The Forty - Seventh Day

I got up this morning at 720. I did not go for the breakfast things as the AQI this morning was in the 250's and still is.  I had yogurt and a swig of OJ for breakfast. before leaving at 800, I was not the first person there this morning which was good as this meant that I dd not have to do the "awkward stand outside of the door" and be examined by the people passing the door to the lab as they head to their labs. I started off the morning by taking a nap for a few minutes before getting to work. When we started there was a shortage of 2 ml tubes so we stole some from the fume hood bin. Faith arrived a little late after taking the wrong direction in the subway. I told her that she has dishonored her family as a native Beijinger getting lost on the subway. She laughed at that.

Yulan has some sort of new method that I think that she wants to try. We did not get to it this morning though because while we where preparing the 2 ml tubes that we got, Wendy came over and told Faith and Yulan in Chinese that it was time for coffee. They translated to me and I was very confused as I thought that it was only Faith and me that were supposed to go have coffee. It turns out that it was a lab wide event and we all crammed into Dr. Cheng's office to enjoy a cup of Columbia's second most popular export. It was good coffee. I drank it black and had almost 2 cups of it while the peeps talked. Faith got stuck in the middle of the circle and so every time someone talked she had to turn around. 

After this Dr. Cheng headed to a meeting and we went back to the lab. The PDA made yesterday turned out well and we prepared some petri dishes with it on them. I got a batch of stuff to autoclave and started it up.  I guess I will be unloading that after the lunch break. Faith showed me a bunch of the games that they like to play in class. 2048 was one of them. I told them about Conner White and getting to the 16000 tile.

We went to lunch at about 1130 and I had some tofu and a good stir fry. The coffee this morning made me rather jittery; my system is not used to that much caffeine. 

This afternoon we extracted DNA. When I came in Yulan and Faith were nowhere to be seen, so I thought that they were still taking a nap. I started helping Leo make more PDA before they showed up. It turns out that they had been on the sixth floor getting tissue samples from the transgenic tobacco. They came back down with the samples. Today Yulan decided to try another method for the DNA extraction. She put very small glass beads in with the samples and froze them in liquid Nitrogen before putting them into a shaker, a more violent shaker that is. This was supposed to break up and grind the sample. It would have worked well except the samples heated up too quickly for it to be very effective. In order to get them ground up we would have had to be pouring N2 over them while they were being shook, which would not have been feasible as the machine was one with a cover that had to be down while it ran. We did the DNA extraction using the kit again. 

I got a little dehydrated, by my terms that is, (this means that I had not drunk a liter in the past 4 hours) but drank a liter of water to rehydrate.

We finished the extraction and tested the concentration of the DNA with the nanodrop machine. The concentrations were very low. We are going to have to do PCR, a lot of it, to get them up to usable concentrations. 

After getting everything done with that, I went down and talked to Ben for a few minutes before coming back up and sitting with Yulan as she collected some samples from the dishes of fungus. I was talking to her and I found out a very important fact about what we were doing. The vector that the Agrobacteria produce does not just interfere with the expression of the gene; the vector cuts the gene out of the genome and replaces it with an antibiotic resistance.  This cleared up some questions that I had been having. After the initial culturing of the co cultivated fungus and bacteria, the individual fungus lines collected are basically selfed down for three generations (they reproduce asexually) to ensure that the gene is stable in the fungus and to isolate a single genetic line.

This made a lot more sense. However it also means that I will probably not be able to get any actual results from here until a few weeks after I finish my internship...

After that she left to go get food so I left. I came to my room and then left to go to the Sesh Wan place where I had fried rice and 4 lamb kabobs. I may have to go get more food here. I knocked on Silvio's door, but I think that he is asleep.

Good night and God bless.

getting sampler ready to extract 

co cultivation

the sun today

bottle for dave

The Forty-Sixth Day

Wednesday. I got up this morning at 700. It was still pouring out, and so when I went in and talked to Ben, we decided not to go to the bakery to get the yummy buns. I ended up going any way about 30 minutes later (just had a hankering for those bakery products). I found out today that there are two types of them. I need to be sure to get the ones that are butter and honey as opposed to the mysterious black goo. Those butter and honey have white sesame seeds on the top. The others have black sesame seeds.

