Beijing, China. What's Happening to Me: 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