Week 7

This is going to be a short post. I continued doing research. I have been making steady progress with my reactions and I have improved some of the reaction schemes. I spend almost all my time trying to complete my reactions, so that is pretty much my week 7.

Week 6

I traveled to Shanghai this week. I really liked Shanghai, but I did not like the hot and humid weather. I went to The Shanghai Museum which had a lot of relics from various parts of China's history. I also walked around Shanghai and I saw the Pearl Tower and the two tallest buildings in Shanghai. I met one of my friends who was in Shanghai and she showed me the traditional Shanghai. I had some amazing traditional Shanghai dishes. One dish was a noodle soup that had raw egg dumped into the water, which was instantly cooked by the very hot water. I also had rice that was cooked inside of bamboo. I also went to the Shanghai Beach. The beach was one of the best parts of my trip. The water was warm and clean and the beach was clean. I had to pay to go inside the beach, but it was definitely worth it. The Shanghai beach was much better than the Qingdao beach that I had gone to. I also ate with some of my friend's friends. I went to my friend's friends parents house to have dinner. It was really fun and the food was great. I was really happy that I was able to eat dinner with them because everyone was so nice.

I also went to Hanzhou. Hanzhou was very pretty. It has a beautiful lake called West Lake. I spent most of the day at the lake, enjoying the mountains by the lake. I walked around the lake and enjoyed the beautiful weather. After enjoying the lake, I walked around the city with people from the program. We saw a Ferrari store and we went in and talked to the people inside. The signs said no touching and no pictures of the cars but we managed to convince the people to let us take a few pictures. I really liked Hanzhou. It was very pretty and relaxing.

I also did research during the week. I am still doing a ton of reactions and purifications. I am really enjoying the experience.

Week 5

Well, I have reached the halfway point of the program. My body is finally acclimated to the Beijing weather! I spent most of my week in the lab. The highlight of the week was the group dinner with my research group. We had group meeting on the same day. This was not too exciting because it was four hours of presentations in Chinese. After the meeting, my professor drove us to the restaurant for our group dinner. Everyone from our lab was there. It was a lot of fun and the food was really good. I got to pick the food that I wanted to eat and then I grilled it on a grill in the middle of the table. Overall, I think this week was great because I felt good and I felt comfortable with the progress that I made in the lab.