Johannisfest

As some of you may know, Friday was my birthday and my lab group was really great in that they gave me presents (chocolate, school gear, card), cake (they left it in the PhD student's desk and forgot about it until dinner though, so we're going to have dry cake on Monday :P with lots of tea and coffee. lol.), dinner, and hung out with me at Johannisfest.

Johannisfest is a 4-day long festival that begins on Friday and ends on Monday with fireworks and it is to celebrate John the Baptist's birthday. It's great that it coincides with my birthday :) So my lab basically took me out to dinner first at this church-now-restaurant and then we met up with another RISE participant's PhD student and herself (they were friends with Sven/Florian). Afterwards, we just walked around the festival and drank some wine/shots along the way. It's really great awesome when you can drink on the streets, if only they had this in America. I have to mention that when you purchase a drink at the festival, they charge you for the cup/glass your drink came in. So you can take your drink with you as you wander around the festival and just return the glass to a beer stand and get your money back. Great system :) So yea, we just hung around and drank beer :P

I also attended a lecture with Florian on Friday just to see how a lecture (hall) was like. The lecture talked about protein degradation (via ubiquination?), citric acid cycle, other cycles, DNA replication, and DNA repair. So I guess the class would cover both biochemistry and molecular biology. The professor seemed very nice and enthusiastic but he seemed to go through the slides quite fast. A lot of material was covered and I don't know if I could have understood everything if I had not taken the classes on these topics already. Based on my one lecture sample, it feels like lectures in Germany are pretty similar to those in the USA.

So yea, for the rest of my weekend, I just lounged around outside where the festival was located and listened to tons of live music. I tried more weinschorle (half white wine half sparkling water), lots of erdbeerbowle (strawberries in red or white wine), and a sangria :)

I think I also got slightly more tan today since I laid around in direct sunlight. There's a tan-line right on my chest now. *sigh* I wish I didn't tan that easily.

Irish Pub

The fact that the sun doesn't set until 10p really screws with how I tell time. I mean, if light is still out, I'll think that it's probably around 5 or 6, but holy smokes! it's 9pm!

The other night I went out to an Irish Pub to listen to some live music and drink some beer on the side. The music was very nice (acoustic of multiple songs by U2, Maroon 5, and others) and I tried an apple cider which didn't taste like non-alcoholic apple cider or beer. It was pretty good since it had the nice apple taste and it didn't have a strong bitter taste due to the alcohol content. Kurtis ordered a round of shots for the three of us so I tried a Jagermeister which kinda burned a little as it went down (probably a lot less than vodka would) and I also tried a Becks beer. Becks tastes kinda weird in my opinion, so I don't think I'll be ordering it again.

It was really nice just chilling, just drinking my beer and listening to music. When the pub got crowded, people started dancing a bit to the music and so I felt obligated to dance as well -___- . It's quite awkward for me so I didn't really like it.

It seems that life in Europe is a lot more relaxing than in the US. People don't rush for you to leave a restaurant by constantly pestering you to see if you want to have the bill. You can just lounge around outside a restaurant/cafe and just sip your drink and watch people go by and it feels like an overall relaxed attitude. For two days in a row, I just met up with other RISE participants and sat at different cafes to chat about random things and drink fruity drinks such as this Sex on the Beach.

I figure I really like this kind of lifestyle where I just have work from 9-5p and then I can just relax and do whatever I want after work. Lounge around and chat with some close friends. It just seems like a no stress lifestyle :) It makes me wonder what kind of job I should have in the future. I mean, maybe I just like experiencing everything in this foreign country so I don't mind having so much free time. I guess I'll just have to see :P

Unsuccessful

Today was just a bunch of screw ups :( During the final steps of purifying a plasmid from a bacteria, I applied to much force to the plunger and caused a lot of the eluate to quickly squirt out of the syringe (it is important to have the eluate drip out slowly so that the DNA plasmid would have a good amount of time to bind to the Nucleobond Finalizer). This probably caused me to lose a lot of my DNA and lowered my nucleic acid concentration :( In the end I only had 1733 ng/ul. The PI mentioned at lunch that the best they had was around 4000 ng/ul which means I have a loooong ways to go. *sigh*

