So today was my first day in lab. I started out the day right- went and got that dan bing I was coveting with Katherine and our suitemate Shirley, as well as Robert and Drew (1 dan bing=2RMB, 0.29¢). The five of us are the undergraduates in this exchange program; not everyone does chemistry research- I think Drew does neuroscience, Robert does physics, and Shirley also does some kind of LS or neurosci.
Afterwards we went to meet our graduate students and afterwards to see our labs- I ended up staying until now in lab. My mentor, Zangxinyu, is very nice. She told me I had a few days to figure out whose project I wanted to join, because she would be working on removing solvent on the rotovap for a week or so. I was very surprised and kind of dismayed- a week? Removing solvent? And then I noticed the three or four barrels of herbal suspension behind her. Okay, I get it now. I asked her how come she didn’t refrigerate the barrels to prevent bacterial growth and ended up drawing bacteria for her when she didn’t recognize the word. I drew a rod shaped, a spirochete, and a ciliated coccus bacteria. She didn’t get it still. When she found out what I was actually trying to say, she made fun of my drawings. I think we’re gonna get along fine.
The lab is very nice and very different from what I do back in LA- it’s natural product isolation from traditional herbs used in traditional Chinese medicine; they use a variety of techniques to isolate and ID the compounds, then test for absorption/see if they are metabolized in a variety of models. It’s a prestigious lab, and it’s also frankly kind of a mess- it’s full of mosquitoes and it’s not thermoregulated, and the toilets are the hole in the ground squatty kind and two of the stalls don’t have doors. The third stall has a door, but no lock.
The nice part is, because of the heat I'm not required to wear long pants or closed toed shoes.
Zangxinyu (Zang for short) and I got distracted making a list of vocab that both of us wanted to know, me in Chinese and her in English, so now I have a long list of terms that I promised to copy over for her for tomorrow. Everyone speaks fairly limited English, but my Chinese has a ways to improve before I can even think about phasing out Chinglish.
Chingrish of the Day: Eskimo Hair, the name of a classy salon on Huayuanbei road.
Vocab of the Day: Zang taught me how to write my own name in simplified. It looks so different!
Check it out:
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