The Third Day

Up this morning at 430 AM, went to bed at 830, so I got 8 hours in. at about 330 I woke up to major rainfall and lighting, It was pouring out there. I worked out and my Mother called me which was awesome.  I am going to wash some clothes and then going to go to breakfast with Pim-sy, (Pimpan). The AQI this morning is pretty good, a moderate at 85.

The breakfast was fine, I had soybean milk, a sesame seed bun-like bread and an egg sandwich. The egg sandwich had lettuce on it that I did not notice while I was ordering it, I took it off the sandwich, hopefully I do not get sick because of it (the cooks probably washed it with water from the tap as opposed to the purified water that is safe to drink). after breakfast we went to the lab and did a lipid extraction. Dr. Hongmei's nephew was there this morning, Jimmy, he is the same age as I am and was working with us this morning. The first thing we did was use liquid nitrogen, and a mortar and pestle to grind up the samples, from there we took methanol the mixed into the the tubes and put it in a hot water bath, then chloroform was but it to it. From there we put it into the centrifuge which spun it at 12000 RPM and separated the proteins and fats. from there we pipetted out the fats in solution. Wen we get back from break we will take the samples over to the food science building to test for fat concentration.
After this I went and had lunch with Wendy and Leo, I had something like meatballs with Chinese watermelon and a pizza like egg bread. Wendy asked me about The Church, they seem to have a skewed view of it, they think that church is a place where the priests take money and then depending on how much you pay, some of your sins are forgiven. I told them this was false, and tried to explain to them about it.
Sorry about the poor quality of the photos, Jimmy was taking them while I was working.

Breakfast

Me and Pim-sy sterilizing the mortars and pestles

sterilizing the mortars and pestles

Freezing samples in N2 to grind

Preparing to grind them

Grinding

Grinding

Grinding

Samples after centrifuge, note the three layers

Separating samples

Lunch

When we got back to work at 2 we walked over to the food science building where they have evaporators that we used to take the methanol out of the samples. The man who helped us do this also show me the equipment that he uses to analyze and separate samples. I saw an interesting inspirational poster. The Chinese seem to really like Thomas Edison as I have scale many poster/quotes of his. After this we came back to the lab and baked the lipid samples, we will finish gathering data from that experiment tomorrow. I helped Pimpan to clean seed Arabidopsis  for tissue culturing. It was raining when I left the lab. 

I went down to hard boil eggs but the pan that i bought did not work on the hot plates as they cook by induction. There was a woman from Bangladesh in the kitchen at the same time cooking with her baby sitter who let me borrow one of their pans to boil eggs in. she was making a shrimp dish with a very short grain Bangladeshi rice. I got to talking to her and learned some more about her and her family. She lives here with her husband and her kids and her baby sitter in room 211, she used to live in the room that I am living in now, 515. she is a scientist and her husband in an associate professor here at CAAS.  She invited me to dinner because she did not want me eating only eggs for dinner. I am supposed to go down there at 730. right now I am going to wash some jeans. 

 Thomas Edison

 Condensing machine

 Me

First pair of jeans washed

Dinner with Salma (the woman that I talked to) and Misma (her husband) was awesome. they have 2 daughters of about 8 and 6, I would guess. She made some chicken legs, fish, beef, a special Bangladeshi rice, vegetables, and good stuff. The food was great, the chicken was the best. Misma is a entomology person. he just finished his PHD about introducing an invasive species to control pests, and the affect that the native environment would have on the species. He is leaving to go back to Bangladesh soon. It is interesting how different our views of the world are. His family has always had to struggle to make it and be safe. Here in China he feels safe, but in his home the capital city of Bangladesh he does not. for this reason he believes that a Chinese like system of government should be implemented in Bangladesh. He wants to be sure that there are some restrictions. They invited me to comedown there and said if I had any problems to just some and ask.

Dinner was Great!!

This concludes to Third Day. Heading to bed now.

But wait one thing i forgot to mention, Last night at 9 there were people out on the basketball court with samurai swords working through forms I guess, along with a bunch of people doing a martial arts form of yoga or something. It was weird