One really awesome thing I have to mention is that the lab has this spectrophometer that requires only 1 ul (1 microlitre, it's like the speck of a raindrop when it's sprinkling) of sample to measure the absorbance, nucleic acid concentration, protein concentration, EVERYTHING. Dude! that is so awesome. I looked it up just now and it is called the nanodrop. I wish they had these in biolabs rather than using those freakin cuvettes (1 ml of fluid required). Things would be so much easier with everything calculated for you instantly!

Another problem with my technique today was loading the DNA sample into the agar gels after they have been digested with restriction enzymes. I didn't really know that I wasn't supposed to go into the wells while I was loading the wells so I did a little damage to the bottom of the well (but not enough to puncture the well entirely, thank goodness). I asked Sven what I should do so that I don't kill the gel, and he told me that I should leave my pipette above the well and just allow the sample to flow from the pipette tip into the well because glycerin is mixed into the sample and it is denser than the buffer, which would allow everything to just sink down. Hopefully I will do this correctly tomorrow and not screw up too badly.

Why am I repeating this experiment if I'm just checking to see if the correct plasmid was extracted? Well...the restriction enzyme (SmaI) didn't exactly work...or it was super inefficient. Apparently the plasmid was only cut once by the enzyme rather than twice (there are two restriction sites for SmaI in the particular plasmid I was using) because it was slow acting. *sigh* Oh wells, tomorrow I'm repeating experiment except I'll be using BamHI and EcoRI which are known to be fast acting :)

Anyways, let's stop on my sad rant. I'm going to try a döner now with my flatmate :)

[EDIT]

Finally tried a döner just now with Marion somewhere halfway from my flat to the main station. It seemed like quite a busy street with some bars here and there. The döner I tried is apparently a very standard and normal döner in Germany (apparently there are many different kinds such as sandwich style, on a plate with sides style and some other ones that I can't remember? döner in Turkish is just supposed to be the meat in the bread rather than the entire sandwich itself). It was pretty tasty, but I wouldn't say it's super awesome that I'd eat it everyday. I mean, this is still German fast food. It might be really unhealthy since Florian (PhD student #2) said the meat used in the döner is total "rubbish". He also totally dissed the döner before Sven told him that I was going to try one today, then he kinda fake complemented it :P (sorry for the super bad coloring of the photo, I think I didn't have enough light and I can't work magic with my camera -____-)

Marion also ordered me a Turkish Chai Tea but when the order came, she said it wasn't prepared the normal Turkish way. She didn't elaborate, so I don't know what she meant by that. It seemed like it was just a Turkish tea bag in a cup on a saucer. Maybe they also added some special stuff to it, but whoooo knows? I added a block of sugar so I can't really say how the tea tastes like alone but it tastes pretty good after that cube of sugar. :P

I feel a little fat right now :( My portions today felt way to big since it felt wrong to leave too much of my lunch since I left so much yesterday (like half) and it seemed wrong to not eat the entire döner. I'm too lazy to run though....gah! Such a dilemma!

I also want to mention that I tried typing on a German keyboard today....and man the slight differences make it so hard! First, I use the "y" key quite often and sadly, the "y" key and "z" key are switched on German keyboards, so I kept messing up. Florian and Sven just laughed at me -___-. The "Enter" key is also like..one extra key away (for three letters: Ü, Ö, Ä) and I can't...really reach it without moving my entire hand >.<. *sigh* It sucks that I can't get used to the German keyboard either since I will still use the US keyboard when I'm typing on my own keyboard like right now.

