Silver

I haven't posted in a while, so I guess I should. I won't be able to upload any pictures because someone took my USB cord, so I can't transfer the pictures to the computer. I think Noel has it....

Anyway.

The school is on break, so this is my time to finish buying gifts for people, and get interesting things for myself. Honestly there isn't much else to do.
I am beginning to realize that I planned this year brilliantly (heavy sarcasm). I arrived here in late fall, when the last leaves were falling off the trees. Fall is dusty and windy, and everything is a gray-brown color. Soon winter arrived. Winter is also dusty, but there isn't as much wind. This is unfortunate, because on the calm days the smoke of the city just sits here in the valley, at times making it hard to see more than a few hundred yards.
Now it is spring. Spring is dusty and windy, and everything is a gray-brown color. You get the idea by now.
I will leave at the beginning of summer. Summer is sunny and green, with spectacular thunder storms almost every afternoon. Migrant hawks, swallows and cranes come to raise their young. Naadam, the most colorful Mongolian festival, is during the summer. The best fishing is during the summer. I'm not going to be here to enjoy it.

Really, just brilliant.

Anyway. I've been trying to buy silver lately because I find it interesting. I bought my first silver coin here for $3, and found out online that it was worth about $20. Since then I have kept my eye peeled for silver things.
The only problem is that there are so many fakes. My family owns a few silver things, but I haven't spent enough time staring at them to be able to tell a fake instantly. It is especially difficult because there are so many silver alloys, so you have to keep more than one image of "silver" in your mind.

I went to the outdoor market to buy a leather jacket (incredibly cheap here) and while I was there I bought two things that were "silver". The first was a Mongolian WW2 military medal for bravery ($14). The second was an item I don't really understand that is for holding tobacco and cleaning a pipe ($7).
I got back, examined both of them closely, and concluded that the medal was silver and the pipe thingy wasn't. I showed the things to a few Mongolians. All of them looked at the two items with an air of confidence and said exactly the opposite. The pipe cleaner was silver, the medal wasn't.
Itgil (the front desk worker) was quite adamant. We've had a few arguments since I got here, because we're both quite pig-headed. She said that we should go to a pawn shop, where they would tell us for certain. We went, but the pawn shop was closed. We then angrily stomped to a jewelry store, where they (like every other Mongolian we talked to) said that the pipe cleaner was definitely silver. However, they also said that the medal "might have a little bit" of silver.

Somewhat annoyed at having so many Mongolians tell me what was and was not silver, I decided to dedicate two days to finding out what the metals were

-Fair warning, it's mostly chemistry from here, but not well documented chemistry.-

Since then I have been doing an array of "chemical tests". This sounds fancy, but it really means I've been looking up everything that can be done using kitchen materials. The list is surprising.

1. Silver tarnish isn't silver oxide, it's silver sulfide. Silver oxide is surprisingly hard to form, and it's white, not black. Silver tarnish can be removed by placing the silver on a sheet of aluminum, dusting it with baking soda, and pouring very hot water on it. Some reaction happens, but I'm too lazy to go look it up. The end result is that some bits of the tarnish go to the aluminum (because aluminum is more reactive than silver) and hydrogen sulfide gas is released into the air. The gas smells like rotten eggs or onions.

I did this, and pretty much proved that the medal is at least partially silver. Most of the tarnish was removed and the bubbles smelled surprisingly unpleasant.
The pipe cleaner didn't smell like anything, and instead of dissolving the "tarnish" chipped off.

I then realized that the tarnish might be cupric oxide, CuO. Alloys of silver and copper turn black in response to heat because copper forms oxides quite easily (yes, "oxides", there are two of them). Cupric oxide comes off with acid.

So I tested the acid, and nothing happened.

Today I took the pipe cleaner to a university to measure it's density. I hate doing this stuff at school, but now that I'm not in school it seems that I'm always doing it anyway.

After 10 minutes of pondering signs written in Cyrillic and asking questions in broken Mongolian, I finally found the general chemistry laboratory. Then, after miserably failing to explain what I wanted to do, I went and found someone who spoke English. That took about five minutes.

They were very helpful, and even showed me how to use the balance (the electric scale required a "technician"). I was very grateful and told them to stop by for free English practice.

Anyway, the density we got was 7.4 g/cm3. The graduated cyllinder didn't have marks finer than 10 ml, so we'll be generous and say it was 7 - 8 g/cm3.

Silver is 10.49 g/cm3.
Copper is 8.96 g/cm3.
Zinc is 7.04 g/cm3.
Nickel is 8.91 g/cm3.

Interestingly, the alloy of copper, nickel and zinc (which would be almost exactly the same density as the thing I measured) is known as German silver because it resembles silver in many ways.

So I bought a tobacco bowl and pipe cleaner for $7, and it was probably only worth $5. If it had been pure silver it's melt value would have been about $70. It was a decent gamble, perhaps I can find a greater fool.

To celebrate the fact that I had lost money, I decided to spend money (wait, there's something wrong with that). I stopped at the store where I bought my first silver coin and bought five more for $15.
When I got home I passed a magnet over them as an afterthought. All but one (a Mongolian copper coin from 1915) was a fake. Small surprise, considering the fact that three of them were from central america.

I can't believe I did that.

I'm going to be very, very careful buying silver now. At least the fakes I have bought were cheap enough so that I can probably re-sell them for about what I paid for them in the US. (Fake cuban 1930's peso for $2 anyone?).