cultural similarities

I'm over here where night is day and day is night - half a planet away - and I'm struck by how similar life is here. I spent the last two days working in one lab, and it's just like at home. When the boss is gone everyone leaves early, when a few lab members separate from the group they immediately chat about the others, there is little time for sleeping, or eating properly, or grocery shopping. The youngest female member of the lab is given a hard time, is the butt of jokes that make her seem like a wild party animal (whether she is or not), and is question about which boys she is dating now. You get sleepy after lunch and need a coffee break, and at the end of the day when you finally get home from work you sit and stare at the wall for a bit and then start working again. I guess if science is a universal language, than being a scientist is a universal lifestyle. There's comfort in that, I suppose.