Na + H20 = Boom!

Work in the lab has been going well - I've been working on total synthesis and even though I've had experience with it in lab class, doing it in an actual lab is still exciting, especially since I have to be much more precise and careful. One of the reactions to convert an oxime to an amine involves sodium, which is very reactive/explosive when exposed to water, so my graduate student keeps a fire extinguisher nearby...just in case. Apparently there's a YouTube video showing what happens when cesium, another element in the same family as sodium, reacts with water. The other reactions are slightly less exciting, but their products are necessary in the overall synthesis, and I'm really sad that experiments are going to be cut short due to various factors because I would really like to make a significant contribution to Professor Zhao and Yan Qifan's research.

Even with another 3 weeks left on this trip, things are already slowing down, not only because of the dwindling supply of solvents. The labs on the fourth floor are being forced to vacate by Friday due to the beginning of renovations, so this week my lab will be working on packing things up and moving and working up the reactions that have already been started. Since we couldn't start any more reactions, we read journal articles and textbooks that were lying around, while doing our best to escape the heat, humidity, and rain engulfing the city.

In terms of moving equipment from the lab, I haven't been able to help much, so I joined Zhaleh's lab to play badminton on Wednesday afternoon. Peking University has a gymnasium behind the Olympic Table Tennis Stadium that has about 9 nets set up just for playing badminton. I'd like to play there more often since badminton is my favorite sport, but a student ID is required, and right now we don't have any unless we go with a student. Afterwards, Zhaleh and I decided to head home but the traffic was pretty slow even though it was only 3pm, so we walked towards a busy area with some malls that we usually pass on the bus. It was an electronics mall, and as soon as we stepped in, all the salespeople heckled us to buy computers and one even followed us up the escalator; I'm pretty sure he thought I was lying when I said I didn't understand Chinese just by that look of disbelief on his face. We ended up going back down the escalator right away anyways and headed instead for the "Wu-Mart Hypermarket" that was just a regular supermarket Wal-Mart type store. The traffic was still bad when we left, so we kept walking along the bus route to Carrefour where we found food from all over the world. They had cheese and pesto (sadly no hummus) but at pretty high prices compared to the Chinese goods, so all I got was a "meat floss bun."

On Friday my parents and my sister came from Thailand to visit me and see Beijing, so I met up with them and showed them around. Saturday evening, I attended a lab dinner with Donna hosted by Professor Zhao and Professor Ma, which was a good occasion for us to get to know our professors and lab members better...all 32 of them. On Sunday, I joined my parents' tour group to the Great Wall at Badaling, which also stopped at the Ming Tombs and Jade Factory. The section of Badaling that the tour took us to was much more crowded with tourists (and was a semi-zoo with bears that you could feed) than the place where Dr. Coppola had led us earlier in the trip, which definitely made me appreciate his experience of traveling in China. Even though that section was harder to walk on, the broken stones and lack of tourists made it feel more authentic and peaceful, though I still have mixed feelings about the Mongolians who had followed us since they were helpful in guiding us but pressured us into making unnecessary purchases. It was one of the few sunny "blue sky" days where you could see the clouds in Beijing though, so I decided that it was much too hot and didn't go up to the top of the Great Wall again.