My VPN started working again and so I am back up and running in terms of blogging. Thank goodness for those small miracles.

This morning was not bad. We started off by making some more PCR tubes to run and then going upstairs to pull some tissue samples. After this we took some old spores and hope to be able to get some more of the spores out of them by culturing them in two ways. We talked about how Wendy was "rammy" (this is a term used in the lab I work in at home - it doesn't mean anything bad just that a worker is impatient). They said to me that it is good that Wendy cannot speak good English as he likes to talk about history.

We talked about fireworks and how there are not many types available (if at all) here in China. I told her about all of various styles, types, and even firework stores in America. She seems to be a secret pyro-technician.

Lunch was good. They had a bacon stir fry entree that was halfway decent and filling. After lunch, work proceeded at a nice clip. We started off by putting the PCR products into a gel to run them. The results with that were not good. The new method appears to not be working well. We are going to have to grind up samples by hand in order to get accurate results with the PCR.

After finding the results were unacceptable, we made up some PDA medium. We walked to the little market area outside of the police station and purchased some potatoes, When I told Yulan that it was my fourth trip in two days, she laughed rather hard at me. I told her about the little buns that I get in the morning. Faith directly translated the words for the name of those things today, and they are called "wives breakfast" (along with some other words I cannot remember/ she did not know the translation).  We got 1.5 kg of potatoes and went back to the lab. There we followed the normal procedure for making it; washing, cutting up. Faith is very meticulous at peeling the potatoes and she is good at it as well. She has to peel all of the apples that she gets as the companies put a lot of waxes on the surface of the apples. She said that her mom does it - peels them for her when she is home.

While cutting up the potatoes, Yulan got very worried about me cutting my hands (which I did not do by the way). I told her that I know how to handle a knife and that if I cut myself it is not a big deal. I showed her some of the scars on my hands and related their respective stories, and she was very surprised/interested. Yulan, it seems, has led a very safe and sheltered life. She has never really hurt herself or done any physical exertion. She was sore from throwing the Frisbee around lightly for an hour or so.

We made the PDA and did the boiling. Yulan would not ask Mister Chi for help. There are some complex relational things going on in that area, so we relied upon what I saw and remembered from doing it, twice, with Mister Chi. The first boil she did not trust me when I said I think that it is done, but by the second time through, she believed me. They do not do much application with the sciences. (Can you tell this drives me a bit crazy?) She was going by the instructions rather then what the water looked like. When I told her that the instructions probably were for much larger potato pieces and that her tiny potato pieces would cook much faster, she started to really believe me.

I tried the dried sweet potatoes today. They were fine but needed some chili powder or something to give them some flavor. (This was for eating not for the potato dextrose agar (PDA) we were making earlier.)

At 500 I headed out and made my way up to the room where I grabbed swim stuff and headed out with Silvio to swim. We talked about how the Chinese are brainwashed into smoking as Mao smoked and they think that he is their glorious leader.

Swimming was good. I got in 3500 meters. I did a mile in about 24 minutes with some stops on the walls. Silvio and I then walked to the Sesh Wan place where I treated him to the food there. He liked the soy beans a lot and the lamb kabobs. The gizzards were not too good today and so I think that I may stick with the lamb from now on. That and the toast that I saw Yulan get. I need to try to order it.

After that we headed back to the dorm. I got a watermelon and some OJ before saying goodnight to Silvio and heading back in.

lunch from yesterday

playing with the left overs (liquid nitrogen)

tetris with flasks is a beautiful thing

Turtle

Albert

Albert

fungus

a plasmid extraction kit

vertigo...

making Agar

Faith and I working together on the agar.

