In which Mitchell works and Emily actually does something exciting

Hello y'all! 

Emily here and as the title suggests, I have been adventuring on my own this week!

On Friday morning, while Mitchell had his team meeting, I went to explore the botanic gardens. I've heard back from them and am starting to schedule in some volunteering hours, but on Friday I was just there to visit by myself. I knew it was a fair size, but this place was HUGE. I spent about 2 hours there and there were still parts I hadn't seen. They split it into different regions, so there's an Australia section, a North American section and others including China (which I managed to miss), each with plants native to the desert regions of that place. 

Went for a quick visit to the land down under

They also have an area which is less wild for various gardens. There was a little herb garden, a rose garden, a butterfly garden and a bee garden, although I did not manage to find this last one. 

Found in the rose garden

As well as some paved paths around the gardens and main sections, there's a lot of wild areas with just small dirt paths. These were occasionally overrun by plants and I had to turn back and take another route. I also had to divert from the ficus trail as they were watering with sprinklers and I'd already had a shower that day thank you. The walk out to the Australia section was deserted and so quiet! There's a pile of boulders (each roughly the size of a large boulder) which they call bobcat rocks and I can see why, I really did think that at any moment a bobcat could come out from hiding within these. 

Here be bobcats

Once I reached the end of the pathway, and it was long with so many twists and turns, I had climbed so high I could see the whole campus and beyond. 

UCR has the highest elevation of all the UC campuses

The visit here makes up a lot of this week's wildlife update. There were lizards of all kinds of sizes and colours, I saw some black ones sunbathing on a rock which must have been at least 20cm long! 

A smaller, more easy photographed lizard

I must have walked past a warren at some point as there were bunnies everywhere, even thought it was almost midday at that point. I also saw a few other fluffy things around, which having come back and searched for them online, I have decided that they were California Ground Squirrels. They look a little like chubby grey squirrels, but less bouncy. Not exactly wildlife, but I did also see turtles in the turtle pond. Although, having looked up what a California pond turtle looks like, it seems they may have been red-eared sliders which are native so I'm counting them. 

Turtles!

For those of you who enjoy flora, you can see all of the photos I took there in this album.

I will now turn you over to Mitchell for an update on the more boring parts of the week.

Hello! In no particular order here are some updates from me: 

I'm still not in the lab yet, there's some approval due to COVID that I need but haven't got yet but hopefully on Tuesday! (after a public holiday on Monday for Memorial day) In the mean time I've had computer work to do, on Friday I had the weekly zoom group meeting where I made the mistake of sounding somewhat confident about statistical analysis and have now been named the resident statistics expert for my group. Hence me now running a stats crash course sometime soon.

Oh no

I got another call from the social security office (after I couldn't come the previous appointment as I had been out of the country within 14 days), and they booked me in for Thursday, literally the 15th day in the country. The guy asked me if England was a city and I told him it was a country, he then asked what the UK was and I sort of flailed and mumbled "a... bigger country?". All in all a very successful trip, (it was the first one on my own!) and I was able to use my free bus pass I get for working at the uni!

I had a zoom meeting for internationals at UCR. I mentioned my ease in getting the social security appointment as I'd heard in the previous international meeting it would be slow and assumed that was out of date information. Turns out there are two social security offices in the local area and the other one is going very slowly and some people have been waiting months for an appointment, a few people have now contacted the one I went to and are getting appointments there instead.

We have an application put in for a rental apartment, almost every day this week we were asked for more documentation, sometimes something we'd already supplied (Emily's UK payslips) and sometimes for something that didn't exist (my US payslips). Despite some concerns on Wednesday, on Thursday we got a positive sounding call about getting it sorted that day, if we could just send over bank statements. Having sent those off we have still heard nothing back but hopefully we will on Tuesday.

Floor plan of the apartment we will hopefully have soon

Our bank cards have also arrived which Emily had picked out a nice picture for the front of, some of the options were pretty obnoxiously loud in my opinion and a lot of sports, I think bank cards should be plain because I am boring. These are not bad though.

Our matching bank cards, which have literally no information on the front

A short summary of American struggles from me, 1. I have multiple bug bites while Emily has none. 2. The hash symbol (#) is called pound here for some reason, I had to enter it after entering a number on an automated phone call. I'm quite surprised that the word hashtag is widely used if Americans don't call the symbol hash. 3. You have to say 'nine thirty', half nine means nothing to these people, or I guess maybe it means four and a half which is even less helpful. 4. We both look the wrong way when we go to cross the road, I didn't even realise I had a direction in how I checked for cars but I do and I need to change it. 5. American dates I'm getting used to but some of the excel files I've been sent, if it recognised a date, fixes it for me and I have it set to do English dates, this then leads to me being confused all over again. Now I'm done complaining, back to Emily who has some interesting pictures of our Saturday.

Welcome back to Emily's brain!

Saturday was a nice chill day for us. We spoke to our parents in the morning to update them on what's been happening (even though that's the point of the blog ugh). For lunch I suggested we go out to the Food Lab in the Downtown area, which is a giant food hall with all sorts of stands selling everything from burgers to sushi to ice-cream. 

One of the food stands

Most of the seating is outside, including a nice area on the roof of the building where we sat to enjoy our lunch in the sunshine. We got some sushi and a smoothie bowl each, but we will definitely be back to try the other places! 

Mitchell preparing to eat some sushi

Sushi Burrito!

Mitchell and our smoothie bowls

Our plan was then to head back to our room, but we got distracted by several things on the way. 

I became a butterfly

We walked past the UCR Arts building, and as we did we saw some people actually go inside and realised it was open to the public that day. So, we went inside to see what exhibitions were on. It's free to go, but they still printed us tickets so we have a nice reminder of our visit. I think our favourite exhibit was the 'Fire in California'. This was a photography exhibition and they had several pieces from artists showing scenes from the wildfires in 2017. They also had an artist who set fire to taxidermy animals and took photos, which sounds weird and macabre, but were actually beautiful and my favourite pieces I saw. 

From the photography exhibit

After this we took a quick wander through white park again and I showed Mitchell the herb garden. I also stole a couple of mint leaves to put in my lemonade while Mitchell stood watch.

Mitchell scanning the area for herb police

That's it for this week, hope you all enjoy the long weekend! We certainly will as we have found the bus which takes us directly to Disneyland! 🤩

Love you all, 

Emily and Mitchell

xxx