This is the first post from Santiago, Chile although I could in fact I could be anywhere in the world as I am making use of free wi-fi at Starbucks. The travel was relatively uneventful which is probably a good thing when you spend 10 hours in an aircraft at 11,000 m over the Pacific. I actually arrived yesterday although my body is a bit confused. I still have the disorientated feeling that comes from travelling back through 11 time zones. It is amazing how reliant our bodies are on their internal clock and how disrupted that can get, fortunately I have travelled enough to know that it is able to adjust in a few days. There's no way of avoiding it, it's not any easier going east to west or west to east in my experience, you just have to get on with it.

I have an apartment in a nice area of Santiago called Las Condes, this is the main business district so its all glass towers, men in suits and confident women strutting their designer stuff. It's also home to most of the foreign embassies, the British embassy is just around the corner from where I live. The Australian embassy, which I'll have to visit in a few weeks to vote in the Queensland state elections is not too far away either.

I will start work at the University tomorrow, I actually have a lot of work to do this week. March 7th is a deadline for NHMRC grants so still need to do a bit of work on this. For those of you who don't know this is a process we have to go through to get government funding for research projects, the government obviously tries to make this as difficult as possible for us with long complicated application processes which are mostly information gathering processes for the bean counters in Canberra. The actual scientific proposal is the easy part but it is a highly competitive process with less than a 25% success rate. Good science isn't necessarily a good indicator for success either with track record playing a bit role which can lead to a bit of a catch-22 situation for young researchers. I also have to organise my teaching for the start of the semester next week. I have most of the lectures prepared from previous courses I have taught, but I need to bring everything together, and organise how I am going to assess the students. I am going to try pre-recording my lectures on video which I'll make available to the students. I thought this might give the non  native english speaking students an opportunity to watch again at their own pace, it will hopefully also give me an opportunity to use contact time for more discussion type activities. This is something I have wanted to try at QUT but simply haven't had the time to do until now.

More later, Andrew