Hola from Santiago! Haven’t been able to talk much since I got here so figured I’d give everyone a short re-cap of my first few days in Chile! (con un poco de español)
martes: Me and my fellow researcher, Kelsie finally made it to Chile! First, in Atlanta our flight was delayed almost two hours because of a suspicious debacle with the caterers, then somewhere over Florida they realize one of the pressure systems in the plane isn’t working properly and we would need to land and do maintenance before flying over the Andes. After dumping the fuel in the Gulf (nbd), we landed in Florida. So we spent over four hours in Orlando in an almost deserted airport and then left for Chile at 7:30am after departing from Atlanta at 11:45pm. All in all, we made it, and Delta gave us 100 dollar vouchers, which I will most likely use to fly to Austin, so I’d say the trip was pretty successful. With limited access to the internet, I will most likely not be posting pictures for a little while, do not be dismayed though, my beautiful little art pieces will be displayed shortly.
A little background about this trip: At Smith College I work with Annaliese Beery and we basically study behavioral neuroendocrinology (this is the link to our lab site! http://sophia.smith.edu/~abeery/Beery_Lab/Home.html), particularly voles and the role of oxytocin on social behavior. A colleague of hers, Loren Hayes, who works at University of Tennessee has been doing field work in a similar field in Chile looking at degus. After a recommendation from Annaliese to Loren, I was offered a research position in Chile for the summer to help in field work. Mostly for the summer I will be assisting one of Loren’s students, Garrett Davis, on his masters thesis. The idea of the project is that in areas where biomass is rich and there is a lot of coverage by trees, the population of degus in that burrow system will be more genetically alike, this is because with more resources available, there is less incentive to leave. We are basically trapping the degus putting radio collars on them and then using telemetry to track where they go and taking tissue samples in order to do genetic testing. We will collect tissue samples by cutting off a small piece of the ear on the tip, I hear they barely feel it, so I don’t feel so bad.
In case you are curious about what degus look like here is a video I’ve watched about a million times of two absolutely adorable degus “fighting” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gu2ahQCGGz4. We will be working in a field site of Rinconada about forty minutes outside of Santiago to do some initial tracking. Then we will be spending almost the entire month of July in Fray Jorge, another field site about 5 hours from Santiago- there will be no electricity and probably no phone service so I will probably just not exist whilst there.
As for living in Santiago, my apartment has a beautiful view of the Andes–I know, be jealous. And we are right down the street from the Universidad where we will be doing some research. There are a bunch of cafes around our apartment where you can buy cheap empanadas, they also sell a lot of pizza here, and a sushi place?, bread is also huge in Santiago, I wish you could all experience the wonderous taste of fresh baked Chilean bread.
miércoles: Today we went to the Universidad católico where I will be working most of the time, we got keys to the lab! And at the Uni they use swipe cards to get onto all of the floors, so I kind of feel like a badass swiping in to all these places. We also visited the degus in the colony they have there, they are so cute!! We also made preparations to go to the field!
jueves: First day in the field! We woke up bright and early at 6:30! We wanted to get out of the city early and to the field site before 9 when the degus emerge, however we forgot the one thing we could not forget (the key that lets us into Riconada) so we ended up getting lost and driving around the city about three times in a state of panic, luckily, using international 3G (and almost 200 dollars worth of data charges), we were able to navigate our way back to the Uni to retrieve the keys!
The field site is absolutely beautiful! We are in a valley, but it is surrounded by the Andes, and there are beautiful birds everywhere! My favorite is this road runner type bird I will eventually get a picture of. Because we got there so late we only caught one degu =[ …but she was adorable!
Thursday night we went out to this restaurant in the ‘yuppie’ part of town and it was this darkly lit place which has bands play every night and big couches to sit on…definitely a cool place. And I could finally get my ternera mechada pobre!
A view of the Andes as we were flying over Peru from my plane window
You can sort of see the Andes in this pic, it is cloudy a lot so you can’t see them a lot, but they are there!
Some of our food at the restaurant ‘Catedral’ (notice ash tray–everyone smokes in bars and restaurants in Chile!)
Pictures of the field site to come! As well as updates on our first fin de semana en Santiago! Ciao!
ripleyinchile 