Beijing, China. What's Happening to Me: The Twenty-Seventh Day

I got up this morning feeling so much better - antibiotics are an amazing thing! I ate a PB&H (peanut butter and honey) and some yogurt mixed with fresh peaches - yum. The fruit here is pretty good. At 800 I headed to the lab. I brought my lab coat (that was given to me by my teachers, and I had tie-dyed) with me today so I was working in that. The people at the lab like it, I think. I started off the morning by getting some microscope slides ready. This is for my test that I wanted to do (with the fungus balls). After that the weekly meeting was held. This was held in the conference room today, so for the first time I saw that. Yulan gave a presentation about elicitors in diseases.

After that we headed back into the lab where I watched Yulan get some competent cells together. I then was put in charge of extracting DNA for testing from the bacteria that I had cultured the day before. I did this by scraping bacteria from the dish, tapping some off into a PCR tube then placing the tip, what is used to scrape, into a culture tube. I took 36 samples and a negative control. These were prepped for PCR and then placed into the PCR machine after centrifuging them. By this time we had missed the people leaving for lunch that I normally go with so I ended up going with Yulan to her boyfriend's lab. He works on fish and was still testing something when we got there. While he finished up,Yulan showed me some of the equipment in the lab that we did not have.

When he finished it was about 1245, which meant that it was too late to go to the normal cafeteria so we ended up going to a restaurant. It was fairly decent. I had a beef dish, and the boyfriend ordered some morning glory with eggs in it. I picked out another cheap dish as well which I thought was atrocious - they liked it though. We also had some sweet and "sour" soup: it was all sweet. It was like Kool-aid but served in a teapot.

On the walk back to the dorm, Yulan wanted her boyfriend to walk her back to her room. I guess that he did not want to as she brought the issue up with me. I told them both that it would be considered rude not to walk a girlfriend home/take a girlfriend back to home. He then decided that he would walk her to her dorm, I think. Said goodbye to them and got back to room at 130. I will go back to the lab by 200 or 230.

The AQI is really good today. It is 38 right now. Hopefully the winds keep up and keep everything blown out of Beijing. Can't express how wonderful it is to breathe some clean air!

I went back at 230 to the lab. Yulan was not there, but I had plenty of things that I could do. I made 1.5 gels for the PCR that we did this morning and then started wrapping the boxes of tips to be autoclaved. I also went up to the sixth floor and watered the plants and then came down and got the PCR tubes out of the machine. Just as I was about to put these into the fridge, Yulan showed up and told me how she wanted them put into the gels so I did that. I do not remember if I said this, but Yulan will be gone next Monday-Wednesday. Today she left me with the list of stuff to do and some instructions for doing them. I do not know whether she has talked to Dr. Cheng about missing work on those days yet. We also moved the plants around on the sixth floor as Chungli was going to use the area that we had put our tobacco. We dispersed our samples to a variety of growing chambers. Yulan was annoyed about that as she was the only one who had to move stuff, even though she had less stuff the most of the others. I could easily see why she was annoyed. After this we looked at the gels. The results were not good. Only one of the bacteria changed so she was going to run the samples one more time to ensure that they were actually valid. She gave me some final instructions before I left.

The guys brought in some "sweet" corn, or at least their version of it and cooked it up. It was basically a starchy blob. not very good. I took a bite to taste it and I was right in fact that it was not true sweet corn. The corn had purple kernels on it as well which may be something that Dr. Murray (a Corn Breeder that I work for at Texas A&M) may want to look into.

I left to go swimming from the office at 520. I forgot to mention that at about 100 my electricity went out. When I came back, it was still out but I did not have time to deal with it then as I needed to get to the pool before pool hours were over. So I left to go to the pool.

Swimming today was unmotivated and not happy. I was hurting in the water and just overall not moving too fast. I basically did about a 4500 distance per stroke with some fast swims. When I got out of the pool one of the lifeguards came to me with a woman who knew English and told me that the pool will be closing on July 14 for repairs... and opening on august 14th... after I leave...bummer. They said that I would be able to get a refund on my unused swims so I will get that tomorrow when I go swim for the last time at that pool. I will have to talk to Mr. Pan about going to another pool. Yippee - just when things were really starting to get settled in. I had taken my shampoo to the pool today, and the inevitable leakage happened in my bag, of course, so now I have some shampoo in my bag (should have listened to my mom and kept it in that ZipLoc bag).

After swimming I headed back to the dorm and dropped off the shampoo and then headed out to the Sesh Wan place. I ran into Vincent and another guy coming back from it so I said hello to them and told Vincent that I again would not be able to come to church with him. The excursion that they planned happens on Sunday at 900 am. I will probably try to go find the church and go to the 600 mass that is in Chinese, I think. That will be interesting.

At the Sesh Wan place, I ordered some lamb, tofu and 2 chicken wings. I ordered those by pointing at the box that they come from and I gestured to the one that I wanted. He tried to give me one of the menus, but at that, I just laughed. I then got some boiled peanuts and soybeans. While I was sitting there, the Nepali man that is in the picture with me from the previous night, walked by. I told him that he was welcome to join me, so he did. I still need to get his name though...We had a good conversation. He is an economics PhD and so he told me about his project to create a model about the effects of changing certain inputs, agricultural inputs that is, on his home country Nepal. It was some interesting concepts. I ended up telling him about quesadillas as he had bought one of the Chinese ones at the shop down the road. He likes the hard classic rock, so ACDC, Guns and Roses, that kind of music. I told him about my hard drive and said he was welcome to copy it. He said he would love to, so one of these days, I will be copying it for him. I also need to get music to the Bangladeshi family. Maybe I will do that before I go swim for the last time in that pool.
After eating another plate of peanuts we headed back. Before I went to dinner, with the help of a translator, I got the electricity figured out. So I am not worried about it. I also bought some OJ (orange juice) down at the store - the good kind, very pulpy.

the slides I made - still need to look at them.