The one benefit of jet lag is that when you travel west it’s really easy to get up in the morning, I actually woke up before my alarm which gave me lots of time to explore my vast new residence. My primary objective was to work out where the coffee was located, after a good 15 minutes of exploring the kitchen I found a french press and after a further 10 I’d located a bag of columbian coffee.

The first excitement of the day was seeing all of the Apple signs as we drove towards NASA. I’m living in Cupertino and so the commute involves driving though one of the smaller apple campuses. The other thing I noticed on my way to NASA was the palm trees, usually palm trees are only allowed in nice places, where you go on holiday, not where you live!

As we approached The Ames Research Park (a former Navy Base which is now a world-class, shared-use research and development campus with partners such as Google), the first thing that caught my eye was the space shuttle perched behind the security gates. It instantly added gravity to the situation! I suddenly realized that I would be spending the next year as a research associate at NASA!

I met with my sponsor company to go through more paperwork and to meet some of the other research associates. Ravi also gave me a tour of the research park, though I can’t go into the actual research centre until I get my security clearance, which is supposed to take another week. It’s really interesting walking around the base: there are old jets and planes on display as well as the famous ‘Hangar 1’ of course, which is staggeringly big!