Beijing, China. What's Happening to Me: The Fortieth Day

Up at 710, had yogurt and a peach for breakfast and then talked to Moo for a while. At 800 I headed into work where I took a nap for an hour then got to work; The cultures needed one more hour to grow. After that, we pulled the cultures out of the shaker - these were the ones that we had taken from the co-cultivated dishes of bacteria and fungus. We looked at about half of them through the microscope to count the spores and then these we started to pull mycelium out of these to extract DNA. The microscope slides were made by taking 10 microL (microliters) and putting them on a slide with a cover. The spores were counted by taking random samples of squares (as the slides are patterned to allow for this), counting the number of spores, and then averaging them, then multiplying by the number of squares. The mycelium extraction was done by filtering out the mycelium through autoclaved cheese cloth then wrapping the mycelium in aluminum foil and putting it in liquid nitrogen. Before extracting this, we took samples of every flask's liquid in order to be able to create cultures of each if the DNA extraction proves fruitful and the fungus did indeed pick up the vector. Pretty cool!We also sterilized some mortar and pestles for the extraction. This was done through the burning of ethanol in them again.

I tried to tell Yulan today that it was okay to have fun at work, I guess that in China loving what one does is not encouraged as she just told me that it was not a good idea to have fun at work. Maybe she did not get what I was saying.

Yulan had never done the filtering part of the extraction ad was using the foil to scrape the mycelium off of the cloth, I made her use the scupula instead. I hope that she remembers to sterilize it in between samples. They don't seem to teach the kids here much physical chemistry as she was rather scared of the fact that ice formed on the scupula when she pulled it out of liquid nitrogen. It is interesting. I think that they know it all in theory but never have had to put it into practice like most students in the USA. It is the same thing with plants. These people are working to produce better plants but do not know how to grow a plant (for example, take the person spraying the leaves of the plant when it is wilted as opposed to actually watering the plant). I see Yulan doing stuff that I could tell her the outcome of and it would be bad, but she does not seem to know what will happen. Take the ethanol fire in the fume hood for example. Almost anyone in USA would have been able to tell her that the entire thing was going to catch on fire and that the best solution would be just to let it burn, but she tried to put it out with an ethanol soaked rag...

All is good here though. This afternoon we will finish extraction DNA and go to Chungli's party. Her birthday was actually on Saturday but we are doing stuff today for it.

This afternoon we ground up all of the frozen samples. This involves a tremendous amount of liquid N2 (Nitrogen) which is always fun. After grinding we used a DNA extraction kit to remove the DNA from the samples, lots of centrifuging. This took the afternoon. At 600ish we left to go to Chungli's dinner party. The gift that the lab peeps bought her was a cake - this I did not notice until they opened up the package after dinner (even though it did say "happy birthday cake" on the side in very small print).

Tonight was not exactly my favorite night in China so far. We started off by looking at the menu which is always interesting, though at this place they had some English translations. The things that they put in the menus in Chinese must have a different connotation or something because Yulan said they translated the Chinese word for word into English. You ended up with dishes called "fish on iron slab" "braised fungus in casserole" "baby cabbage in superior soup" "Pot of Delicious QQ Tofu" "Sour sliders." While I was laughing at this,Yulan asked me what was funny and so I told her it was the names. I hope that I did not offend her or any of the others around the table. It was all the people in the lab who were there. After that the food was ordered and it came... It was okay tonight. The only dish that I really liked was the tofu that I got. I wish we had eaten at the Sesh Wan place. In my opinion it is much better.

While eating, Mister Chi asked me about the two China's, Taiwan that is. When I said that they are an independent nation the group got rather angry. They think that Taiwan is a province of China still, which is interesting, and on the map (in my room) it shows Taiwan as part of China so eh, it must be what the Government tells them. I did not press the issue though as it probably would not have been a great idea though I would have won that argument. It would have been very easy to ask "Who here comes from a country with an absolutely free flow of information?" though they may have just answered all of us as they may believe that there is no censorship. O well. I let them believe what they want to believe, just like the political parties thing...

After a pause we started talking about birthdays, and they asked me what constellation I was born under. At this I said, "I don't know," and then stopped really listening for a while until Mister Chi brought out candles - very long and thin they were (I'm Yoda now) and started lighting them. This was when they brought out the box that I had not noticed was a cake. This was also after food kept on coming - it was a very spread out meal and took 2.5 hours to get through it. But the candles were put into a very pretty cake and then blown out... by Mister Chi for some reason, but Chungli did not care. The cake was served - if you can use that term. They do not know how to serve cake, and little fork-like things were given out. It was rather a sad fork - tiny and only two prongs. Though exquisitely decorated and looked tasty, the cake was rather horrible. The Chinese cannot seem to make baked goods very well with the exception for the golden bread which was very much like the pineapple bread that I got early on here. This one had a filling.

After this we left. I tried to take a bottle for David as it was rather funny but it seems that is a very bad thing to do. Sorry Dave.

Got back to the dorm at about 840 and then I worked out for about 40 minutes just to make myself tired. I did abs interchanged with some other exercises. I am looking forward to Frisbee tomorrow night.
I am going to talk to Ben right now - I will tell you about the conversation in my next blog.

Good night and God bless.

Dish of co cultivated bacteria and fungus