*It’s pronounced Shim-gapore. Cheers! The crappy thing about being a scientist, is that you tend to move around a bit. And so do the people you meet and grow to love. The silver lining flipside of this, is that you get to meet a bunch of awesome people from different places, and sometimes, as you move, your paths cross again and again. In 2010, I met Polish Szym in my hometown of Perth. He was doing a Phd, I was doing Honours in the lab next door. In 2012, I moved to Germany as a Phd student, and a couple of years later, in 2015, he joined my lab as a Postdoc. In 2018, we lived together briefly, after my ex and I broke up. In 2020, I visited him in Warsaw with my favourites, Joram and Doro and their at-that-time-tiny-and-only child. A last minute trip at the end of Feb, before the world went to shit. In 2021, just as the world was starting to feel normal again, he stopped by London with his … Continue reading Szymgapore, part I: the dragons and the merlion