Oh yea, I described Sven to Marion when I showed her this blog. Like I said earlier, Sven is what I would call the "cool type". I feel like he can have the "I'm hot stuff" stuff attitude but he doesn't really show that around me. It's probably because he's more focused on translating his German thoughts into English when he speaks to me. He also has 5 piercings total (3 on one ear, 1 on the other, and a tongue piercing) and he drives a brand new BMW. I also showed Marion the lab photo that is from my "First Impressions" post, and she said that Sven is what she would call a "Proll" which is apparently a German equivalent for "chav" (UK version). But I always thought that chavs were more loserish...at least that's what Denise and Marcel made it sound like when I was in HK. I feel that Sven doesn't carry himself in a loserish way though. WHAT IS A CHAV?!?! I'M CONFUSED!!!

And I feel I should mention that even though I describe Sven as the "cool guy type," he's really nice, sweet and sometimes comes off as shy and quiet. He's very noncritical on the things I do, and reassures me whenever he thinks I'm worried about future encounters with another professor or difficult experiments. He's overall chill and is probably the typical German nice (as in just like Marion! but in guy form) :) I don't want to create a bad impression of him because he's totally awesome!

Meeting the Lab

Finally went to work today :) It was a half hour uphill trek to get there but I made it :P My SIM card is still not working so Sven called me at around 8:30 to make sure I was still alive and coming to work :P Such a worry wart. When we finally met up at the bus stop, I told him about my weekend (the fact that I got lost and that I watched a film at the cinema) and he totally laughed at me. I guess it is pretty weird that I watched a German film without knowing any German :P.

First thing we did when we got to the office at 9am, was coffee break! I get my own mug and desk at the office :) The PI (Tina) also brought some chocolate croissant like thing for all the people in the lab and she got me a travel book for Mainz. She joked that it was perfect for me after my trek to school since it was how to tour Mainz by foot. The lab was pretty small, including only 2 PhD students (Sven and Florian), the PI, and myself.

Sven gave me a tour of the areas that I will be working in (all the equipment spread out in a bajillion rooms -___-). Did I mention I work at the Clinic of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy in the University of Medicine? Yea, slightly weird. So this means that all doors are automatically locked and can only be opened via keycard. If you turn the knob without a keycard, it just keeps turning but does not lock on to the locking mechanism to actually open the door. For some reason, my keycard didn't work the first time (everything Sven gives me doesn't seem to work...first the SIM card and now the keycard. lol. I kid.) but luckily I got it to work after another visit to the office.

As for techniques I learned today, Sven taught me how to subculture a overcrowded cell plate in a sterile manner (he demonstrated and then I did one myself) and I learned to prepare a cell medium for my cells :). I also observed as he measured ADAM10 expression from cells treated with miRNAs. Expression was measured through the reporter gene luciferase with a machine that measured luminescence (or absorbance if it has to). Everything was pretty good today and I didn't screw up yet. So let's cross my fingers and hope I don't majorly screw up any time soon :)

If you guys are wondering what the hell my project is on, read on. So it is widely accepted that Alzheimer's disease is caused by plaques and tangles within the brain. My lab focuses on the plaque component of the disease. Amyloid precursor protein (APP) is the initial protein within the brain. A beta secretase (BACE1) followed by a gamma secretase cleaves and releases three separate proteins from the cell membrane. The protein of interest is AB-peptide, which clumps together to form the plaques.

The previous lab my PI worked in discovered another protease, ADAM10, that cleaves APP in such a way that that AB-peptide would not be formed after gamma secretase cleavge. My project specificially studies how two particular transcription factors affect the expression of ADAM10 and BACE1. The promoter activity for each protein is measured with a reporter gene, luciferase and the ratio for promoter activities will be calculated (ADAM10 promoter activity/BACE1 promoter activity) where a high ratio means that more ADAM10 is produced while BACE1 production would be decreased. This section measures specifically the transcription of ADAM10 and BACE1.

The second section of my project studies the effects of the transcription factors on ADAM10 and BACE1 translation. Protein expression would be measured directly via western blot or ELISA. And that is the general basics of my lab.

