Deep-dive with a buzzard into a sea of chemistry (POST UNDER CONSTRUCTION; TO BE CONTINUED AND EDITED)

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(POST IS UNDER CONSTRUCTION, WILL UPDATE WHEN I HAVE TIME)

I jumped in joy when I saw the email title “Accepted application to JACS ACS150 Symposium at ETH-Zürich 12-13/01/2026”

So, I landed at Zürich Flughafen, took the S-Bahn to Hauptbahnhof, and had a Kaffee und Hafermilch. There I talked with a lady from Midelt, Morocco, and learnt some German: Danke vielmals!

After leaving my bag in a locker, on my way to Veganitas, a vegan Middle Eastern restaurant in Langstrasse, I saw a man feeding the black-headed gulls (Chroicocephalus ridibundus) by the Limmat river at Landmuseum. I also started feeding them peanuts I brought from home, and they loved them. Suddenly though, they, and the pigeons and crows with them, started flying around like crazy… There was a buzzard (Buteo buteo) trying to catch them!

The buzzard was successful and managed to (almost) drown a black-headed gull. Almost metaphorically, while drowning the black-headed gull, the buzzard also started sinking and getting way too wet to catch flight again.

As it started to struggle in the water, it “swam” towards the river’s bank—a vertical wall—and the black-headed gull escaped.

A kind family kept my bag safe and held me from my jacket as I leaned into the Limmat. I took the buzzard out of the water with a tree branch, and put it on top of a shrub so it could dry its wings. As expected, all the crows (Corvus corax) started harassing it, but that’s nature! We must always be careful, though, not to extend human moral values to nature, as animals’ vital experiences and necessities and way of experiencing the world are not necessarily comparable to ours.

The startled buzzard who dove deep into the Limmat. OWN IMAGE.

Then, at Veganitas, I met María, one of the waitresses, from Málaga (Spain), and talked with her about epistemology, Deleuze, Foucault, Nietzsche, and Heidegger while she was planning her work timetable. I also talked to Clinton, originally from Perugia (Italy) and Benin City (Nigeria), and Elisa, from Brescia (Italy), and learnt to say “Ancora acqua, per favore!”. Experiences like this, meeting people from all walks of life, are what truly form the fabric of my life and being.

Elisa, Clinton and I in Veganitas, a great vegan restaurant with wonderful people.

-People who used their card for my dinner

-Meeting Juliana from Medellín

-Meeting Abhi from Varanasi

-Going out for dinner with Abhi and meeting man from Himachal Pradesh

-Going birding

-JACS Symposium: Prof. Erick M. Carreria, Prof. Kelly Chibale, Quantum dots with Prof. Bawendi and his talk on curiosity and ambition, Cyanide detectors, Oxygen detectors, Organic semiconductors, nanocrystal nucleation, nanomaterials…

-Member ACS

-Steps Einstein: ETH