Calligraphy, Tea, Chemistry Experiment

We begun the day with a very relaxing tea and calligraphy class. It was the calmest activity I believe we have done since we have been here. I really enjoyed the atmosphere, the tea made me feel so calm,and the professor, Mr. White had a relaxing voice. Everything went fantastic. We practiced some Chinese letters in calligraphy which was extremely hard. It was hard to do, but also a lot of fun. We left from there, grabbed some lunch and then went to the lab. We had a lot of work to do. Once that was over, we all relaxed with each other and headed back to the hotel for the night.

I'm actually holding the brush wrong. You are supposed to hold the brush perfectly up and down, but every time I used the brush I wanted to hold it more like a pen, and trying to get the brush strokes right felt impossible.

I didn't do too bad though. Here is me and Anna's practice paper. The bottom left is probably the best one i've done when I practiced. 

Mr. White drew this for me.

We are all holding pieces of paper that have a certain character on it. Mr. White also drew these for us, but there are to be placed in the front of the house in the middle of the top of the door frame. All of us got different things such as wealth, long life, and more.

Mr. White taught us how to say we are Americans. 

The first day of our chemistry experiments we had two groups who did the thin layer chromatography at different concentration. So the 0% has no methanol and is 100% water. The rest are ratios of water and methanol. Today we were trying to test 10% and 15 % again because our retention factor (rf) is greater than 0.2. The retention factor is the distance traveled by the compound divided by the distance traveled by the solvent. The absorption of compounds increases with increased polarity. Non polar molecules move rapidly up the plate because more polar compounds bind stronger to the absorbent. As you can see, we have a lot of dots showing up at the top of the plate which isn't what they were looking for.  We were using reverse phase TLC.

When we were done with our Thin Layer Chromatography we an MPLC or a Medium pressure liquid chromatography. We used a RP-18-40-63 with a filter on top. The non polar compound will bind to the RP 18 and stay in the column to allow the high polarity compounds to come out first. The tube and the column is washed with 100% methanol. Then the column is filled with 10% methanol as we wait for the injection. The machine is ran for 30 minutes and during that time the machine will go from 0 to 100 as it is getting the rest of he non polar particles out o=of the column when the polar particles where removed already.  Inside of the machine is a UV light that helps to detect the different compounds. There are 4 channels being used, channel one for 280nm, channel 2 for 254nm, channel 3 for 210 nm and a range of 200 to 400 for channel 4. It was set so that tubes couldn't fill up beyond 20 mL.  We ended up with about 53 tubes. When we come back to the lab again we will run more thin layer chromatography to double check our work. 

Graph showing when each new compound was detected and so then the next tubed was begin filled. 

When I was using the bathroom the girl tot he right, named Lina, asked if I was a foreign exchange student. We spoke for a while and I explained why I was in the lab. Lina and her friend Terry are both Pharmacist. In Taiwan you can become a pharmacist after you get your bachelors degree. I was excited to learn all the things Lina had to share. She showed me the Chinese medicine shop, and in this picture are some herbs that would be used.