Internet

I know it was kinda weird how I haven't been posting on my blog after posting daily, but it's because I didn't have any internet at my flat! The place downstairs that helps you set it up was only open once every two weeks (now three weeks since I was too lazy to finish and post this last week :P) and I just missed it when I moved in -___-

After not posting consistently about my adventures, it's difficult to start up again. Similar to procrastination, once it's stop and the things you have to do/talk about pile up, the less you feel like doing it :P So, I'll just blast you guys through the last two weeks.

1.5 weeks into the internship

I found out quite suddenly through email that Daniel (the person I was subletting from) was returning from Greece the next day. So, I had to quickly pack my bags overnight and I left the flat the next morning when Sven picked me up to go to work. Throughout the day, I constantly called Daisy (the flatmate for the new flat) so that I could pick up the keys for the new flat but she failed to pick until an hour before work ended. When she did pick up, she told us that she would not be home until 7 or 8 o’clock at night (we ended work at around 5). Sven seemed pretty impatient during this whole ordeal and he decided to call the housemaster and pay a €15 fee in order to open the door to the new flat. We just needed to provide a contract to the housemaster to tell him that I was actually living in the flat.

When the housemaster finally came to open the door for us, he told us that the contract we had was illegal. There had to be a separate form submitted by the tenant to the StudentNetwork (the school owns the complexes) tell them that she was releasing her contract to me. So the angry man kept yelling at Sven in German and Sven continued to argue with him for another 15 minutes to convince him that we were unaware that Ekaterina (the person I’m subletting from) had not submitted the other form and that we had a separate contract written by Ekaterina telling us we were allowed to live there. Basically, there was a lot of screaming from the “angry man” (that’s what Sven and I refer to him as) and Sven trying to calmly talk to him and telling the angry man not to treat Sven like a child by yelling at Sven the way he did.

Well, in the end I was not let into the apartment and Sven refused to wait for Daisy to come back at 7 or 8 because we believed if we moved in that night, it would have been illegal since the StudentNetwork was not notified. We then drove to the town where Florian lived since Florian’s family owns a winery and his house doubles as a mini hotel (just 3 rooms available like a hotel). We got there and called Florian, but he said the rooms where booked until Sunday. During the entire time that we were waiting in Florian’s town for Florian to call us back (when we initially called him, he didn’t pick up because he was at the gym), it seemed like Sven was seriously panicking about how to get rid of me. Well, that’s how it felt like since he was willing to pay the €15 earlier and he was constantly calling Florian. I was thinking that it should be totally fine if I just stayed over at Sven’s flat. Maybe it’s a cultural thing and the fact that he was living with his girlfriend that he felt it was not right to have me stay over. I’m not sure what he was feeling at the time, but if it was me back in the States, I would relinquish my couch or something for a friend or someone to stay over if they needed it. I’m not sure what to feel about this and I don’t know who to ask to see if this was a cultural thing. (I wrote this section on Word a couple weeks ago but in hindsight, Sven was mostly likely just worried about where I was going to stay rather than trying to "get rid of me" as I put it before. Like I said before, Sven is a very nice guy and I don't know why I put it this way at the time. I guess it just felt really odd as I was experiencing it.)

Anyways, point is that I wasn’t able to stay at Florian’s place and so I stayed in a mini hotel a few houses down from where Sven lives. It was a nice little place that was like a restaurant/hotel (entry through the front leads to the restaurant, and entry through the back/side was to the hotel). The room was small and fit for a single but overall it was quite nice. I’m not quite sure how much the room cost since Sven paid for it but it was good. (another thing I didn’t understand, I mean, wouldn’t it be cheaper to just let me sleep on your couch than for me to stay at a hotel? I just don’t understand….). Anyways, I’ve been internet-less since Wednesday night and I’m currently writing this on a word document on a Sunday night. I thought there would have been internet at the hotel since there was a sign that said internet, but when I actually plugged the LAN cable in, it didn’t work at all. I checked the cable and I noticed that 4 out of 8 of the mini wires within the cable was missing *face palm*. I don’t know how the hotel managed to buy a faulty internet cable or maybe they bought a phone cable and tried to change it into an Ethernet cable, but that was majorly retarded. Anyways, I basically just slept the entire time at the hotel because I had absolutely nothing else to do. I watched a couple Jet Li movies on my laptop, but that was only entertaining for a little bit. Like I said before, some things don’t cut it when you’re not procrastinating.