Eine Insel Namens Udo

I finally got to meet the other RISE participants today! We met up at the cinema and pretty much randomly chose a film based on the time. Initially, there was a miscommunication that some of the films would be shown in English with German subtitles, so I walked over to the theatre thinking that everything would be just fine. But I got over there and they were like...noooo...everything is in German! So I thought, ok...then you guys should watch X-men First Class since you haven't seen it yet. Since I've already seen it, I should be able to make my own subtitles and just watch everything for the action. Sadly, we missed the showing and were forced to randomly choose a movie to watch. Luckily, the movie we chose was a nice quirky romantic comedy.

The movie is about a man that is basically invisible to everybody since he was young. He's invisible to the point where he could get hit by a car, and the driver would not even know. People just didn't notice him regardless of what he did. I mean, he slept in a tent at the department store he works at and the security guards wouldn't even notice since he was "invisible". Anyways, long story short, he meets a girl who can actually see him and they fall in love :P. It was very cute and apparently (according to the people who were translating the film for me as we watched it) it's a very typical German comedy movie (Black humor as one of them put it). It was a really nice experience even though I didn't understand all of the dialogue. Just knowing the gist of it was enough for me :)

I also have to mention that I ordered a "medium" drink, which I ordered in German (Mittel Pepsi was what I said, and then the vendor asked me if I wanted anything else and I didn't understand so my friend had to step in and tell them no. So much for trying to be German >.< . She was probably wondering why the heck I was in a German cinema without knowing any German. How was I going to understand anything?!? Good thing I had some nice translators :) ) The drink was definitely far from medium though. When I saw the drink, I was like...wow. It was a freakin 1 litre! That thing was massive. It had to be like 3-4 inches in diameter man. Apparently the large is 1.5 litres. Dude, I drank half a bottle of pepsi today, that's how crazy it is (and yes, it's all fountain soda. They didn't add any ice at all).

After the movie, we trekked over to the brewery and I had my first German meal. I ordered turkey and mushroom gravy over rice because..well...it has rice in it and I love mushroom :P. It was pretty big and I decided I should probably control my portions so I only ate half of it. I also ordered my first beer in Germany. I had no idea what it was but it was "light" as opposed to....dark draft? I don't know beer too well as you can see. It was pretty good. I feel like it tasted kinda sweet sometimes but it also had the bitter taste of beer. My taste buds were pretty darn confused. But it was pretty good :)

My first beer in Germany :) Apparently it tasted a little bit like Guinness according to one of the other participants.

Here's my turkey mushroom over rice dish. It was really good and it had a good amount of sauce enough flavor :)

I could only finish half of it though, I had to take it to go. I think they put it in a styrofoam box wrapped in foil (why the foil? I don't know)

Here's a pretty bad shot of the brewery I was at. I was totally too lazy to step back 20 metres, so this is all you get.

The other RISE participants (left to right: Kurtis, Karen, Sarah). Kurtis and Sarah learned German in high school so they helped translate the film for me :)

So far, the only German word I feel sorta confident enough to say is "Danke" which means "thank you". It's kinda necessary to say, or else you just seem plain rude, and you know I don't want to be labeled "the rude one". Hopefully as I get more used to German, I'll say more key phrases :P

I finally start work tomorrow! Let's hope everything goes alright and I don't screw up too badly :P

Lost and Illiterate

I realized today how difficult it is to get around when you are illiterate. I tried reading a sign today to determine how much a bus fare costed but there were just a bunch of German words with numbers next to them. Some of the fees were really low at 1.50 Euros and some were as high at 7 Euros! In the end, I asked a kind woman to tell me how much the fare was. Turns out it was 2.40 euros.

When the bus arrived, I put in 2.50 euros because I didn't have the right change. I was about to leave the front of the bus, but the bus driver called me back and he gave me change!!!! I was so fascinated that they actually gave me change, this has never happened before. In Hong Kong and San Francisco, they always ask for exact change or else they'll just take what extra you gave them. It's so awesome, if only the fare wasn't so expensive.

