South Carolina

A couple of weeks ago, I went to South Carolina with my wife. To be more precise, we went to Easley, which is right next to Greenville, SC. My uncle is a professor of bioengineering at Clemson.

Here is Shraddha holding a jar with a pig's heart valve. Bioengineering is undoubtedly fascinating.
I did notice an immense cultural difference between his lab and my lab here. Well, to be fair, my lab is not really a lab, but a national research facility. Yet the level of human interaction varies a lot. On an average day I probably interact with a few faculty members, certainly a few post-docs and some graduate students. And mostly these are people from universities across the US (UPenn, Purdue, U. New Mexico) and sometimes across the world (Liverpool University, Univ. of Udine, Italy). Indeed, the level of interaction I have is certainly not as intimate as the bio lab. The sort of relationships forged there could be lifelong. Of course, the level of interlab competition is roughly the same!

We also went to Atlanta and visited the CNN center. Apparently the CNN news across the world are beamed from Atlanta. We did a behind the scened tour of the studios and stuff.

We also went to Stone Mountain, which is a monolith outside of Atlanta.

It does have some amazing views of Atlanta and the neighbouring countryside. It was quite enjoyable. We did go to the Smoky Mountain's, but that will come later.

Here's a neat picture of the Atlanta skyline from Stone Mountain -