Birthday Parties

Last night, my friends celebrating the birthdays of my two French friends Claire and Benjamin and myself.  We went to a nice French resto called Cafe de la Poste (apparently it's a very stereotypically French name).  It had French steak, French desserts, French wine, and more French-looking people that I've seen in my 3 months here in Beijing.  It was fun to see my friends delighted by the appearance of bread that crackles when you squeeze and and songs that they all knew from home.  The wine was good, the cake was chocolately.  We offered a slice to the French owner man and he was so excited he brought out the aerosol whipped cream, which got me pretty enthused.

Today, my lab group got together to play ping pong (because the badminton courts were all booked up) for a couple of hours before going to dinner together.  I'm pretty bad at ping pong, but it was fun to see all of my labmates and my professor so hardcore and having so much fun.  For dinner we went to "Big Pizza."  This is my first time going to an American restaurant in Beijing and it was pretty funny.  They had a salad bar (awesome), soft-serve ice cream, and pizza.  The most amusing kinds of pizza were "warm banana pizza" and "chicken pizza with blueberry sauce."  Both with cheese of course.  Chinese are a lot more liberal about mixing sweet and savory.  They also had a lot of Chinese-type skewers, chicken wings, and other various dishes.  And "Special Big Pizza Wine," which was like grape juice with a slightly off taste.  It was one of my labmates birthday.

Great news from the lab:  My name is getting put on a paper that I have put some editing time into.  It'll be great to be published!  I'm like a real person now.  I guess I shouldn't talk to soon as it hasn't been reviewed yet, but still very exciting.  I'm also helping to write another paper on the experiment I've been working on here and I should be 2nd author.  My prof. joked that I should come back for a postdoc someday, which is probably a good sign.

A week from now, I'll be waiting for my family in the airport.  

真棒的天！My fabulous day

Yeah today was pretty good.

I've been doing a lot more work in the lab lately.  I have two reactors that are technically "mine," though another grad student helps a lot, but they are both going very well, and it's fun to solve the little problems that come up.  I also got to do some PCR (a useful molecular biology method that necessitates an anal retentive level of precision) today, which reminded me of the good old days at the lab at the U of M.  The grad students are all very nice and happy to speak English and exchange English practice for some valuable knowledge about their work.

I got confirmation today that I can spend two months in May and June in a big laboratory in Zurich helping a student with her aquatic ecology project, which will be awesome.  As an added bonus, now that I have friends living in Germany, Holland, and France, I can visit them and see their hometowns after I'm done in Zurich.

Tonight, I had dinner with my language partner, who is the cutest little Chinese girl.  Afterwards, we made chocolate pudding (amazing. . .) and got together with a bunch of my friends to eat chocolate in several forms and watch West Side Story.  

I'd say today was pretty sweet.  As another bonus, Matt will be here in two days!

Boy's day and my experiment (finally!)

In China, 11/11 is singles day.  Four sad lonely lines.  But the day after is specially celebrated by Tsinghua University as Boy's day (girls get their turn in March).  I went with one of my Chinese friends to watch the festivities.  All the girls of a class give gifts to the boys.  My friend's class congregated outside the dorms where the boys were and called them to come downstairs, then sang to them many cute silly songs.  Another group was playing a relay game that involved holding a cup with your teeth and pouring the contents into the next person's cup.  And on and on down the line.  China is so cute.

And. . . my experiment finally got set up today!  It's pretty exciting.  I have to feed it everyday for the next five weeks until I leave the University and test the influent or effluent 2/3 of the days.  It's pretty cute.  I'm sure it will wear off after a while, but it's pretty sweet right now to have something useful to do.  It's a relatively novel application, so hopefully we can get some good results.  Though, believe it or not, seafood processing wastewater is a little rank.

Tonight I went with language partner #2, Yanan, to go have a special kind of fish.  It's called "water fish."  The cook brought out the squirming fish in a bag before we ate to make sure it looked ok, and then 10 minutes later, it came out swimming in a huge dish of oil and chiles (its' Sichuanese).  It was so fresh and delicious.  Yanan is a cute Asian girl studying fashion design.  I'm hoping to go to her studio sometime and see her stuff.  

It seems like a lot of people like musicals here, which is amazing.  I can share my strange obsession with friends.  

Oh, and being lonely yesterday, I pulled Atlas Shrugged off the shelf, and have been opening to random pages and overcome with joy.  It's amazing--or sad--how good of a friend that book has become over the years.

Apparently not that different

I had a Wastewater treatment test today in Chinese.  Last week in class, I thought the teacher said the test was Saturday at 9PM.  I thought, whoa that's really weird, but hey, this is China.  Anything is possible.  So I had made plans for this morning and afternoon, and was putzing around at 9AM when I got a call from my classmate asking why I wasn't at the test.  Everyone was amused that I thought they would schedule a test for 9PM.  

The Prof asked the students in the class who were in his lab group out to eat afterwards (which I thought would be really weird at 11PM.  morning was much better) and we went with his family to a nearby Hunan (his home province) restaurant.  It was pretty delicious.  I love the Chinese charing method of eating, so you can try 12 different dishes instead of just one.  And you don't even have to scoop a bunch on your plate.  You just take bits with your chopsticks directly from communal plate to your mouth.  It's so simple.  Hopefully no one has mono.

Lab work at last!

So I started learning in the lab yesterday.  I guess that was my primary reason/excuse for coming here, but I honestly haven't been all that sad not to do lab work.  But I'm still excited for it.  One of the grad students is working on single-chamber microbial fuel cells.  The ultimate goal for the concept is use in wastewater treatment plants to generate electricity while removing organic material.  He is doing some study on whether or not it improves power output to spin the anode, and is also trying to convert one of the reactors from a batch reactor to continuous flow.

He's going to be gone in Harbin next week to give a presentation, so I'm going to help babysit his reactors and feed them substrate every day.  It's pretty exciting, though a little weird at first.  I think it's always hard to come into a new place to do work, because you have no idea what to do.  

I had dinner with my language partner on Sunday (he cooked Chinese food, and next time I'll make western food) and talked for about 3 hours in mostly Chinese.  Someone who lived down the hall came to chat, and I had an entire conversation in Chinese.  Also, my language partner has a classmate from University who's doing her Ph.D. at the U of M Civil Engineering Dept.  I wonder if I've seen her.

Maybe I am cut out to be a teacher. . .

I taught my second English class today, and it was actually awesome.  Their English level is actually very high and they are mostly just shy about talking.  I was also a little less nervous today, and a little more easygoing, which I think helped too.  

We talked about family and holidays today, especially comparing them between the two countries.  Everyone was so amazed when I told them that I have 12 cousins.  About 90% of them were middle children, so we discussed what they thought about the one-child policy.  I went through some of the important american holidays and what we do, and then they talked about Chinese holidays that they like the best.  

The students are shy, but generally very respectful and eager to learn, and if I am laid-back and supportive, they react really well and speak well.  We're still working on the volume level though.

I also visited the largest wastewater treatment plant in China today.  It was amazing.  250 MGD, 16 huge anaerobic digestors, 16 primary clarifiers and aeration basins, and 10 secondary clarifiers.  The sheer mass of it was awe-inspiring.  I went with two master's students and a Ph.D. student who knew a lot about the plant and explained a lot of stuff.  

Woo another awesome day in Beijing.