Would you expect that anions would be physically closer to the oxygen or to the hydrogens of water molecules that surround it in solution?

Anions are negatively charged particles. The water molecule is a polar molecule, that means that, it is partly positive and partly negative. The oxygen atoms in the water molecules are more electronegative more than the hydrogen atoms and they draw the shared electron nearer to themselves than the hydrogen atoms; this make them to be slightly negatively charged while the hydrogen atom is slightly positively charged.
Therefore in solution, the anions would be attracted toward the hydrogen atom that is slightly positive while the cations will be attracted to oxygen atom that is slightly negative.

Proteins are the workhorses of the cell, controlling virtually every reaction within as well as providing structure and serving as signals to other cells. proteins are long chains of  amino acids  , and the exact sequence of the amino acids determines the final structure and function of the protein. instructions for that sequence are encoded in  genes  . to make a particular protein, a messenger ribonucleic acid (mrna) copy is made from the gene (in the process called  transcription  ), and the mrna is transported to the  ribosome  . protein synthesis, also called  translation  , begins when the two ribosomal subunits link onto the mrna. this step, called initiation, is followed by elongation, in which successive amino acids are added to the growing chain, brought in by transfer rnas (trnas). in this step, the ribosome reads the  nucleotides  of mrna three by three, in units called  codons  , and matches each to three nucleotides on the trna, called the anticodon. finally, during termination, the ribosome unbinds from the mrna, and the  amino acid  chain goes on to be processed and folded to make the final, functional protein