So I have been in San Cristobal for about a month now. I think I have the island life down. Last week was Carnaval, or in the US, Mardi Gras/Fat Tuesday. This holiday comes before Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent. The premise is that people traditionally needed to consume all of their fats before giving them up for Lent. So in the US, we eat donuts and stuff, while in here in Ecuador we throw the donuts at each other.
Okay, we don't actually through donuts at each other, but the things that make them. At the beach outside our university, there were big parties on the weekend before Carnaval to Fat Tuesday. Everyone smeared one another with paint, flour, eggs, fish oil (ew), and water. It was a lot of fun because for a few days, a social barrier was broken down. Everyone in town is fair game. We made lots of young Ecuadorian friends by being painted and retaliating, and by the end of Tuesday, my neighbors and my host family had an all out war with water, flour, eggs, fish oil, and even chili powder. There was a mass of dough on my head by the end of the day and I was totally covered by paint.
Class has been pretty busy because this is our last week of Phylogenetics. It can be difficult to stick to work here because the beach is so distracting. We have a project due Friday in which we need to make a phylogenetic tree of the group of organisms that we chose. Our choice was big cats, so we found lots of data on the genetics and need to build a tree depicting the evolutionary relationships between the species. It's really difficult to use all this new software for it, but really interesting as well. Then, Friday afternoon we leave for spring break! We are going island hopping to Isabela, Santa Cruz, and Bartolome. I'm really excited for all the awesome snorkeling and hiking we will do, it's going to be amazing. The Galapagos are such a unique place with soo many things to see, I'm excited to get to see more of it!
Last week I also started my digital photography class. I really like it, the professor is from Quito and is a professional photographer with some really great work. Our class is based on landscapes and we needed to pick a theme to pull all of our photos together for a final project.
