Land of Delicious Molds and Bacteria (June 13th, 2011)

Greetings from Cluny! The day started off with meeting the group under the clock-tower of Gare de Lyon train station in Paris. The week before the meeting, I had stopped at Gare de Lyon train station, so I thought I knew where I was going. However, I used the metro system in Paris and had only seen this station from the inside, and the clock-tower was outside. To make things complicated, there were several entrances to the outside of the station, depending on the subway line and the part of town that can be accessed. Finally, after walking circles outside the perimeter of the station, I found everyone. We boarded the TGV train to Macon-Loche and then took a bus to the town of Cluny.

We are staying at Cluny Sejour—a hostel that was once the candle-making building in Cluny. This is because Cluny was a grand monastery before the French revolution. The building now that it is renovated to a hostel looks like a replica of a typical dorm. There are two or three beds per room, and there is a common bathroom on each floor. Because we are in Cluny, the hostel also has views of the old monastery walls and towers. There is an engineering college across the hostel in a grand building (also converted from the monastery) and the students all wear robes depending on their year. I never thought I would see a school just like Hogwarts in real life!

After arriving in Cluny, we were warmly welcomed with a wine and cheese tasting at the town’s wine shop. We learned by tasting the burgundy region’s local wines and cheeses as defined by the AOC. The AOC, or the Appellation Controlle Origine, is a regulatory committee that preserves local goods [such as cheese and wine] to each region in France by labeling the product “AOC”. For example, Champagne can only be produced in Champagne, France—otherwise it is only sparkling wine if made elsewhere. I absolutely love this system because it preserves patrimone—or heritage, of each region and keeps the economy going. Maconnais goat cheeses are AOC to the Bourgone, or Burgundy region of France. Similarly, the Burgundian wines are made from the regions grapes of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. The wines would not be called pinot noir or chardonnay—they would instead be named after the AOC region from where they were made. This is because they terroir—or terrain of each region is different, and thus results in a different wine.

Anyhow, I’m heading off to bed soon. Earlier in the evening, I went on a run through the countryside to burn off the cheese and I’ve concluded that the town of Cluny is also a runner’s paradise. There are gradual hills, steep hills, beautiful pastures filled with sheep, goats, cows, and of course—the vineyards. This is such a scenic town. Everyone in town seems to know everyone living here, and the community feeling is strong. I can’t wait to go on my early morning run tomorrow and smell the boulangerie’s fresh baguettes! Bonsoir! Bon nuit!

Everyone minus Dr. Haggblom (who took the picture) at Gare de Lyon train station

Housing at the Cluny Sejour Hostel

Walking up to our first wine and cheese tasting

Pastures

Day 3 In Pari-Finally Settling In

France 2011 Day 3

France 2011 Day 3- Finally achieving the Louvre, no art pictures here because they still have to be cropped and straightened.

Nous sommes arrives!

Finally, the big day, June 12th, and time for me go on my first trip to Europe. Not only is this my first trip to Europe, but it's the first trip that I've ever gone on alone as well. So, after my parents dropped me off at the airport and gave me a hug I was on my own. One red eye flight and 20 hours of transit later I arrived and somehow didn't make any mistakes in the process. Surprising, right? I thought it was. Luckily I had my French skills to help me navigate from the airport and bus stop to the Gare de Lyon, where I would meet the whole class and then travel to Cluny.

I had already met most of my classmates before this point, but it was as if we were actually meeting for the first time at this train station in France. Once everyone had arrived we traveled together to our final destination, Cluny, via a two hour ride on the TGV (the European bullet train system) and then an hour bus ride. When we arrived in Cluny it seemed as if I had stepped out of the 21st century and back into the medieval ages. Where we're staying now is literally 50 feet away from what was once the center of Christianity in the 11th and 12th century. The town of Vitry-les-Cluny is dominated by an abbey that was constructed in the medieval ages and then became the largest monastery in all of the Europe at the height of its power.

Growing up in New Jersey I've never experienced something with such an old and rich heritage as Cluny. It's amazing to be able to reach out and touch something that's older than America itself, let alone something that's almost a thousand years older than America. Although Cluny has a very large medieval influence it still contains the French culture that we all imagine when thinking of France. With bakeries, cafes, and wine shops galore, and roads that are only wide enough for one car, Cluny is a very intimate European town.

For our first night in Cluny we went to one of the town's wine shops that was expecting us for a wine and cheese tasting. Wait, what? Aren't you supposed to be studying microbiology, Scott? Hold on, there's more. Also attending this tasting was the mayor of Cluny, who was actually a very friendly and genial frenchman. So, we started the tasting, mayor included, and tasted the wines of the region, which are Chardonnay, Pinor Noir, and Gammé. And of course, everything was absolutely delicious. The four different types of cheeses, two salamis and baguette were amazing, especially washed down with a sip of some Burgundian wine.

