First day in Bloomington

Breakfast in B&B is cooked by the people in charge of the place. A bit oily, but the juice made up for it. After that, I headed to Indiana University. I went for a few talks and grabbed a quick lunch of pizza from their student union.

The students' union is a huge building by itself. It has a bowling alley. YES, a bowling alley, with an arcade and pool table. There's a canteen, information centre, study room, reading room and so on. And one more thing is more exaggerated. There is an official University orientation for.. PARENTS. So i see a long line of parents at the union. What a sight. And here, parents get seriously upset when their kids leave for college (college here means university). To them its like losing their sons and daughters - cause children would leave home during this schooling period and visit them rarely after that. (they'd probably work there or at another town after they graduate and start their new life there.)

Today was a rather eventless day in terms of touring. We ate korean food for dinner! Healthy food again. =))

(I'm lazy to write too much so tt's it for today, unless u want me to write about the talks i went to.)

OH! Actually there is something interesting that I want to say about one of the talks i attended. Sidenote: the tables in the lecture hall are much smaller than those in NUS, its like somewhere less than half of ur A4 paper would fit, SO, be thankful. Anw, there was this talk about creating a vaccination for AIDs. For other viruses, they either inject weakened viruses so that our bodies can produce anti-bodies to fight it. For another group, they obtain the protein/substance that surrounds the virus and inject it as vaccine. This is so that our bodies can recognise the proteins and identify the virus. SO, there is research in this area that is trying to use the latter method to create a vaccine for AIDs, but there aren't anything conclusive yet. The reason for not using the first method should be obvious, who would want to take a vaccine for AIDs with a 2-3% chance of getting it?! For curable disease/sicknesses, its MUCH safer. But in the case of AIDs, everyone would be very cautious. One thing though, the protein obtained for the AIDs virus might cause our bodies to produce a lot of useless antibodies which aren't helpful to the situation. Thus, more research needs to be done.

Just thought u might want to know. =)