The Forty-Fifth Day

Tuesday. I did not sleep well last night. I think that it was because of the pollution as I woke up, and it was about 239 on the AQI chart. which is in the very unhealthy range. I ate my normal yogurt and banana before leaving at 750 to go to a bakery and see if they served the tortillas in the morning. They did not, but they did sell a pretty good sesame seed bun thing. It had a sweet filling and was pretty good. I will be getting some tomorrow, I think. I got to work at 805, and there was only one person on site - Chungli. In a few minutes, people started to show up. I felt absolutely terrible this morning. I am almost certain it was the pollution last night.

We started off the morning by getting some PCR tubes ready for loading with plant tissue samples. Yulan is trying out a new method for a company this morning so we did it that way this morn. We put the enzyme, primers, and other ingredients into the PCR tubes before using a tool that was like a very tiny cookie cutter to cut some tissue from the leaf. This was put into the PCR machine this morning and I made a gel for it to run on. Within the plants we are looking for a specific gene, and to do this, we used the plasmids that were used to insert the gene into it as a ruler.

We transplanted some samples and made soil and potted it as well. This we planted with some of the tobacco seedlings. Faith started planting bunches of them instead of individuals, I was lucky to have seen that before she planted more then one pot!

I told Faith about tongue twisters that I knew. She could do the toy boat one no problems, but the others she could not even come close. We went to lunch and I got a dish with peas in it. How one is supposed to eat several hundred peas with chopsticks in a timely manner I have no idea. I ended up doing the "shovel". After lunch I went back to the bakery to get a tortilla. I am so hungry today.

After lunch I was much more awake. We did some stuff with the plants before going back to the lab on the sixth floor. I was talking to Faith about ice when we were getting it from the other room. She was surprised at how it did not melt, This puzzled me, It must be that she has no experience with ice but she also is an organic chemistry major - she should know the basics of how ice melts, and how much energy that it takes to melt the ice and other properties. They teach them everything but they do not know how to apply it. She also thought that coke still had cocaine in it... she thought that this was why her friend was quote "addicted to it".  I told her that it no longer had cocaine in it, and she had no idea that one could get addicted to caffeine. Maybe it is the language barrier, but I do not think that in the school here they teach them much about the actual world; they teach them only in theory.

After this Yulan gave us some PCR's to do. We each had one replication to do. I made the joke about seeing who was better at doing PCR. I finished first by a large margin though that may have just been because I had seen it done multiple more times.

Mister Chi brought in a watermelon to eat, Faith does not like watermelon as when she was young her mother made her eat too much. I was assigned the task of cutting up said melon, and I do not understand why they use a cleaver to cut up everything. Something with a point is more useful when cutting up melons it seems.

At about 510 I went down and talked to Ben a little and told him about the breakfast thing that I got this morning. I also asked him if he had anymore shows like "The Unbelievable Ttruth".  Tomorrow night I am going to go swim. Hopefully Faith and her friend will come with me and maybe Silvio. Faith had to pick up her firend and go see her grandma again today.

I got back to the dorm at 530 and then was going to go to Frisbee, but I started talking to Silvio, and then Albert came up. We all sat around and talked until about 800. Silvio knows how to play the guitar pretty well. Albert reads a lot of American politics, though he only reads the democratic view. He does not really know about the two sides of the issue. I told him that he needs to read both sides of the issue to understand it. 

After that Albert went down to cook some corm mash stuff, and Silvio and I went out to get some food. We got the fried rice from the place that Silvio showed me. It was completely acceptable. While going there, Silvio saw a friend of his named Ackmed  and we ran into him again at the restaurant that we went to. He was getting some beef skewers and then heading back to eat. He gave us each two skewers and paid for our meal. It is incredible how generous most of the international students are here.

I headed back with Silvio after eating and am about to do my Skype interview for my last 4-H awards. The interviewers called about 10 minutes ahead of time and caught me with uncombed hair.  I didn't quite know how to respond so I just proceeded forward with the interview like there weren't any issues. I am sure they must have thought I was a contestant on Survivor (on Day 45). My VPN has not been working this afternoon which may be a major problem as I will not be able to check my email…

Hopefully it will resolve itself though.

