Welcome to Paradise...

Next morning. Instead of getting some deserved rest and to sleep in, we were woken up at 6am by some nice rhythms from the same DJ as last night – Zumba. We rolled over to the right side. Nothing. Left side. Nothing. Pillow on our heads. Nothing. There is no point: we have to get up! Half way through our first coffee at the breakfast buffet the music stopped! Finally. It took only 5 minutes until we realized that the Zumba dancers haven’t had breakfast either…

Rather than catching up on some sleep from the night before, we got up with the first glance of the sun. The next two days were driven by the question: How to set up a microbiology lab. Firstly, we took the cardboard box of the petri dishes and turned it into a clean bench. Secondly, we realized that our clean bench is not really clean nor sterile, so we tried to improve it. Thirdly, some flies got through the parafilm of some petri dishes and got into our media – which were supposed to be sterile. Lastly, we realized that there might be a reason why institutes and universities spend tens of thousands of euros for sterile/clean laboratories and working benches.

After a few days, many thoughts shared, and different techniques tried, we got to an acceptable level of sterility which might suit our needs… We are super happy that we managed to tackle the first challenge! On the downside, we already majorly damaged our pressure cooking pot and broke two of four glass bottles …