This past Friday after Spanish class in the morning we hopped on a train to El Puerto Santa Maria to take a tour of the Osborne sherry winery. It was cool to walk around and see all the old-fashioned equipment that they used to use to make the wine and also to walk through the winery gardens, which were impressive considering the bland exterior of the building that you see from the street. The tour was in Spanish (clearly) though and the tour guide talked way too fast, so I actually didn't catch 95 percent of what he said. But it was still fun and, of course, they let us try some of the sherries they produce at the end of the tour.
After the wine tour Ashley, Rachel and I left with my flatmate Mario to visit Granada for the weekend. During the whole week preceding Granada, everyone would invariably tell us that we needed to get tickets to see La Alhambra now, because they sold out over a week in advance. So we got tickets on Monday to see La Alhambra on Sunday morning, because all of Saturday was sold out. Granada is a beautiful, youthful, vibrant city and lots of tourists from all over the world like to visit the city. We spent Friday and Saturday wandering around the city and seeing everything we could in the short time we had. We went out on Saturday night but had to go back to the hotel early by Spanish time, 3:30 a.m., which was the time that all the locals we were with started to go to the discos. We needed our rest for the main attraction, La Alhambra.
La Alhambra is an old Moorish palace, dating back to the 1300s, where the sultans used to live when the Moors occupied Spain. It is enormous and immensely beautiful. We got to La Alhambra at 8:15 a.m. and did not leave until 3 p.m. I do not take many pictures, but I took over 130 pictures at La Alhambra. I only have 200 pictures total on my camera. Instead of trying to describe the architecture and gardens, I will show some pictures. All of the pictures are of the various gardens and buildings that comprise La Alhambra, but they do not capture even half of the palace. Enjoy.
In lab, I have been continuing with the Kjeldahl method on the Ramalina terebrata lichen sample to remove nitrogen from the sample by converting it first to ammonia and then to ammonium. After I got the product from the Kjeldahl reaction, I titrated the sulfuric acid with NaOH and used a simple formulat to determine percent protein.
So, if you are taking analytical chemistry and wondering when you will ever need to titrate a sample outside of the classroom, read this blog. Sorry there is no picture of the titration, but if you have used methyl red as an indicator before, then you know exactly what the picture would look like. Determination of fatty acids will be the next thing we will determine for our lichen species.
