A New Life in Quito

Written in the ATL airport with no free wifi:

First post—it’s always the hardest. After two weeks of spending pretty much every waking moment in the lab trying to complete my independent research project, I finally feel ready for the Ecuador trip to begin, somewhat. I’m anticipating visiting a third world country, but from many people that I’ve spoken to they say that the city is great—basically first world—but you travel an hour outside in any direction and you’ve hit the rural areas with health and wealth disparities galore. I’m excited to hit the ground running, as many of you know I would be. I should be meeting with a few of our collaborators at Universidad San Francisco de Quito (USFQ) on Friday, May 20th to make sure we have enough supplies for our field study at the end of June. If not, then we’ll have to order it through Emory and make sure they get in before Marissa Grossman (my research partner!) comes down to Quito on June 2^nd. Looks like we're planning on doing 400 assays every other week for 4 weeks from the end of June through July. In the meantime we'll be helping out with the current projects so we have space when ours begins. Ahh nerves, excitement and curiosity are hitting the roof! It’ll be a pretty darn busy summer: Spanish school (5-6 hours a day of individual tutoring for 3-4 weeks), blogging, complete my research report, ORIENTATION 2011, and preparing/going into the field for the water microbiology study. The next time I post I would’ve already landed and started to adjust to the high altitudes. Fingers crossed I don’t get altitude sickness! Adiós!

From Quito, Ecuador:

For those of you who think that Quito is incredibly warm all day long you are VERY wrong. Because Quito is about 2800 meters above sea level it gets incredibly chilly at night and in the early mornings, but the afternoons are super warm or chilly (again) or raining. Definitely temperamental weather. I'm currently living with a host family that consists of a German guy dating an Ecuadorian girl who are both a year older than me and only speak Spanish. It's pretty awesome. One downfall: cold showers, I would almost argue the warm bucket baths in Africa were better. :-P

I went in to the USFQ lab earlier today to talk to our collaborators about supplies and other materials we need for the field study and eventually celebrated one of the microbio lab doctor's birthday! Everything here is so reasonably priced. Each meal is about $2-3 dollars and staying with my host family is about $10 a night. Did I mention the currency is US dollars? My Spanish needs some brushing up for sure but I can pretty much understand what everyone is saying...so far. The public transportation is also another thing to boast about. It's not perfect, but it's pretty darn good with 1 trolley bus, 1 metrobus, and 1 ecovia bus: all travel north and south on main roads--10 de agosto, América, y 6 de diciembre. The entire city is about 45 km wide so it's not too difficult to get around, but I've definitely gotten lost for a couple hours trying to feel my way through the streets.

I think I'll spend the weekend running in la parque carolina, which is right next to my host family house and check out la Mariscal that's known to be a 'hoppin' nightlife place. Bring on the salsa! It's a little bizarre, but I almost feel like I could live here for a very long time before wanting to go anywhere else. Let's see how the research experience turns out and we'll go from there. Chao!