The picture to the right was taken from my room. Sven picked me up the next morning and we went to the university to speak to the StudentNetwork. When we arrived, it seemed like she knew our purpose there and told us the matter has been resolved. Apparently, the angry man had called the StudentNetwork to give them a heads up that two people (Sven and I) were going to come over in the morning to argue about the contract. Luckily, she told us that Ekaterina did leave a form telling the StudentNetwork that she was going to leave the rest of the contract to me. So we just went back to the flat, talked to the angry man and got my keys to move into the flat. During the ride to the flat, I realized that I had left my jeans with all my keycards at the hotel and I was so embarrassed when I told Sven but we drove all the way back to get my keycards (and my jeans on the side, but mainly for the keycards). Anyways, news spread like wildfire and by the end of the day Florian, Tina, and other people from the lab next door knew that I left my pants in some hotel. Sven said that he had to tell because he needed to explain why we were late to work. Excuses!

My new room for the next 1.5 months

That night I also made donuts with my friends. I learned that donuts were fried and not baked. You really do learn something new everyday :P Btw, they were uber delicious.

Blast through 4 weeks of internship

I'm going to update more on what I did these past few weeks when I come back from Heidelberg if I ever get to it. Here's a short overview of what I did.

***BBQ Monday to celebrate Benjamin's birthday; I bought 2 bottles of Jagermeister at 8 o' clock in the morning. I was pretty embarrassed :P

***Wine tasting at Florians (10 different wines--5 whites, 5 reds; Jagermeister shots); I also tried blood sausage which tasted more plain than nasty and I had liver sausage which had tuna texture. Pretzels and dip were also served with the wine so that we wouldn't get drunk too fast :P It was all very delicious especially that dip! I forget the name but dude, it’s freakin amazing! It’s some sort of cream cheese that is only made in this region. I really have to look up a recipe for it.

The wine was pretty good but I couldn't really rate which ones would be better and whatnot since I'm still not used to wine. It tastes a bit funny to me but I definitely like whites more than reds. During the wine tasting, Florian's sister gave a presentation about how the wine was made and how many acres of land was used to grow the grapes or whatever it was they used to make the wine. Before we drank the wine, we were always supposed to swirl the glass and smell what was inside the wine. Every time I sniffed my glass, I thought it smelled pretty similar. I couldn't really distinctly smell the scent of strawberries, cherries, or whatever fruit we were supposed to smell from the cup >.< By the end of the tasting, I was pretty tipsy. Not as tipsy as later in the week when I drank a beer tower, but I knew I was feeling it :P

Karen and me at the end of the wine tasting.

***Shared a 5L beer tower between 3 people (me, Kurtis, Karen). By the end of it, I was preeetty tipsy (you can probably categorize it as drunk). It took us around 2 hours to finish the tower because we didn't want to get too smashed. Afterwards I walked home and being so tipsy, it was kind weird :P

Our 5L beer tower.

We each had 1.66 L of beer and one shot of Jagermeister that was on the house. The picture above is just a picture showing our accomplishment. All done!

***I went to Cologne. I climbed all 509 steps to reach the top of the cathedral. It was pretty scary by the time I got to the top because at that point it wasn't just a stone spiral staircase where you wouldn't see the outside, it was more of a railing that I had to climb up and I could see the bottom a bit and I'm afraid of heights :\ The hike up the tower for the view was pretty hard, you can hear people wheezing throughout the staircase wondering if they're going to make it. Good thing I'm still in semi-shape :P Staring at the cathedral from the outside kind of messes with you. The cathedral is just so huge! and the shape, the color, and all the carvings in the cathedral really ruins your perception of the cathedral. The picture below is taken 100m away from the cathedral and I still couldn't even capture the main entrance into the cathedral. We spent a good amount of time as we were going around Köln to find an angle where we could get a good view of the cathedral. The last picture with the two of us was the best picture we could get sorta. We had to use our heads to try to block out the buildings :P That angle is the most exposed we could find the cathedral when you're farther away. Even with the cathedral so big, it's hard to get a good picture if there are always these buildings around and we couldn't sneak into a taller building, so we just made the best of it.

