¡Vamos Argentina!

I was in my apartment shortly after 11am on Saturday morning when I heard a deafening combination of horns blaring and people screaming. I was initially a little distraught, thinking that there had been some kind of attack or natural disaster. The noise died down after a few minutes, but I continued to be puzzled as I went about my business around my apartment. Finally, I turned on my computer and went to the FIFA homepage, and then it all became clear. Argentina had scored its only goal in a 1-0 victory over Nigeria just six minutes into the country's first 2010 World Cup match, at approximately 11:06 local time. I'm convinced that every single person in the entire country screamed with joy at that moment.

Like many other countries, Argentina has definitely caught World Cup fever. Fútbol memorabilia are being sold on every street corner, and locals of all ages are sporting their imitation jerseys. I tried to tune in for the second half of the game on Saturday, but this was actually the first time that I wanted to use the TV in my apartment, and I discovered that it doesn't work. Depending on what my work schedule looks like, hopefully I'll be able to go to a pub and watch the next game on Thursday when Argentina faces Korea Republic. I'm holding out high hopes for Argentina's performance this year. After all, they are the defending Olympic gold medalists of 2004 and 2008, and they also have Lionel Messi, who many consider to be the blest player in the world right now. Additionally, their coach is Diego Maradona, one of the greatest players who ever lived, although after 20 years of heavy cocaine use and alcohol abuse, I'm not sure whether he's an asset or a hindrance for the team.

I had a very interesting, exciting, frustrating, and generally confusing week in the lab. I started trying out one of the other compounds that I'm supposed to be characterizing, the compound which I expected to be the best out of the three I'll be working with. My initial results were absolutely incredible - so incredible, in fact, that I quickly realized they were too good to be true. I spent the next two days coming up with a variety of ways to try to figure out what was going on with my data, and hoping that my very strange results were just artifact. My PI is in the States at a conference, but I e-mailed her to ask for advice. She was puzzled by my results, but very kindly offered me a long list of possible ways to tweak my experiments to try to make sense of the data. I also spoke with nearly every postdoc, senior scientist, and grad student in the lab, and all were a bit flummoxed. On Friday I decided to try to repeat the same experiments one more time with cells that I borrowed from another student, and oddly enough, my results were perfectly normal. A fresh batch of oocytes will be ready on Tuesday, so I'm just crossing my fingers and hoping that my results will be normal again. If there's one thing I learned from this week, it's that oocytes are temperamental little haploids. Actually, even though the unreliable oocytes and strange results were frustrating, the science geek in me really enjoyed getting to problem solve and come up with new ways of figuring out what was going on.

Today I met up with my friend from Emory, Elaine (who I know through her involvement in biology research, although she's currently studying Latin American Culture in Buenos Aires), and her friend from Johns Hopkins who is also doing research here this summer, and we had a little American-scientists-in-Buenos-Aires celebration. We went to the market at Plaza Dorrego in San Telmo, which is one of the oldest and most historic neighborhoods in Buenos Aires. It's fairly touristy at this point (I hadn't heard so much English in a day since I got here), but it was still a lot of fun. Here are a couple of pictures of the market and some tango dancers on the street:

We also stumbled upon this church around the corner from the market, which I thought was gorgeous.

We then proceeded toward one of the fancy shopping districts downtown to look around and see a movie. On the way we stopped by the Casa Rosada (literally, the Pink House), which is the Argentinean equivalent of the White House, except that as you might guess, it's pink instead of white.

In other news, I finally found a place that will wash, dry, and fold my laundry for around $4US per load. I tried it out on Friday, and my clothes were returned strain-free, so that was definitely a relief. Also, I received compliments on my Spanish from two separate people this week! After I correctly used the "vos" tense and added in a bit of yeísmo, one of the PIs from down the hall even told me that I'm losing my American accent and starting to sound like a real Porteño. I was very proud.

After a great weekend, I'm definitely ready to head back to the lab tomorrow. I'll whisper sweet nothings to my oocytes and just hope that they cooperate!