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From 2010.igem.org

Tuesday 20th July - The team travel to Newcastle for the UK iGEM meet up!

Early start for the 9.20 train to Edinburgh. We all (...or most) met at the train station for 9.00 to ensure we all made the train. A couple of team members arrived just in the nick of time, which kick started the our adrenaline for the day. We arrived at newcastle for 11.30 - plenty of time to get up to the university for lunch... or so you would think. Sadly we got lost in a field somewhere, avoiding the quicker direction because there were cows nearby (an unfortunate case of bovinophobia within the team). Finally arriving at the right place for 13.00, we grabbed what lunch we could and sat to enjoy the team talks.

Following alphabetical order, we were quite far down the list to give our presentation. It was great to see how well plannned and clear ther other teams' presentations were. Some very interesting ideas this year. This set a high standard for us to follow on from - here come the nerves! Overall though, we don't think we did too badly. Every team appeared to have strong points, and we seemed to have made a good impression with our human practices work. Let's keep it up!

After giving our talk we had a brief break and watched the rest of the talks. Looking good for the UK this year! Following the talks we had our team building exercise of building the tallest egg holding tower out of spaghetti, cocktail sticks, a plastic tub and marshmallows. It appeared that most problematic (and tasty) were the marshmallows that faked their structural integrity. At first appearance they were quite strong, but given a few minutes holding a structure together entropy ensued and the marshmallows disintegrated. We can't remember which colour team won, but sadly none of our team were a member of this team - well done winning team.

Next on the agenda was a visit to the local pub, which had a nice selection of ales and a friendly atmosphere for us to get to know members of other teams. Naturally hungry from the busy day, we followed on to La Tasca in town for muchas tapas y sangria! The walk down was quite lengthy and wet, but it definitely helped us work up a healthy appetite. Dinner was very tasty and it was good to chat to the teams over lots of food.

Fortunately we didn't have such a long journey up, so we were probably a bit more awake than some of the other teams - enough stamina to last us for a few bars. Again a great opportunity for witty bannter and to have a laugh with other UK iGEMmers. We sadly lost the other teams towards the end of the night and ended up in a very strange place right at the end called Eazy Street. We'll not say what the first thing we saw was as we entered, as we're trying to keep our Wiki quite censored, but feel free to ask at the Jamboree. Definitely a unique experience. We returned at ~4am chatting breeze and looking for vegetarian pot noodles. A silly state, but we had a barrel of laughs. Very impressed with the day - sorry if we woke anyone upon our return!

Word of the day: Hyperspankoid

Food of the day: Marshmallows

Drink of the day: Sangria

Place of the day: Newcastle!