Most of the day today was just me being SUPER lost. I went out to the middle of nowhere to try to buy a used bike for 20-30 euros (so cheap!) because there was supposed to be a bike sale event there or something. By the time I got there in a really round about fashion, a nice old man told me the event was closed for some reason (no, it's not because I arrived late that it was closed). So I had to pay another 2.50 to get my ass back to the main station (Hauptbahnhof) so that I could meet some other RISE students in Mainz.

I tried to get a map from the station but the mini map the information center had did not cover the area where I was trying to get to. Assuming that I had a gist about where it might be, I started wandering along this street that should bring me to the the university. At some point I walked past the university apparently and continued going in the wrong direction. Since I was lost to the point where I had no idea where I was going, I asked two elderly women where I should go and they told me I was going in the totally wrong direction! Total fail. So they drew me a map and I had to walk 30 minutes until I got there :\ By the time I got to where I was supposed to meet the other RISE participants, I was 40 minutes late and they have already left obviously. The fact that my mobile phone (Handy in German...so cute) was not working did not help at all. Apparently they kept trying to call me but it did not go through. I thought I would be able to receive calls since I was able to take my PhD student's call yesterday. Guess not.

After being totally lost and stranded, I made my trek back to where I thought I could take the bus but then I realized I was totally too cheap to pay another 2.40 euros for 3 measly stops. So i began my long trek back to the main station. At some point, I passed by the University of Medicine. All the buildings that belonged to the University of Medicine had like the same label on them (UniversitatMedizin), and I wonder how they know which building they should go to.

I spy with my little eye a helical staircase :P

What I first thought was the only building for the Universitatmedizin.

Then I found more!

Anyways, long story short. I wandered a lot today and took some random pictures along the way. Got super tired and the soles of my feet hurt to the point where I wondered if I had blisters. Then I came home and had a nice nap :)

At night my flatmate, Marion, took me outside I finally tried some wine (weinshorle which is one to one riesling and water) from the art exhibition next door (the artists live upstairs from us) for 2 euros. I learned to clink my glass of wine against others while holding the stem to get the best sound from the clink. My wine glass was pretty full, so I was really worried that when I knock glass with others my glass would tip, fall, and break. So I don't think I did it properly :P

Afterwards, we wandered toward this place called Peng (http://www.pengland.de/?sp_events=blota-blota-museumsnacht-mark-bohle) and listened to this band called J.Stone Orchestra. They were quite good apparently because people were dancing to the music according to Marion. I thought it was pretty good but not something super mind blowing. The flat Peng was located in was very crowded with university students with them all dancing, smoking, and drinking (apparently, they couldn't sell alcohol there so they were giving it out for "free" but according to my roommate, you're expected to give a "donation" based on how much your drink should cost).

Anyways, I feel that I probably shouldn't bore you guys every day with my activities written in diary form. So when things settle down and I'm getting less culture shocked, I'll update weekly or something.

First Impressions

I've just arrived in Germany and I must say, it's quite different. Growing up in the city, I've grown used to the hard grey cement and metropolitan style architecture. Here in Germany however, it's filled with tons of green scenery where there are plenty of trees along the freeways and surrounding each town. As we were flying closer to the ground to finally land at the airport, this is the view I got (the picture below is from the internet, but it is basically the same)

Here you can see just one town, but you can imagine that as you're flying over Germany, you can tell distinctly where each city is based on the little cluster of red roofs. In America, it would be very hard to determine where each city begins and ends. The way things are laid out in Europe is quite unique and I like it.

I have to mention that when I used the public restroom in the Frankfurt Hahn airport, I was very confused. Rather than having a very grid like layout for the stalls, there were a lot of twists and turns. So it was kinda like a very scrunched up "S" layout for the stalls. I was very confused when I first entered and saw what I thought was a very small amount of stalls until I peeked around the first stall and saw a "row" of stalls. Also, the "towel dispensing" device was totally different from a normal towel dispenser. It was more like a cloth towel that you pull down with both hands and then it retracts from the bottom like a scroll would. I feel like Europe is probably very eco-friendly if they even have towel "dispensers" like those.

