Another eventful week in Buenos Aires

This week's update begins with an account of my first experience involving the seemingly harmless activity of doing laundry in Buenos Aires. As my supply of clean clothes dwindled, I began to search the city for laundromats. After days of searching and a little bit of internet research, I came to the conclusion that self-service laundry shops really don't exist here. According to the Frommer's travel guide, there are supposedly a variety of wash-and-fold laundry shops where customers can pay a small fee to have clothes washed and folded by shop workers. However, I have yet to confirm the existence of such shops with my own eyes. Instead, all I have found in my neighborhood are expensive dry-cleaners, and I wasn't too keen on the idea of spending a small chunk of my stipend on dry-cleaning. Therefore, last weekend I decided to buy detergent at the grocery store, fill my kitchen sink with water, and wash all of my clothes by hand in my apartment. It was raining at the time, so I couldn't hang any clothes on my balcony to dry; instead, I found creative ways to hang damp garments over every single light fixture and piece of furniture in my apartment. I was feeling quite proud of my frugality and self-sufficiency. Unfortunately, my pride disappeared the next morning when I realized that not only had some of my brightly colored clothes bled onto other garments, but additionally, a sizable percentage of my garments had removed a layer of varnish from the pieces of furniture over which they were draped. In the end, it turns out that in my attempt to save money and be self-sufficient, I managed to permanently stain about half of my clothes with a beautiful array of red, blue, and furniture-finish brown colors. I was rather distraught over this incident initially, but I then considered the fact that this laundry disaster has been my only tourist blunder whatsoever, so all in all, I think I'm still doing pretty well. I haven't figured out exactly what I'm going to do when the time comes to wash my clothes again, but a might take one of the graduate students in the lab up on his offer to let me do my laundry at his house.

After the laundry incident, I cheered myself up by meeting an acquaintance from Emory who is currently studying abroad in Buenos Aires. We had a great time walking around the city, enjoying tea and cake in a traditional cafetería, shopping, and getting hit on by a slightly creepy Porteño who fooled us into thinking that he needed help understanding something written in English. There are around seven Emory students in Buenos Aires this month with the Latin American Cultural Studies Program, so I'm hoping that I'll have the chance to meet up with them again over the next few weeks.

Research is going really well. I'm beginning to feel very comfortable with the electrophysiology techniques that I've learned, so over the last week I've been able to gain a lot more independence in my work. In a nutshell, my project involves characterizing several novel drugs designed to target the cochlear receptor that my PI discovered many years ago. We currently have three potential drugs to characterize, and I'm almost done collecting data on one of them. The one issue I've encountered is that the compounds were synthesized by an international collaborator, and unfortunately, he didn't quite send us enough. In order to repeat my experiments enough times that I can feel confident about my conclusions, I need to obtain a little more of all three compounds. We contacted the collaborator and requested more of the drugs, so hopefully he'll be able to synthesize and send those soon. While I'm waiting to receive enough of the first compound to finish characterizing it, I'm planning to move on and look at the other two.

The graduate student who's been training me, Juan, is dating another student who works in the lab down the hall from ours. It just so happens that Juan's girlfriend is also working with an American undergraduate for the next few months - her name is Sarah, and she's a rising junior at Harvard. Juan and his girlfriend have been showing off their incredible city to Sarah and me by taking us to concerts and leading us to the best food shops. Last night the four of us met up with two of Juan's friends and saw a fantastic concert in a very traditional old theater. We heard Dino Saluzzi, who according to many Argentines is the greatest living bandoneón player. He plays a very interesting tango/jazz fusion style in a group with a saxophone or clarinet, guitar, bass, and percussion. Having just studied both jazz and tango in my most recent music theory class at Emory, I found the concert to be fascinating. I planned to take pictures at the concert, but unfortunately, photography wasn't allowed. Instead, this poor-quality YouTube clip will have to suffice:

¡Hasta Luego!