8 Manila

For our third weekend escapade, we decided to travel to the Manila city. One of the other interns we met named Jehee grew up in Manila with her family and is an international student at Cornell. Her father was planning on picking her up that weekend se we tagged along. The seven of us that went to the spa the week before and had grown in friendship in just another week decided to all go together again. A couple hours of being stuck in traffic finally got us to our hostel for the weekend. It was a colorful fun place with a really great atmosphere, clean bed sheets, Air conditioning, a kitchen with a warm breakfast provided, and toilet paper included! Our days were spent doing what most Filipino’s do for fun – shop. We found a really neat thrift store just down the street from our hostel and then spent a day at the huge mall in the area. It was gigantic with an entire lower floor dedicated to restaurants with food from all over the world. There was live music playing all day that ranged from a jazzy saxophone soloist to a fun string quartet. Jen and I even went to the movie theater in the mall to see the dog movie called Max.

The night life in Manila is fascinating. Our first night out we accidentally ended up in the Red light district! Men and women were cat calling our group of foreigners from near and afar. Luckily, a trustable looking man came up to us and told us that he can take us to an actual Filipino bar. After walking a couple blocks through dark back allies that lead to what looked like away from civilization, we were welcomed by a street with families and large groups of friends eating at the outside restaurants and a bar that had Filipino’s and foreigners from all over. It ended up being a really enjoyable night drinking half liter beers of my newly favorite Red Horse, playing pool, and befriending a group of men from Whales who were here for a rugby tournament. We played darts and lifted each other up to add our names to the one blank spot we could find in the tangle of others on the wall with a sharpie marker.

The next night we travelled to the more high-end bar life in Manila with Jehee and all of her local friends. We had quite the experience going to the ice bar, which is literally a room of all ice and drinks in cups of ice. We got to wear big white coats and sit on an all-ice thrown. We even got to visit the 74^th best club in the world. It was a fun night meeting even more new Filipino friends and experiencing the interesting entertainment that the people enjoy here.

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Stay — Makati district outside of Manila, MNL boutique hostel, ~ $5 a night

Food — Pizza joint down the street. It is cheaper if you order multiple smaller sizes instead of one large one.

Travel — taxi’s, 45-100 pesos depending on distance; most are metered, don’t get jipped off.

Tips — Manila is a fun place for a weekend trip. Just be aware while you’re there, always hold your bag in front of you and make sure you know how much to pay for something and you’ll be totally fine. Ask the hostel for help with food or travel or anything, they’re great.

7 Spa 88

One of the things that the four of us at IRRI – Jess, Ariella, Jenni, and I – promised ourselves when we left to come here for the summer was that we were going to experience as much as we possibly can of Filipino places and culture.  We plan to spend every weekend and free time outside of work travelling around the Philippines, eating Filipino food, and making friends with people who cross our path.

Our second weekend here, we found out from a friend that her advisor suggested we go to a hot spring spa in town that gets its water from the volcano. We travelled by Jeepney about 20 minutes outside of IRRI campus. Jeepney’s are these long metal public buses that look like a very old jeep in the front and extends the length of a stretch limo with an open back so people can just jump on and slide down one of the two parallel benches lining the sides of the vehicle.  They are often decorated with colorful designs, random words, pictures of Jesus, or neon lights made by placing a neon green Mountain Dew bottle over the fixtures. They line the streets and packing as many people in them as humanly possible taking them everywhere for only 8 or 20 pesos depending on how far you need to go.  They remind me so much of type of the type of transportation in Tanzania, which are basically the same thing but more of a small round bus called a DalaDala. America needs a type of cheap transportation like this. It is the best form of public transportation I have ever seen.

So, we ended up at Spa 88, which is this huge beautiful resort filled with pools of various temperatures with different healing purposes. There were seven of us all together – us four from IWU, one other American from North Carolina named Erika, and two sisters from London named Sophie and Lucy. None of us really knew each other yet, but we took the opportunity to have a small adventure together and get to know one another. We spent the entire day talking and learning about each other’s lives, cultural differences and similarities. We relaxed, ate ice-cream, tanned, and listened to the other Korean guests sing Karaoke in the background. The place was beautiful. We felt tucked away in between the rolling mountains with the rainforest around us. It was the perfect relaxing first trip in the Philippines.

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Spa 88 – 660 peso all day entry

Travel – 20 minute Jeepney ride, 20 pesos

Food – expensive inside spa, bribed the front desk to let us leave and come back to get food down the street at a 7-11 and fruit at a Sari Sari (small side-street shop). Water was free in the restaurant attached to the spa.

Tips – Pack a lunch and hide it in the locker they provide you.