Good night and God bless.

The Forty-fourth Day

Monday. I got up at 730 had a banana, yogurt and milk for breakfast before heading to work at 800. At work this morning I napped for an hour before we got some stuff ready for autoclaving, then watered the plants and stuff. Leo was back for the first time in a while and he leaves for good this Friday. Faith was in the lab with us. We filtered out some fungus to extract DNA from and talked about the tobacco plants. It seems that Yulan has two different experiments going on right now. She has tobacco that is transgenic for one part and then the knockout vector is another part of the experiment though it is for a different part. Lunch was good - they served my favorite foods.

After the lunch I headed back where I ground samples and and extracted DNA. This was done by: filtering first then grinding in liquid nitrogen. After this, a kit was used to get the DNA out of it. It was Leo's birthday today. He turns 22 and went out to eat with his family tonight. He got back from his grandparents home today. He does not like it there very much as there is no internet, and Leo has to have his LoL to play. We were talking today about random games.  They have some weird stuff that they play, they lable stuff and then have another person finish off the label. It is weird. that is about all you need to know. I looked at some of the words on the GRE thing that Faith is studying and talked to her about spelling words and stuff. She thinks that writing in Chinese is easier then writing in English. I told her that writing in English is probably on the whole easier. How does one sound out a Chinese character?

This Friday is a lunch or dinner or something for Leo's going away, and it may be a joint one for me as well. Yulan decided to go to Frisbee with me tonight; Faith had to go to see her grandma, she is getting better Faith said, so she did not come. After we finished the DNA extraction I left to go get some frisbee stuff and change clothes. And so did Yulan. I told her to meet me at the north gate at 540. I accidentally left my passport and key to my room in the lab so I had to make my way back to collect that. I stopped by Silvio's room to ask if he wanted to come to Frisbee and saw what he was up to. He decided to come.There was another African, Albert, who just got back from the farm who talked to us as well. He thought about coming but decided that he should get a good nights sleep for the first time since Friday. Albert is the one that wants to talk with me about graduate schools in the USA.

I met the peeps downstairs and we headed to Renmin. On the way there Silvio and I were talking and Yulan was very surprised at the speed at which we talked. We told her about Portuguese and Spanish and some words that sound like bad words in Chinese, but are in fact,words like "grape" in Chinese. We got to the fields and started throwing the Frisbee. Yulan liked it, I think, though it was not a good day for me in terms of catching. The wind was crazy and blew the Frisbee every which way. A Kazakhstan person came and play with us. Hopefully he will come play again. He says that he swims every now and then.

We talked about how old Silvio is. He is about 26 and he is on his first year of a masters. When Yulan asked if he was a masters students she asked, "Are you a master?" which was very funny. Silvio likes The Lord of the Rings and so I impressed him with my Gollum imitation. Silvio is actually engaged to someone back in his home which surprised me as he still has another year at least to go here.

After throwing the frisbee for an hour or so we headed out. I was hungry and Silvio had to go see a friend off. He got onto the subway and Yulan and I went and had dinner. We went to the sesh wan place and had peanuts and soybeans along with meat on skewers. It was pretty good stuff. I think that I will go there tomorrow but we will see. If I go somewhere with Faith tomorrow I will have to see if Silvio wants to come with me.

I headed back, stopped and did a few pull ups and saw Wendy doing his martial arts stuff and waved.
Because I was singing all day, they want me to go to a karaoke night at one of the places. I may go; it would be fun.

I have got to work on the paper some more - I am up to 636 words.

Today many times I was told that I had a strong body. Yulan told me it, then almost every girl in the lab. While throwing the frisbee, an old guy walked up to me and told me in Chinese (Yulan translated), "you have a strong body". I guess that it is just something that they say and that they appreciate physical fitness.

