How to miss three consecutive buses

I don't really have much to say, but I did manage to miss three consecutive buses today, so I guess I'll talk about that...haha There are 2 buses (355, 365) that go from the PKU East gate (where the chem building is) to our Wanliu apartments.

First, I was walking over the bridge that goes over the Zhong Guan Cun Road when I sighted the 355 bus off in the distant. I figured, if I started running, I could probably make the bus. So I sprinted all the way to the bus stop, got out my bus card, and was about to get on...but then...the bus driver decided to close the doors in my face and drive off. That's happened to me before, so I figured I'll catch the next bus...

10 min later, a 365 arrived. I can't possibly miss a bus while standing AT the bus stop right?!... Since there are so many different buses that arrive (seemingly simultaneously) at each stop, each bus has its designated parking spot. And the bus drivers are really picky about people getting own at the exact spot along the bus stop. Since I didn't want to po the bus driver, I waited at the 365 spot. But the bus decided to pull up at the 355 spot (the total opposite end of the bus stop!) and it wasn't even by curb, it was parked one lane over. The 365 stopped for 10 sec, while I was starring at it, and it drove off. (buses here apparently run in pairs and come at 20-30 min intervals as apposed to one every 10-15 min...sometimes it seems like the bus drivers are racing each other, but that's just my hypothesis). Anyways, so 10 seconds afterwards, another 365 came. But that bus assumed that the first one had picked everyone up from my stop, so it didn't even bother stopping...

Meanwhile, I was like "Oh crap! I guess I'll just take a cab home" (it was getting late 9:30pm). This shouldn't have happened, but 2 min later, another 365 came...I was half expecting it to keep on driving, but it surprisingly stopped at the right place and I managed to get on...miraculously! Of course my bus somehow got into a traffic jam at this one intersection as another 365 passed us. After passing that intersection, my bus driver assumed that the previous three 365 have picked everyone up, so we essentially only stopped at 3 of the next 6 stops...haha...and that was just to drop people off. But the funny part was, since we didn't really stop anywhere, our bus driver drove incredibly fast. In fact, he drove so fast that the entire bus was vibrating like it had two flat tires.

Lab Do's and Don'ts

Lab Do's:
Experiments
Talking to Grad students
Fun
Smelling disgusting organic solvents

Lab Don'ts
1) Don't spill chloroform on the rubber gloves that you are wearing...it reacts with the rubber and gives off heat(if you do spill it on your gloves, don't leave your gloves on for 5 min like I did)

2) Try not to do reactions involving Sulfur....S-CH3 exchanged for a Br smells like rotten eggs x 20 ...I'm not even exaggerating...it smelled so bad we had to go on another floor to do our reaction just so that our lab group won't hate us for the rest of the month.

3) Don't forget what you learned in Ochem lab....when doing a reflux, the incoming water goes in the bottom of the cooling vessel and comes out the top, not the other way around....lets just say that I had a little mishap in the lab today

4) Don't pour your product into a column before the silica gel has settled completely. You will get a very crooked column and some of your product will come out at the same time as some byproducts.

Weekened adventures

On Saturday, we decided to go to the Golden Resource Mall (Asia's largest mall) to do some ice skating. This mall is just absolutely amazing! It spans a couple blocks length wise and another 2 blocks width wise. The fifth floor is the dining floor and it has round 20 restaurants with cuisines from all around China. In addition, it has an arcade room and 2-3 bubble tea kiosks. Starbucks, McDonald's, KFC and Papa John's are on the first floor. Everything else between 1 and 5th floor is a shopper's paradise, but it doesn't interest me since all I care about is eating (ask anyone from our group...haha) Ok, back to skating. The skating rink is on the second basement level, one level below the car dealership. Think about that! A car dealership underneath a shopping mall! Anyways, ice skating was very fun. Once you buy a ticket, you get to skate for 90 min (skate rental included). Getting skates was an adventure in itself since all the sizes are the same as European sizes. Once we had the sizes figured out, I still couldn't fit into my skates because I apparently have wide feet. So I had to get skates that were 3 sizes bigger. Finally, we were able to get on the ice and have some fun. It was a blast! I also thought it was really funny that there were a bunch of 6-7 year olds in full ice hockey gear zooming up and down the ice trying hit each other.

