november update

November has definitely been a month of firsts.
Here’s a start for the list:

I killed chickens with my bare hands during the process of learning how to necropsy them.

I saw albatross and blue-footed booby chicks

I swam with clownfish and angelfish that seemed as big as my head on a reef full of colorful corals

I ate raw clams and shrimp in cebiche, this from the girl who hates seafood

I swam in the ocean without my bathing suit much to the delight of early-morning fishermen. At five in the morning after running for an hour strange things seem like good ideas.

I have 10 plants pressed, mounted, and preserved in an herbarium

I ran a half marathon (21 K) and actually ran the whole way, despite the altitude in Quito.

I learned how to collect semen from and subsequently inseminate rabbits

I successfully made an Ecuadorian dish that my host mom did not know how to make but that we both love: pan de yucca

I went to my first concert (popular concert, that is...I’ve been to lots of concerts of classical music)

There are more firsts, but these are the coolest (or grusomist as is the case with the chickens).

Selected elaborations:
The race: My friend Angie has been running basically since we got here but she always runs for an hour and I was convinced I could never run that far. So I had just been running around my house for under 30 minutes until one day about 2 months ago I decided to try and run the route that Angie uses. I ran most of the way and it took me about an hour and before I knew it I was getting up at 5am every day and running for an hour. Then about a month ago I saw an advertisement for a half-marathon that kicks off the Fiestas de Quito (a sort of week-and-a-half-long celebration of Quito’s independence). They had a relay option where you could split the race between two people and each would only run 10.5K. I thought it sounded really cool so I asked Angie if she wanted to do it with me and she said yes. We were all set to go when Angie started running two laps around the park that constitutes about half of our running route and decided she wanted to try the whole thing. So I conned Amelia into running the other half with me but then she decided she was going to go somewhere with her family that weekend so Angie convinced me that I should run the whole thing with her. We did a practice run the weekend before and Angie easily ran at least 21K but I gave up somewhere around 18. I had myself convinced that with the adrenaline from the race and Angie to distract me I could make it the last 3K on the day of the race. Then three days before the race something happened to Angie’s legs where it was painful even to walk (we think it might be shin splints) and she couldn’t run in the race so I ended up running the whole thing all by myself. I actually wasn’t even that tired until the last kilometer because the last two kilometers were a huge hill and by the last kilometer I wanted to stop so bad but then I thought: when is the next time I am going to run a half-marathon let alone a half-marathon in Quito? I tried really hard to convince myself that it wasn’t going to kill me to run one more kilometer and kept thinking about how cool it would be to actually run the entire half marathon and how mad I would be if I stopped in the last kilometer and suddenly I was crossing the finish line. It was crazy because there were so many people. I don’t know exactly how many people ran but many thousands of people at least. Saturday I had to pick up my registration packet and chip to monitor my time and it was a huge fiasco. I waited with Angie for two hours in the morning until we finally found out that the chips were being held hostage in customs and they wouldn’t be there until 2pm. So we came back at 4 and at that point Angie had decided not to run but I waited another 2.5 hours until I finally got the stupid chip. I was so mad a good part of me didn’t even want to run. But since I woke up at 5am anyway the next morning, and because I was really stubborn about the whole thing I got up and drank the avena (a shake made of oatmeal, cinnamon, water, and naranjilla, a fruit that’s kind of like a cross between a tart orange and a tomato) and set off for the race. The route was so beautiful! For a good part the moon was still out and the sun was rising over the mountains and the scenery in general was amazing. Plus there were tons of people on the street cheering. And I was on TV :) My mamá turned on the tv just as the guy who won the race was finishing and then they started showing clips of other parts of the course and she saw me passing the halfway point. Yep, as the winner was finishing the whole darn thing I was only halfway. But oh well. I made it in 2 hours 12 minutes and out of women 19-29 I came in 40-something but out of everyone I came in in the 1000’s somewhere. Besides, it was really fun and I still can’t even believe I ran the whole way. As a super-bonus not only do I have a cool t-shirt (albeit a pretty big one since they were all out of smalls by the time I finished) but also a bag that says Quito Media-Maraton on it and a medal. And of course I am keeping my number.

Inseminating rabbits: Apparently my animal nutrition and reproduction professor developed the technique for artificially inseminating rabbits as his master’s thesis (why you would want to artificially inseminate rabbits is a question I am still grappling with). The morning we were going to learn how to collect the semen samples the custodian had found the artificial vaginas we were going to use and not knowing what they were tossed them in the garbage. Fortunately this did not stop us. My professor quickly manufactured new ones from glue stick cases with the ends sawed off, the finger of a disposable rubber glove and some hot water.

Juanes Concert: So cool, we were on the field which meant we were very close to the stage and in such a dense mass of people that I couldn’t move enough even to lift my hand enough to scratch my nose. The acoustics were great though and I love Juanes’ music and he sang all my favorite songs so all in all it was a great first concert.