The Frankfurt Hahn airport was very large but it was also very empty. I didn't really hear much German at the airport and instead, American English was the predominant language I heard from travelers. I also found it quite odd how there was only one window at customs for both EU and non-EU travelers, luckily the line still went by pretty fast. I guess they aren't that paranoid in Europe (at this point, I have to say I went through the body scan at SFO, it was ok I guess...). When I got to the arrival hall, I easily found my PhD student due to a picture I found online of all the people in the lab I am going to be working in.

Before you say it Wen, I must say that I am not a crazy stalker. My dad made me look up all the information possible about my PhD student in case I was entering some scam program. He was pretty paranoid about the entire thing. Anyways, Sven is the one on the far left. He is very nice and I think I would describe him as the "cool guy" type with his 4 ear piercings (3:1 on the ear) and fairly stylish way of dress. He's very funny and cute because he downloaded an English-German dictionary on his iPhone because he was afraid he wouldn't understand me very well. He doesn't understand everything I say sometimes, so I may have to rephrase what I say with simpler vocabulary or explain the word. He only whipped out the application once so far lol. He has a mediocre sense of direction in that he can't remember where he parked (even though each aisle is numbered...he forgot the number. lol. At least he got the correct floor of the garage) and barely remembered where my first flat for the summer was. Initially, I thought he was total baller since he drove a brand new BMW but as we were driving on the freeway, I noticed that all the cars on the streets are German (lots of BMWs and Volkswagons with not a Toyota or Honda in site). I guess it's quite common to be baller.

After I dropped off my luggage at my flat, Sven walked me to the main bus stop where all the buses run and told me which line to take (well, we did a little searching because he wasn't totally sure. There were A LOT of bus and tram lines and we were looking for one specific line). I could tell he wasn't very prepared to help me out with all the things I needed because there were a lot of moments where we would have to ask some people at shops to look for where things were. After around three hours of wandering around the same area, we finally 1) exchanged my USD to Euro 2) got a SIM card 3) confirmed Deutsche Bank allows me to withdraw money without an ATM fee 4) ate a 10 minute sandwich lunch 5) brought groceries. It was quite fun wandering around the area and it was funny how lost we were. But hey, we got everything done :P. Afterwards, I finally got back to the flat and took a nap :).

I'll give you a mini tour of the flat I will be staying in for June:

As you can see, the room I'm subletting has a nice bed and desk for me. It's very nicely decorated with a very homey feel to it.

The kitchen is quite small but has everything I need.

The living room is very small, it ends where that black couch is and it begins where the green couch is. It can seat 4 people in very close proximity to each other.

Look how short I am in front of the mirror. I can't even see myself LOL.

Here's a different mirror. I can see myself only because I'm on my tippy toes. :P

I'm too lazy to take pictures of other parts of the flat, but it's very nice. Very tall ceilings and whatnot. The other flatmate that will be with me is named Marion. She's very friendly in that she gave me a quick tour of the flat and we had a nice chat for an hour or two. Apparently, most students in Germany take time off between high school and university to do something else before they return to schooling, so Marion is already 28 years old! So much older than me! She told me how she thought American architecture was strange. Well, I guess it's not architecture, but more the layout of cities. She explained that the center of most German cities are normally where the oldest parts of the city are located. The government funds people to renovate these buildings, and I guess it might be a way to keep their culture. She said in American cities, the center of the city is also quite old, but it is also where all the poor people live and there are no renovating of buildings in the United States. People just build new ones and toss out the old.

Another neat thing about her is that she rolls her own cigarettes! At first I thought it was weed, but the contents looked more like cigarette. It was very different, and I have never seen it in my life. Anyways, that's my quick blurb for the night and I'll tell you more when I get super culture shocked again :P