The Forty-third Day

Sunday. I got up this morning at 900 and basically sat and played guitar and ukulele. I did start on my paper and typed 458 words in the introduction (thanks to the gentle suggestion of my Dad who said I needed to get the paper done prior to getting on the plane to head home). At 1120 I left to meet with Faith. I met her at the west gate of CAAS, and we headed to the subway. We had a few minutes on the subway ride with a transfer or two before exiting the tube and heading back to the surface. Once above ground, we waited on Faith's friend Richard. Faith, as it turns out, is a very bad map reader.

We walked though the Hutongs (old alleys) and stopped for lunch. We had an Asian pizza thing. It was kung pow chicken and Peking duck flavored (I don't think it is a flavor that you will be seeing at Pizza Hut any time soon). After eating, we continued to walk through the alleys. She got me a very weird milk thing to try (the recipe contained mangoes), and it was pretty good. We walked around for a while before I told her that this was not the type of place that I visit - way too touristy for this country boy. We meandered a bit more, saw their version of Big Ben, and got back into the subway where we headed to the place of Richard's and Faith's old high school, Tsingua. This school was inside the grounds of Tsingua University which meant that in order to get in we had to have ID cards for the university (as it was also a popular tourist place). These ID cards we did not have but we went through the gate any way. When the guard stopped us, he asked us what dorm we lived in, and since Faith knew the names of the dorms, she was able to fool the guard and gain us admittance. It was a very nice university with lots of trees and green space. Faith told me that the dorms were ridiculously cramped - there would be eight of them placed in a room smaller than the room that I am in.   She also said that her class size was 200.  I told her about the class sizes of Texas and that I had graduated from a class of over 600!

She has lived in Beijing all her life and goes to college in a southern province, so she knows all the things to see and do in Beijing. Hopefully tomorrow she will take me to another place, that is, if she does not have anything else to do. I told her that I would like to see the Water Cube and the Bird's Nest at night and see them lit up. She said that this would be possible. She also said that I need to see the modern Beijing at night to see the skyline. That should be pretty cool as well.

After walking through Tsingua, we were going to get Beijing Duck. Unfortunately it was too early (none of the restaurants were open for that) so instead we walked to a train station and headed back to CAAS. There was a duck in front of the building that we were going to eat the duck dish at. I had seen it before as there is one that is close to CAAS. It turns out it is a denoter of a fancy chain restaurant that serves good duck. I stopped by the dorm room to grab my Frisbee and more water before we went to the place. It turned out to be a very fancy place. I am not a fan of the fancy Asian food places. I would rather eat at the Sesh Wan place or one of the smaller places like that than a fancy place. I mean the food was good but no more so the those other places (and they are much cheaper). The duck was pretty good, I have to say. You make kind of a taco out of the meat and then put some sauce into it.  Definitely different.

I talked more to Faith. It turns out that college here is very easy and high school is extremely difficult. It also turns out that Faith and her friend went crazy for the first year of college. She did not go to many of her classes and drank a TON of alcohol. She also gave herself an ulcer. She mellowed out a ton when she took a GRE class over December. The Instructor of the class was a very good influence on her. She now goes to class and does well academically. She is going to be taking the GRE soon, and I may be helping her with her English studying.

Richard did not say very much the entire day. His English is not as strong as Faith's and he is less comfortable with conversation. After dinner, he left to go home - he has a soccer tournament tomorrow and needed to get a good night's sleep. Faith and I proceeded to the Renmin field, threw the frisbee, and talked. She really loves tennis but had no concept about cross-training. She did not understand how other exercise improves one's ability in other areas such as running, swimming or playing tennis even. Our evening wrapped up at about 840.. She got on the subway to head home, and I went back to the dorms where I talked to the family.

Lunch yesterday

Silvio

my burger

The Hutong area

Faith

Faith and me

Traditional Asian fare

Pizza

Weird stuff in a shop

More of the same

???? Yikes.

The bell clock tower

Richard

Faith and Richard

down Tsingua

Walking

Zone of quietness

Going for duck

Duck place

The restaurant

the waitress

duck

Screen shots of my cousin Cassie creeping me on Skype