NY continued...

Today we were able to hang out with Mary and Ram all day.
First we went to Mary's lab. She does stem cell research on mice for Cornell University. They use the embryos from mice to do experiments on different gene mutations (at least that's what I understood from it). One of the colleagues did do her work on time, and some baby mice were actually born (that's not supposed to happen)
Then she put some mutated embryos in a dish for us to look at. They can put "markers" on certain genes, and see what part of the development they impact.After that we took the subway down to Chinatown. Chinatown is a lot busier and there are a lot of street vendors. Many of them sell scarves, hats, and accessories, and there are also many of them that try to sell fake designer handbags. We met Joe's other cousin Annie, and her husband Kah-Leong for Dim Sum. Mary has a good description of it on her blog. In short, it's a big banquet hall with lots of tables, where the waiters bring carts of food around, that you pick food from.

Chinatown has a really cool store "Pearl River" where they sell all kinds of cool Chinese things, from traditional clothes, to dishes, soaps, vases etc. I just wanted to buy all of it!! I restrained myself though, and just got a couple of cool handmade dishes.

After walking around a lot, we wanted a little brake, and went to a fun little bookstore. It's an independent bookstore, so not one of those big chains. Recently I have been wanting to make more Asian food, but haven't had good recipes. So my mission was to find a good Asian cookbook. I found a really cool on that has recipes from several different countries, and the ingredients don't seem too complicated. We also visited a used bookstore. In there, you just have to browse, and there is just too much!!!

Later at night we went to Annie and Kay-Leong's apartment (on the other side of Manhattan) The funnest part of the night was when we all made music together with instruments they had. There was a drum, flute, Australian super duper big horn (I don't know the name), rattles, and music sticks. Joe got a good recording of it, and I will try to post it here with my blog later.