Peking Man trip

So six of us (Alisa, Donna, Kelly, Zach, Zhaleh, and myself) decided to make the excursion to Zhoukoudian last Sunday to see the Peking Man site. It took 3 buses and 2.5 h to get there. It's out in the countryside 50 km southwest of Beijing. The H. erectus bones were found in the 1920's and are dated at about 500k years old. We got to go into the caves to see where these guys lived and saw the museum where they keep artifacts. We almost missed lunch but the chef cooked us a fresh cabbage and tomato dish with some sort of sauce. That was absolutely amazing! I want the recipe for that. We were there about 3 hours.
Once we got back to Beijing, Zach and I walked into this random restaurant off the street. The menu was completely in Chinese. We tried to ask for egg fried rice and the lady pointed to some part of the menu. So we took a gamble and ordered two dishes. Zach said the look on my face was priceless as I found out we ordered cold dishes. One was a sardine dish and the other might have been chicken. It was edible but not great...we were lucky not to get sick. What a culinary adventure!

I'm an author on a paper...how about you?

So today was pretty uneventful. I set up another hydroylsis reaction and I'll use HOTf and TFA as my acids of choice this time. I was getting ready to go home and my grad student gave me the latest copy of his manuscript...and it's got my name on it! I wasn't expecting that! I guess I have contributed a lot to the work on the hydrolysis part of the paper and I've done some of the editing. We hope to submit this paper soon to PNAS and hope it gets published in the fall.