Day 19

It’s hard to believe that it’s already July. Only six more weeks, and I’ll be home again and starting school. Today was a very productive day for me. I went to the lab at 830 like I do every day. I called Cici on the phone and was expecting to have to pass the phone off to Alex in order for him to translate, but I was so wrong. She speaks perfect English. I could understand every word she said. She told me to meet her at the old lab at ten so we could begin ELISA testing. I just messed around on the computers until then. Then, I went to the old lab, and we got started. First I had to grind the leaves into a liquid and put them into test tubes. I had four samples total. Then, we had to refrigerate them for four hours. I talked with some of the graduate students before I went back to the new lab to go to lunch. They are all very nice. There was a man named Zhen who just came to the university six days ago to begin his masters degree. He was very anxious to practice his English on me which was also very good. Cici was embarrassed to talk to me because she didn’t think her English was very good, so she had Zhen do all the talking for her. I tried to tell her that her English was very good and encourage her to talk, but she didn’t believe me. At 1130 we all went to lunch. I came back to the lab at two in order to continue my experiment. I had to use the centrifuge to separate the liquid from the solid. Then, I had to create a control of known concentrations to be able to compare the concentration of protein in my unknown samples. I created 8 controls; each having half the concentration of the one before it. Then, I had to mix in chemicals to my known concentrations and samples and incubate it for two hours. We went to supper at this time and then went back to the lab again. I had to then wash the samples and concentrations with a special fluid and fill the wells back up with chemicals and incubate it for 30 minutes. I had to wash, fill, and incubate three times. Then, I added a special dye and a stopping agent. Then put it in the spectrometer for analysis of the color. It printed out a table for me, and I will have to graph it tomorrow to determine the amount of Bt protein in each of the samples. I know this is confusing to read, but I skipped a lot of details in order to save everyone from intense boredom. I was surprised my experiment was successful because Cici and Zhen didn’t tell me what not to do until I was doing it. I didn’t get back to my room until well after 9 tonight. I also have a pounding headache because the old lab doesn’t have air conditioning and it was in the upper 90’s again today.
I had a slight scare today too. I didn’t have a lot of money left, so before I went back to the lab after lunch, I stopped at the atm near my building. It rejected my card saying it was an error. I was freaking out because I was told my card would work here, so I didn’t bring that much cash. I mentioned it to Alex, and he took me to a different atm also near my building. Luckily this atm had an international banking option, so I was able to withdraw money. I also had the most intelligent conversation with someone since I have been here. Zhen is very interested in American politics and the economy, so we talked quite a bit about that. I also talked with Cici and another graduate student, Ming, about movies. Apparently, most of the movies shown in China are American. They just run Chinese subtitles. As we worked, we also watched the first Transformers movie on the computer because it is everyone’s favorite.