Zoo day!

Hey! Hope everyone is doing great and isn't freezing too much!
Today was wonderful because we all got to sleep in a little bit before starting our day. Since we didn't do our chemical treatments of the zebrafish embryos yesterday, we went to the lab around 10 this morning to divide the embryos up into groups of five and treat them with different chemicals. My roommate, Courtney, also doubles as my lab partner. We treated 20 embryos with a chemical, AA (short for aristolochic acid) to give them heart failure. We then treated another 20 embryos with AA, and this time also with a chemical called NS-398 to see if it will help the embryos recover from the heart failure. We have to wait 2 days for the results, so we will see what happens Tuesday!
After the chemical treatments we went to the Taipei Zoo! It was really fun, and pretty cheap as well. It was 60 Taiwanese dollars, which is equivalent to about 2 US dollars. Myself, Beth, and Kayla (two of the other girls on the trip) walked around trying to find food. Kayla and I ended up splitting a pizza which wasn't very good. The crust was burnt, and they advertised cheese pizza but it was also COVERED in onions and had pepperoni. We made a special effort to see the penguins, since they are Kayla's favorite animal. She was almost crying from excitement! We went to see some of the other, typical animals you find in a zoo as well. We also went to see the pandas at the zoo. I know I was very disappointed because they only had one panda out. I really wanted to see the baby panda. Oh well.
After the zoo we took an awesome gondola ride to the top of one of the mountain s that is rich in tea gardens. The gondola ride was awesome because we were in a car with a glass bottom, so we got to see some awesome sights as we rode up.
At the top of the mountain we went for a tea dinner. We arrived and they served our group two different types of tea leaves to brew. Because our group was split up into two different tables we each started out with a different type of tea. Our table started out with a delicious green tea. We tried brewing it like Dr Huang taught us, but when his wife came over she tried the tea and realized he taught us wrong. So she decided to join our table (the students were all at one table and Dr Huang and his family were at the other) to make sure we had good tea. Boy was that even better! Everything was actually brewed right from that point forward. About halfway through the evening we switched types of tea to a black tea, which was still pretty good. Dr Huang was proud of our table though because it was the first time in a long while that the students finished their entire meal. I think it helped though that we knew what we were ordering, got the small size, and had it served family style instead of ordering our own entrées. I'm not quite sure how much tea I drank, mainly because the cups were tiny compared to American tea cups, and we did so many brews it was hard to keep track. Either way I really enjoyed it.
We took the gondola back down to the mountain but this time took a regular car since it was dark out. This was an amazing ride in a different way than the first rife because you cou, d see quite a bit of the city instead of just greenery (have I mentioned everything here is super green and super lush?), and the city was all light up. It was such an awesome thing to see. We were also able to see the Taipei 101 building lit up, which was cool.
We finally made it back to our hotel to do the gift exchange to celebrate Christmas that we had been meaning to do since we arrived. My mother always taught me that good things come in small packages,  which worked out for me with this because I picked the smallest box, which had a $5 bill in it! No complaints here! (:
Hopefully tomorrow will be a fun day, but I can already tell it's going to be a long one. Goodnight!

Pictures- panda at the zoo, myself and Erich (one of the guys on the trip) on the gondola up the mountain, Dr Huang's wife pouring tea at dinner