Laundry drama and PCR stress

Last week Becca and I were told that it is totally fine to take several showers during the day, even four showers a day is fine! We took this as a subtle hint, and decided it was time to do laundry. Monday was the chosen day, and without any help we successfully completed all of it! Success! It was raining so we hung all our clothes up in the side room instead of out in the sun. Then it kept raining, and raining, and raining, and raining..... and never stopped. Said clothes began to stink... so much for that.

Wednesday we received new primers and ran a PCR (now that I explained the process a bit I can use all the science jargon I want! ha!). Since we began working in January however, Becca and I have struggled getting PCR to work with Calopterygidae. These new primers were supposed to do the trick, but the gel we ran on Wednesday was a fail. We could barely see anything, and decided to run another gel the next morning. We put the gel in, turned on the UV light and.... nothing. Becca and I scratched our heads a bit and wondered what to do. We finally decided to try again, this time using the shortcuts we'd learned in the US, and it worked!! Finally, we'd gotten some Calopterygidae to work! Friday we ran another PCR with different primers, and it worked too! It's a miracle!



Had a girl's night Tuesday :)



Plants are amazing.



We went collecting with a couple of our lab friends on Wednesday. So beautiful!!! I love exploring here, it so different from anything I have seen before.





Bamboo!





Lovely Becca hard at work in the lab.



Look! There are definitely bars on there! The big ones are primer dimers, but if you look really closely, there are definitely faint bars everywhere we didn't have a blank :) (And if you're going cross-eyed trying to see, don't worry, I understand)



Juice from sugarcane! Not nearly as sweet as I thought it would be.



This is what chocolate comes from. I'm dying to try it, even though everyone says the fruit doesn't taste super good.

Today Becca and I are leaving Assis :( We'll be coming back though, and I'm excited to see what a new city brings!