6 My Family away from Home

Another really interesting aspect of IRRI is that the institution brings in people from all over the world. Many of them end up living in one of the two Residence Halls on campus for anyone staying for a set block of time.  From just walking through the hallways of my dorm, we have met people from India, London, France, all over the States, Iran, Korea, and Australia. Most are here as interns/scholars, Masters, or to finish their PhD, which has made for deep, fun, and intellectual conversations I never thought I would have.  I have even gotten to experience food from all over the world when many of the residence cook in the kitchen and gladly share their amazing dishes from their homeland. The people here are incredibly open and friendly. Our group keeps getting larger every time there is a new addition to the campus.

Outside of other internationals like us, the Filipino’s we have crossed paths with have been some of the most kind and caring souls I have ever met. We will often end up on a weekend adventure with locals that are complete strangers, and end up being great friends by the end of it. IRRI is one large family on its own. Everyone seems to know each other and help one another out. If we are trying to plan a trip or just figure out how to get to a grocery store there is always someone we can ask, and if that person can’t help us they will message another co-worker to take us there personally.  Our advisers even often act as our pseudo parents, providing us with activities to do on the weekends and safe ways to get there. They even appreciate if we text them how we are doing. It’s crazy how fast a group of people can become your family away from home.

5 Peach

Lab so far has been an incredible learning curve. In just under a week I’ve had to figure everything from pipetting technique to learning the process of PCR (which I learned means polymerase chain reaction, which basically means a process to amplify or copy a certain gene that we are interested in on a strand of DNA multiple times in order to be able to work with it!).  However, I couldn’t be more blessed to be working under the best teacher. The Assistant Scientist, Peach, has taken me under her wing. She is a smiley, joyful, and extremely intelligent person. I honestly wish she could be my personal teacher for everything. She answers every question I have with drawings and diagrams that are easy to understand. I owe a lot of what I have learned so far to her.

Peach’s goal is to teach me as much as she can while I am here, and I am willing to learn. So, we don’t just wait during our down time in lab, but instead go to other lab sections or departments to work with and learn from them. And in our down time between the down time she insists on teaching me Tagalog, the native language here. She is also just someone who is a hardworking role model. She runs everywhere – back and forth between business calls, meetings, and lab work; I’ll hear fast paced small feet behind me and know it is her. And she does it with such grace. I have never heard her once complain, even if I make a mistake or somehow our data is all kinds of messed up for no reason and we have to spend hours redoing it.

And she has become a good friend. We talk all day about the differences between the Philippines and the United States. She’ll look up from pipetting samples into tubes and ask how to pronounce a certain word in my Chicago accent or cultural stuff like what the dating life is like in my country. We’ll talk about it, and then go right back to research until another question pops up.  It is a whole whirlwind of science, culture, and friendship that has become the workday that I have learned to love so far. I cannot wait to keep following the wonderful Peach around to see what adventures come next.

4 My first time in Lab

So I had my first day of work. It truly is going to be an opportunity to do something completely foreign and new to me. I have been placed in the Plant Breeding, Genetics, and Biotechnology division where I will specifically be working in a molecular biology lab. Just after the first few minutes of being there, I realized that this is going to be one crazy adventure in itself.  One of my advisors asked me about my studies back home – when I explained to him that am studying Ecology and Sociology, so “people and the environment”, and then later was a little rough around the edges in explaining the basics of genes, DNA, and what they do in depth, I knew I had a lot to learn.  Even with just a general biology background, I told them that I was ready to learn. So, they gave me a chance.  I was told that I will be working under one of the scientists in the lab nicknamed Peach. My project will be helping with genetically modifying rice in order to increase its iron and zinc concentration to provide more nutrition into the staple foods that people eat in developing countries. Specifically, my small part in this big project is to standardize the approach used to screen the transgenes in the rice before product release. This basically means I’ll be optimizing the qPCR process which amplifies the transgenes that we are interested in isolating and working with. This sounded like a whole lot of jargin when I first heard it, which made it slightly thrilling but mostly scary to think about. But, I was given this opportunity, and I didn’t want to give up on learning and working on something I might never have the chance to do again. I was ready to learn. So, I sat in my room that night reading as many articles and watching as many Khan academy videos as my eyes would stay open for to re-learn and expand on my knowledge about rice, DNA, molecular biology, and whatever the heck qPCR and transgenes were. I was going to be ready for the work and the learning I had ahead of me.

3 Orientation

After spending our first day in the bustling Manila city, we split off into our destinations around the Philippines for the summer. Four of us including myself travelled what was only supposed to be an hour south, but ended up being three. As we learned, distance doesn’t matter as much as the unexpected traffic for the day.  We met the wonderful Ramon Oliveros, or Tito Mon to us, who is to be our uncle while we are here. We received our first instance of Filipino kindness with warm welcomes and people willingly caring our luggage up three flights of stairs.

