Japan - Day 15

Before I begin today's post, I have a couple of things to say - firstly, I completely forgot to mention a few days ago that I spent an hour or so helping to clean the room where the mice are kept. This mainly involved moving the mice into clean cages, reattaching the cage labels and providing them with fresh water and extra food, so nothing too taxing. Secondly, I know it's past midnight now, but this is still technically Friday's blog :-p
Anyways, today started with me attempting to PCR some samples of DNA (23 to be precise) and then genotype them by running a gel. First off, because my pipette seems to be a bit dodgy, I pipetted the wrong amounts so ended up with negative readings in the spectrophotometer (in layman's terms, this means that the DNA samples had less DNA than pure water XD). After realising my error, and the fact that I'd wasted a good 30-45 minutes, I retried it and got more positive results (literally). Then I made up the PCR mix, but again, I miscalculated, so I PCRed and ran a gel of a total failure of mixtures ><
While the PCR was running, I went to grab some lunch before Japanese, and I randomly bumped into Jen outside the bakery :-) So we sat and had lunch together, then went together to the book store where I bought my kanji book. Then onward to Japanese class :-) We did a few more drills (the giving and receiving verbs, I've already studied them at Manchester but they're still horrible -_-) and had a quick test on yesterday's drills
Back to the lab - after running the fail gel, I started a new batch of samples to the correct specifications, and set them in the PCR machine at around 5pm. I'd arranged to meet Jen to go to the International Students' Party at 7.30pm, and as the PCR takes around 2 hours, and the gel 20 minutes, I wouldn't have time to wait for it. So, after asking about getting a new keycard into the building, and checking things over with some people in the lab, I'm going to try finishing the gel on Saturday morning. Or if not, apparently Monday is fine too
So, after bailing out of the lab, I got the bus home (it arrived as I left the building, luckily) and got changed and scrubbed up a little. I went down to the bus stop at about 7pm, about half-way between the times the buses are supposed to arrive, so I had to wait about 15 minutes for one to arrive. When it DID arrive, it stopped at almost every stop on the route, so I was very nearly late. But I got to Jen's on time, and they cut the hedge outside her room so I can knock on her window now. The bus didn't show up on time at her bus stop, so we walked along to the party, and arrived right on time ^^
The party was very fun :-D We got a drink when we got to the desk where we wrote some nametags - I got a violet flavour drink, though I was disappointed that it didn't taste much like violet v.v We met up with a few more familiar faces and then got some more people talking to us, playing the A-Z game at one point which was kinda funny. Then we ended up sitting around talking until about 1am, about all sorts of things ^^ Though because everyone else lives in Ichinoya, I had to walk home alone, which wasn't helped by the fact that some guy I talked to showed me a mark on his arm where a guy tried to mug him a few days ago, which made me paranoid. Still, I'm back in one piece, so all's well that ends well ^^
Anyway, as it's almost 2am now, I better sleep so I'm fit and ready for the lab tomorrow ^^' Ciao for now