The last post this side of the Hemisphere...

So... yes, this will be my last post from France. Just saying it makes me quite sad. Although I did so much in this span of two and a half months, the time literally fly by me, and I didn't see it go. That is the sign of good time and fun, but man, when it comes time to go, you begin to think of so many things you could have done or wanted to do. Well, all I can say for sure is that my return here is set in stone.

So, the final week has been quite interesting. What Bianca had me do was make another pre-culture of the bacteria that I had created and grown, and then make of these bacteria. This was for the movie that we would make. Now the idea of the movie was super exciting, and so when the day came, I was hopping off walls and stuff. We packaged the bacteria and some glass slides, and headed over to Orsay Ville, a small town not far from Paris. There, we came to the university campus of Paris 11, one of the many public universities of Paris. And man, the campus was absolutely beautiful. There was nature all around us. You could literally walk out of a class and get lost in the great expanses of forest on campus. Anyway, we finally got to the building Bianca was searching for and climbed four flights of staris, and then we finally found Marta! Yay! She is working on bacteriophages (which are, as we all know, viruses that insert their Dna into bacteria and use the host to create new bacteriophages) and she has a microscope that gets 100X lens. Most microscopes, or the ones I'm used to working with anyway, have at most, 40X magnification. On this microscope, we could see individual bacteria. How cool is that. So, after showing us how it worked, and the many things that shouldn't-happen-if-not-it-will-break, I began the long, long process of sitting there and taking the pictures. Every five minutes, I had to stop what I was doing (drawing, daydreaming, the likes...) and take a normal picture, which captured the fluorescence of the green bacteria (the red fluorescence was too weak too capture on the filters) and then take a brightfield picture: Brightfield is a mode on the camera where the camera captures everything, so its not based on filters that capture a specific type of light. Anyway, its not that taking the pictures took a long time or anything, its just that I had to do it every five minutes, for three hours. So I guess it wasn't so long, but it was becoming uncomfortably hot in the room, and I was beginning to become impatient. Marta was so great, periodically checking on me to see if I needed help with anything. Finally, I acquired the pictures, and headed back to the lab (it was around five in the afternoon.). I downloaded them onto Bianca's computer, and then went through them, just to see them. Awesome stuff, really. It was definitely worth the wait. On Friday, I decided to stay home and work on my comic. And this weekend was a blur. I did so many fun things, but I tell just one story. At my aunt's house, they have a garage that is very big, and they wanted me to spray paint, or tag, anything I wanted on that wall. Then, they realized how much it would stink, and so they closed up a corner of the garage and gave me a 15 by 12 fabric sheet on which to do my work. It was an amazing experience, creating something on such a big scale. I have pictures, and even a movie, which, if you speed it up, is actually not so boring. I will definitely get it to you guys as soon as possible.
So, from France, This is Clover, signing out. Gonna miss my peoples here! Peace.
Clover