1) I've been quite busy these past two days. Mostly because I'm packing up to shift houses this Saturday. So yesterday, I met Erika (the exchange student from Hoshi University, Japan) near RCSI and I decided to show her around, as she's only been here for three weeks. So we went on a walking tour to Trinity College Dublin, before walking past the Ha'penny Bridge to Dublin 1. While walking towards the Spire, we made the acquaintance of a fellow student from UCD, Patrick "Paddy" O'Grady.
2) Together, the three of us walked around Dublin 1, passing Penneys and the Ten Thousand World Buffet and The Savoy. As we were about to double back, we met Melvin, who sadly was in a rush to go somewhere. So we continued our way back to the bridge, before walking along the River Liffey to Dublin Castle. That's opposite the Queen of Tarts shop where I bought some lovely pies on my second day here in Dublin. How time flies...
3) But I digress. We found out more about each other, especially Paddy since we had only just met him haha. After spending some time in the St. Stephen's Green Park, it was time for dinner. I brought my friends over to Wok In, and got the beef curry with rice. By this time, it was getting late, so I had to excuse myself to finish my packing at home. That was the gist of my day yesterday :)
4) Today was back to the labs for me. I spent the entire morning and part of the afternoon finishing off the second product (now labelled KC4), only to find out in the end that it wasn't the product that we were looking for! We've now followed two different sets of instructions to synthesize this compound, yet no luck so far. So using Reaxys (a web-based tool for the retrieval of chemistry information and data from published literature), Donal and I found another published article detailing the process. We've set up the experiment as described, and left the intermediate on stirring overnight.
5) Hopefully the product will turn out fine when we finish up tomorrow, as we've run out of the starting material already. Anyway, that's been my day today, and I hope you enjoyed reading about it. Have a great day, cheers!
Me, Erika, and Paddy at Dublin Castle central square
Posing in front of the Spire
(which is completely overexposed haha)
Having dinner at Wok In ^^
Need to filter ppt tomorrow...
Note to self: When they say add SOCl₂ drop by drop, they really do mean that
(case in point the balloon on the right burst because of the pressure build up due to the sulfur dioxide gas produced - gave me the shock of my life!)