I went to the chocolate museum while I was there and I have to say I was slightly disappointed. Going into the museum, I was expecting more of a chocolate tasting kind of scenario rather than exhibits about the history of chocolate and a section showing how chocolate bars are made. The part where they showed how they made chocolate was pretty cool, but as you guys might know, I'm not really good with history and so I don't like it. The only free samples I got was when I purchased my ticket and a cracker dipped in hot chocolate sample :(

***Drank cocktails to celebrate Tina's birthday with the entire lab. We finished work and then walked over just when it was happy hour :) So cocktails were only 4.80 Euro each. I had a Strawberry Mojito (it was only ok compared to the other drinks I had), Zombie (for the amount of alcohol it has in it, it sure was fruity!), Blanco 43 (it tasted like the left over milk after you finished eating all the cereal. Another dangerous drink :P), and two Coronas. I also ate a seafood Paella because I had a craving :P

Sven and I both had Zombies. This picture tells me that I need to lose weight. lol. As you can see from the picture on the bottom, the Zombie drink has two types of Rum, some 73% alcohol, and some fruity Brandy. Dangerous sweet drink :P

After typing all that out, I don't think I'm going to make another post for each event. Hope all that above was good enough.

What I've been doing at work

As for lab, things are going alright I guess. I learned how to make competent cells (they weren't that competent though, DNA doesn't seem to transform properly into the bacterial cells so I will redo this competent cell preparation). I learned how to transform a plasmid into the DH5-alpha cells and then extract the plasmid to be used for later experiments. I've been running a lot of agarose gels and we've sent the plasmid I obtained for sequencing. The results were just like how it looked like in the text books for the Sanger DNA sequencing method. Originally, I transformed three different plasmids into three different cell cultures but only one was successful in reproducing the desired plasmid. Apparently the other two plasmids might have been altered because of chemicals from the company we got the plasmids from. These chemicals probably won't allow us to store the plasmid for long periods of time at minus 80C.

I've been learning a lot of stuff and Sven is a really good teacher. He's very patient and would not mind explaining everything if I didn't understand. At the same time, he tries to get the correct answers from me before he tells me anything. Sometimes I get it right with my guessing (well, sort of guessing) but if not, he'll try giving me hints to push me towards the right answer. :)

Recently I've also been observing how Sven is creating a vector with a deletion in it. It's a pretty long process that requires a lot of agarose gels and eluting the DNA from the agarose gel after running it for 45 minutes. Sven's going to finish that experiment while I'm in Heidelberg.

As for my actual project, I've done four identical promoter assays to measure the effects of the transcription factors on promoter activity for various proteins (ADAM10, BACE1, APP, Control reporter vector). The actual time it takes to do this assay takes only two days, which is why I had a lot of mini projects. Hopefully my results are going to be ok. The standard deviations are a little high for some of the conditions but it might work. One of the problems I'm having is that the results I have aren't the same as Sven's. Apparently he's sorta done this assay before and I have not reproduced his results which implies my results might not be reliable apparently. But we will see when we analyze the data next week to see which values to exclude and whether results were significant.

I've also started the western blot of my project and I must say it's a lot more work than the promoter assay. There's so much well scratching and whatnot to get the lysate from the 12-well plate that my arm gets super tired. Then I have to resuspend protein pellets streaked across a 1.5 ml tube with just 15 ul and that takes like 3 minutes of pipetting up and down the tube. With 12 tubes, that's like 36 minutes of constant pipetting. My thumb was getting major workout by the end of it. My samples are currently in the freezer and ready to be loaded onto the gel. I'll get to see my results hopefully next week after my Heidelberg RISE meeting.

Anyways, talk to you guys in a week!