It was an amazing first day in Cluny, and I can't wait to see what it has in store for me tomorrow.

On top of the world--from Paris!

Day two was planned for originally to see the Louvre. However, it was Tuesday, and I had no idea that the Louvre is closed ONLY on Tuesday. This was a big disappointment and I kept taking some pictures of the area. So the day was rerouted towards Sacre Coeur [Scared Heart] Basilica in the Montemarte bohemian region of Paris. The name of this church stems from a legend that the heart of Christ was buried under this church. This church was located on top of a hill and had never-ending views overlooking all of Paris.  The tough part was getting to the views—this was done by climbing over 300 ancient stone steps up a spiral staircase (talk about heights and getting dizzy)! But the view from the top was completely worth the climb. Words cannot explain this view, so below are some pictures from the church. 

Vous parlez anglais?

            Bonjour! My name is Preshita Gadkari, and I am taking the course “Microbiology and Culture of Cheese and Wine” in Cluny, France. I flew in a week early to explore Paris, Aix-en-Provence, and Avignon before the course officially started. Currently, I am on the TGV train heading from Paris to Aix-en-Provence. These speedy trains zipping voraciously through the country-side, and it is very much like being on a plane [except on ground of course]. I’m trying to take pictures from the train, but the task seems impossible because the train travels too fast to capture anything without blurring the image. On the other hand, this train has finally given me the chance to upload pictures and type up entries because my 3.5 days in Paris were extremely long so that I could maximize my experience.

            Paris is magnificent and fabulous city right out of a storybook. With the architecture conserved to the Napoleonic era, the buildings and streets are painted with bronze, copper, and at several times gold. The French people were somehow miraculously able to understand me in my broken French and hand charades. I roughed it out by traveling through the metro from the airport [which required carrying my luggage up and down the subway stairs]. My hotel was several blocks away from the Eiffel Tower and next to L’Ecole Militare [Military School]. I arrived at noon to Paris and decided to go out for the entire day to fight my jet-lag.

            First stop of the day was the one that was closest to the Hotel—L’Tour Eiffel! Little did I know that the Eiffel Tower not only attracts tourists, but also gypsies and “shamans” from North Africa that prey on naïve tourists. The gypsy [and she also was just a child] asked for euro donations for the deaf and mute by hand gestures, and right when I was about to takeout a euro, a Frenchman stopped me and yelled at her. The French claim that there are many such people all over the city scamming money out of tourists. Anyhow, the Eiffel Tower was gigantic and swarmed with tourists. There are two restaurants on some of the floors, but they were way too expensive for my price range, so I ate at a nearby café with a lovely view of the tower and its grounds. I had a croque madam without ham—a sandwich which has fried eggs mixed with gooey mix of cheese on toasted bread. Il a bon gout (it tastes very good)!

The Sterility Code

Slowly, but surely I am getting into the habit of working. 7:30 wake up, leave 8:30, work at 9:00, lunch at 1:00, and end workday at 6:00-at this point I am starving so dinner immediately follows. These past two weeks I have been gaining different skills in the lab, most notably learning how to do tissue culture and how to use a wide field live imaging microscope and a confocal microscope.

I was intimidated by tissue culture at first. When Amy first showed me how to do it I feverously took notes. The next day I typed these notes and studied them intensely because I needed to subculture the next day. Kuayping (who is now watching over me because Amy went to the US for two weeks) showed me again and then let me try.

The steps to tissue culture of fairly simple; remove the old medium, wash with buffer, add trypsin (an enzyme) to dislodge the cells, remove the trypsin because you don’t want to have too much enzyme, incubate the cells so that the remaining trypsin can do its job, add a buffer that inactivates the trypsin because you don’t want to digest your cells, suck up and squirt out the cells to put them all into solution, and finally add new growth media and call it a day. Overall, pretty simple, the most complicated procedural task is remembering which button on the electronic pipette sucks up liquid and which squirts it out.

But, the procedure for tissue culture isn’t what is tricky-being sterile is the though part.
Your tissue culture to do list:
Spray down the hood with ethanol-check. Spray every bottle that enters the hood with ethanol-no problem. Wash your gloves with ethanol before you put them in the hood-really cell culture is an alcoholic’s dream (just kidding, never ever think to drink the ethanol).

Why all the ethanol? You need to have a completely sterile environment, 70% ethanol will kill most biological organisms that threaten your sterile hood atmosphere.

Alright-I’ve been working spray bottles as water guns since the second grade; so far everything I’ve explained about sterility shouldn’t be a problem. But now we in da hood (science gangster reference, not typo).

When working in the hood you need to be much more conscious about everything you do. This means when I reach over my sterile pipette, with my sterile glove, for my sterile media bottle I have risked contamination of my sample because my unsterile arm may have dropped dust on my once sterile pipette. Even when being rigidly careful, Kuayping still pointed out how I broke the sterility code at least three times-which means throwing out a perfectly clean pipette tip (I felt bad about that).