Sunday was Allison's Birthday, so we out for dinner and afterwards had cake. At dinner, we ordered this delicious eggplant dish that we devoured in 10 min. So naturally, we had to order a second plate of it. However, the chefs decided to play a joke on us and purposely (maybe...) left the seeds in the green pepper that were in the eggplant dish(just fyi...peppers that seem like ordinary bell peppers are frequently hotter than any pepper you've ever had...so if you don't watch out, everything will taste like rubber for a month) After we were done eating, we had quite a few of those green peppers left. So I came up with the stupid idea of spinning the "glass spinner" (often times tables at Chinese tables are round, and have a glass spinner in the middle so that the food can be rotated around the table for everyone to share), and whoever the plate of peppers pointed to had to eat a green pepper filled with seeds. The spinner pointed to a few people and finally made its way in my direction. After eating my pepper (it wasn't that bad) I gave the spinner a big push....and along the way...it somehow knocked over quite a few dishes and tea cups and spilled some sauce/juice on Nicole's skirt.

I forgot to mention that we've played our second soccer match on Sunday as well. Every Sunday there are a whole bunch of students from the University playing recreationally. Spencer "the Hattrick" Leong dominated the game like Cristiano Ronaldo did in the Champions League Final. It was just a great overall performance! Mr. Hattrick even promised more goals in the near future. Also, Melody "Gerrard" Campbell showed her smoothness and agility on the pitch by defending the back end of the field like no other player. Her toughness and leadership will certainly lead to a contract extension from FC Liverpool.

Last days of Fun, First days of work

Here are some of the interesting things that we've done during the past two weeks.

Michigan Alumni Event: We "students of this chemistry program and the joint institute" were invited to participate in Michigan's 3rd annual alumni event. This event was quite an experience because was gathering of alums as well as featuring speakers such as Rich Rogel and Lloyd Carr. In addition, we got to listen to an absolute marvelous violin performance by Xiang Gao, a world famous violinist. Not only was the music amazing, but the violin he used was also very impressive: 1699 Stradivarius violin “Lady Tennant”, which he received from the Stradivari Society of Chicago. Below is a link to some of Xiang Gao's play.

http://www.udel.edu/violin/music.html

During that week, we also attended an acrobatics show and the Peking opera. The acrobatics show was just great! One of the performers juggled 9 balls on the floor and another biked along a rope while ridding a unicycle with shoulder pads. The Peking opera was interesting because we were allowed to see the actors paint their faces.

By the end of the week, some of the people from our program went on a trip to Xi'an. The rest of us stayed behind and visited the summer palace on Saturday and the Temple of Heaven on Sunday. The summer palace was a nice place to just chill and walk around. We also took a boat out to the lake.



Temple of Heaven was cool but the main temple wasn't as big as I expected...haha I guess those National Geographic people did a good job filming. Prior to visiting the Temple of Heaven, Julia the Join Institute Program director, took us to a famous dumpling restaurant, where Tom and I had an eating contest....it ended with each of us consuming 35 dumplings...pretty disgusting..haha



First week of work:

It was great to finally start doing what we are here for, but as with most internships, we didn't get very much done the first week. Kelly and I are both in Prof. Pei's lab, which focuses on the synthesis of novel light emitting materials, which could potentially be applied to electronic devices. So the type of work done in this lab is definitely very interesting. The past week, I watched my Ph.D student Hai Bo conduct organic reactions such Sonogashira and Suzuki. It was exciting to see how these reactions, which I've learned about in Ochem, are actually done. Next week, I will start ( and hopefully finish) a set of reactions that were just completed in our lab and the findings have just been submitted to a scientific journal.

I think it is also important to mention the lab setting here at PKU. The inorganic and physical chemistry department have just moved into a brand new building this year. The old building, which is undergoing renovations will house the organic department and others that I don't know about...sorry I guess that was my random short update on the chemistry buildings.

Pictures from Week 1 and 2

Here are some pictures of our trip so far.


Si-Ma-Tai portion of the Great Wall


Jin-Shan-Ling portion of the Great Wall


Shopping at the Pearl Market


the Forbidden City