and allow me to work in reasonable peace of mind.

I think I covered much of this hectic week. (You see how long this post is!). I hope that I will settle in and start working full time, which means a lot less to share.

Till the next time...