On Wednesday night, at around 9 p.m. (the sun is up until like 10:10) I went to play a pickup game of soccer (futbol) with the two guys who live in my apartment with me, two guys I know from working in the allelopathy lab, and three other guys (I was the only American). So it was pickup soccer, and I played soccer all through high school, so I thought I would do fine, as the guys are older than me (like 24-27) and they said they weren't very good at soccer and were out of shape. So anyway, the point of this long introduction is to set the stage for the butt kicking given to me by these guys. Not all of them were good players (two were only OK), but there were three guys who were very good, and hit give-and-gos like they had been playing together for years. I also was the first person to leave, at 10:10 when it got dark, because I was dead tired and had been standing in a fixed position for the final 15 minutes like I was rooted in the cement we were playing on. They kept playing until 10:30. Yeah.
Side note on soccer: so Spaniards riot in the streets after big soccer matches, I don't know if it happens after wins or losses or both (probably both). I was watching CSI Miami in Spanish and trying to understand what was happening, and during one commercial break there was a public service announcement from someone in the government, asking people not to destroy public property after soccer matches. And it was a serious commercial. Yeah.
On Thursday night at around 10 p.m., we went down to a tiny bar in town because we had heard that they had live flamenco music on Thursday nights. When we got there, there were two chairs on top of a table, and a lot of people packed into the tiny bar. The two chairs were for the performers, a mid-40s guy playing guitar and a mid-40s girl singing. And that was it. I had never heard flamenco music before, but I definitely enjoyed it. The guy was a phenomenal guitar player and played an acoustic guitar like it was a mix of a bass and a banjo. And although I couldn't understand the lyrics, the woman was singing her heart out for this tiny crowd packed into a tiny bar.
Flamenco is hard to describe, so I'm not going to try to explain it any more. But I will be going back next Thursday.
This week in lab we have been analyzing our columns for various compounds, so here is a picture of Ashley working a rotovap. Some of the samples from the column were too big and so had to be condensed. We are doing this with the Stereocaulon antarctica lichens. We have been using the rotovaps often this week, so that we can run TLC plates from which you can actually identify compounds under the UV lamp.
I have also been progressing with the extractions, now using acetone, of the Ramalina terebrata lichen sample. After I finish running the samples through the acetone, I will dry and weigh the extract and then continue the extractions with n-butanol. The point of the extractions is to progressively remove from the samples compounds of increasing polarity.
I'll leave you with two pictures looking back on the city of Cadiz from the ferry we took to El Puerto de Santa Maria, because I forgot to include them in the last post.
