Scavenging around Cuenca

Well, I definitely didn’t promise frequent updates, but here’s an overview of my past few days…

This week has been a lot of fun. On Wednesday, we split up into two teams for a scavenger hunt around Cuenca. Well, that’s not entirely accurate. Jesse and Coral declared Tim and me a team against Elizabeth and Alex, but our groups weren’t very competitive and only spent the last of six hours apart. The scavenger hunt included making copies of the house and gate keys, finding a woman named Maria, and asking what type of biology classes the University of Azuay has. The University question was a bit annoying. First, we ask a couple of students, who took us to an admin secretary who sent us all the way to the registrar! We became rather proficient at describing our task and asking questions in Spanish. We also had to find a Chifa, which is a chinese restaurant. While the other team was waiting on our keys to be copied, we found two Chifas and thus won. We are such cheaters.

We also were supposed to buy pan de yuca for Coral. Unfortunately, we became too caught up with other things that we didn’t buy any. Thankfully, Coral accepted this and bought us some the next day. She was definitely telling the truth—it is delicious!

While on the scavenger hunt, we found an orchid nursery on the map and decided that we wanted to visit. Jesse and Coral surprised us by taking us there Thursday morning. There were three green houses completely filled with gorgeous orchids! I ended up taking over 100 photos of just flowers. This was my favorite of the orchids. It looks just like a monkey!

Yesterday afternoon, we had our first anthro class at the Pumapongo museum, which included Incan ruins. So far, we have syllabi for 4 of our 5 classes, and all of them are reading heavy classes, and we have one paper assignment already. In fact, we’ve spent most of our past two evenings reading and still are not ready for Monday’s class. And in case any of you were wondering, the Grinnell journal system is going to be a pain.

Today, we have been preparing for our first venture into the field. We are spending a week at Rumi Loma, the higher of our two field camps. It is up about 10,000 ft. It should be quite an adventure.