We began our “Rice Orientation” the next morning. We expected a short welcome and a tour of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) that we would be working and living at, though we soon learned that we would be going through the entire process of rice from “seed to seed”, literally and physically.  The next few days followed with the opportunity to travel to the rice fields in our backyard, pull some really cool hoof-feet boots on,  and walk in the mud pushing all kinds of machinery for planting, tilling, and harvesting. We even got to drive the tractors that till the soil!  In just 4 days we learned the entire complex and exact timeline of growing rice.

We also had the chance to tour most of the departments within IRRI – We learned that there are multiple departments that work with growing certain types of rice, including but not limited to rice that can germinate under 10 cm of water, environmentally efficient rice that produces higher yields with less water and nutrients and needs less fuel because it cooks faster, and rice that has increased nutritional value.

But, when all this new rice is created and perfected, it has to be tested for its taste, texture, and aesthetic value. People, Asians especially, like their rice a very specific way depending on where in Asia they grew up. So, there are many different kinds of rice that need to be perfected to its cultural value as well. There is Jasmine rice, brown rice, wild rice, white rice, sticky rice, rice that has a lavender scent to it, harder rice, longer rice, and whole grain rice. There is a lot of different types of rice that I had never even thought about before coming to IRRI.  There is even a machine that “chews” cooked rice grains to measure how it feels if someone were to eat it.

Once the rice is both better on a molecular level and on a cultural and aesthetic aspect, it needs to be relayed to the public somehow. And that’s where Communications and other social departments come in, with bringing the rice to the people.  Who knew rice could be so complicated, interdisciplinary, and fascinating! It is crazy how many people with a multitude of disciplines are behind one small grain that means so much. In just 4 days I have learned that this institution is such a large and intricate project that tries to solve a simple yet important issue – to feed people in the best way possible – and they do a pretty darn good job at it. I am excited to keep learning more about what IRRI has to offer and what my small part in this larger strive for a solution will be.

2 Sushi with a View

I walked out of the automatic door after a just under a 14 hour flight from Chicago into the bustling night of Dubai. The air held the crisp AC of the airport for a brief second before I, and the other 9 exhausted and hungry girls around me, were encompassed by a heavy humid air that made our shoulder slump and clothes stick in all the wrong places.  The loud familiar city noises rose up from the streets as we stepped onto the shuttle headed for the complimentary-for-extremely-lengthy-layovers hotel.  But we weren’t going to stay there for more than a few minutes. We figured we would make the best of a 9 hour layover in a new city full of exiting things to explore.

We were blessed by chance that one of the girls travelling with us had a relative who owned a high-end Japanese food restaurant called Katsuya that is conveniently placed in the middle of Dubai.  After dropping our bags off into our hotel rooms, figuring out how to exchange money and then getting two taxi’s to fit all of us, we headed to the Dubai Mall to try a little more than what we thought would be a bit of sushi.  The fact that our taxi cars brought us to two different locations made for a mini adventure in itself.

We arrived to a quaint restaurant inside the middle of the largest mall I have been to. We were welcomed to a room that opened up to the city below, painting a picture of the tallest building in the world, huge billboards, and a lake with a water and light show.  Then the food came, and it seemed like it would never end with plate upon plate of various sushi and fish meals. I have never tasted food so tender and tasteful. We ate until we were wonderfully content and full, with just enough time to grab our luggage at the hotel and head back to the airport. We were sad to leave such a fascinating place so soon, but eager for the destination ahead of us. It was a wonderful beginning to a new adventure.

1 The First Grain

When you think of rice, it seems simple. A simple food. A simple taste. A simple smell. However, in my studies I have learned that a simple issue is always more complicated than meets the eye, with multiple parts that form an entire web of factors which need to be taken into consideration. I’ve recently learned that even a simple grain of rice is just as complex.

My journey to this tiny grain begins on an adventurous layover in Dubai, and then drops me off at the International Rice Research Institute in a small town called Los Banos in the northern part of the Philippines.  Here, I will be spending my summer as an Intern learning the science of rice and just what this Institute is doing for the world.

I am excited to share with you my next few months – specifically, my research in the lab setting and also my cross-cultural and interdisciplinary experiences along the way.  As an Ecology and Sociology double major at the wonderful Illinois Wesleyan University, I enjoy comparing, connecting, and understanding just how people and the environment work together. My cultural comparisons come from a view shaped by growing up in the United States near Chicago, Illinois, and my very recent adventure studying and doing field research abroad living in Tanzania in East Africa for four months.

I hope this little part of me finds you well and that you have fun with me on my escapade of a single grain of rice.