During my first tissue culture venture, I literally felt like I had never used my hands or arms before. To set the dramatic scene:

The setting: Biopolis, Singapore on another 85 degree day, 100% humidity. On the fifth floor of IMB which is kept at about 10 degrees (I wish I brought more long sleeved clothing), in the tissue culture room whose doors open only if you wave your hand in front of a scanner to the left of the door (it is really cool, I couldn’t figure out where else to put that). Devinn, the narrator of this telling tale, is diligently working on cell culture. The hood is gently humming in the background as it sucks up air to keep the environment clean. She is working with a flask which has the general shape of a metal whisky container that you see men have in the movies-except lie the tin bottle flat on the table.

My motivation: I need to make sure I dispense the media everywhere in the flask except the bottle neck of the flask because it is too close to the air and that compromises sterility.

The Conflict: I can’t figure out how to rotate a foot long pipette so that I cover the area around the mouth of the flask without touching it. I awkwardly struggle and fail multiple times.

The Climax: Kuayping either out of pity, boredom, or frustration reaches in to demonstrate this task.

The solution: he uses his wrist!!

Anticlimatic? Maybe. My point is that my arms felt so foreign to me that this simple motion was revolutionary.

On my second time sub culturing, Kuayping didn’t watch over me- I was surprised. It was like the mother bird pushing the hatchling out of the nest- thankfully I flew instead of splatting on the ground (This reminds me of a really funny website with analogies-I suggest you check it out http://writingenglish.wordpress.com/2006/09/12/the-25-funniest-analogies-collected-by-high-school-english-teachers/).

Every attempt after the first has gone fairly smoothly-now that I know the procedure by heart I can focus more on my movements to make sure I keep everything sterile.

I will dedicate another blog to my microscopy work once I have some beautiful fluorescent photos.

Till then, keep it real USA
=]

France, Here I Come!

Seriously, what happened to the whole month of May? It seems like I went from finals week in New Brunswick straight to June 10th, what gives? Well, it's now two days before I get on a plane in Philadelphia and head out to somewhere in the sunny countryside of France, which is really friggin' cool. I'll be spending two weeks in the town of Cluny which is in Burgundy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluny) and learning about the microbiology of wine and cheese. But, do you know what learning about the microbiology of wine and cheese entails? That's right, eating and drinking a whoooooole lot of each, which, again is really friggin' cool.

Alright, enough rubbing it in, Scott. Just get into it and introduce yourself to these wonderful people, will you? I'm from the scenic Buena, NJ which is situated in the heart of south Jersey between Philadelphia and Atlantic city. Buena is a small, mostly rural town that has a large italian population and is surrounded by large expanses of farmland. My family has called Buena home since 1914 when my great-great-grandfather Angelo bought a 20 acre tract of land here and began farming vegetables. He named his farm Bellview Farms, which was handed down father to son throughout the next several generations until my father took over the farm after graduating college.

By that point the farm had grown to encompass 150 acres of farmland and was well known throughout southern Jersey. My father continued to farm vegetables on our land for the next 25 years until he made a drastic change to our family history. The market for vegetables was declining, and with international competition increasing it was only getting worse. So, my father decided to get out of the vegetable business and open a winery (which might not have been my first idea in the situation, but it was a good one!). He started by planting a three acre vineyard and converting an old barn at the original Quarella homestead into a wine production area. Today, Bellview Winery has 40 acres of vineyards and produces 30 different wines, which are all made from grapes grown on our estate. Our wines have won distinguished awards and have given us a reputation for making some pretty tasty stuff. In the future, I hope to propel Bellview Winery to new heights by becoming the fifth generation of my family to cultivate our land.


At the moment I am studying Food Science and French at SEBS (The School of Environmental and Biological Sciences) of Rutger's University in New Brunswick, NJ. When I saw the course title The Food Microbiology of Wine and Cheese I thought, "what could be more perfect?". What I've learned from classes and from working at my family's vineyard and winery will be directly applicable, which is surprising. Let's be honest, what do we learn in school that we actually use in real life? I would say little to none, so I'm very lucky to have found such a fitting course.

I'm very, very, very, verrry, excited to be going to France, which will be my first trip to Europe; I'm even more excited to taste a whole lot of French wines and cheeses! This will be the first time I've traveled a long distance by myself and I have to admit that I am a little nervous, but I'm sure that I'll be fine. I can't wait to put some of the French that I've been learning for the past several years to use and meet some new friends. I suppose I will kind of have to, seeing as how I don't know anyone else who is taking the course, but I think that that will make this experience very special for me and leave me with a lot of lasting memories.

Anyhow, that's it for now, but I'll be posting plenty more once I get to France. Tout à l'heure!