I've decided to switch hosts... blog.com was slow, almost always down and impossible to use. Hopefully I won't regret choosing blogspot over wordpress.
Ok, so I'm still alive. Turns out that going back for more street food may have been the wrong decision. Very wrong. So wrong that I spend from Saturday night until Tuesday afternoon slowly dying in bed (did I say bed? I meant the bathroom). Really nothing to mention from that period of my life that anyone wants to hear. I spent almost the entire time watching Bobs Burgers; not necessarily the best decision considering my reason for being bedridden. Today I finally satisfied the intense craving for a good bacon cheeseburger that I'd been building for the past 4 days. Nortons Pub managed to provide me with an enormous burger, complete with smoked ham (basically Canadian bacon), cheese, mushrooms and avocado. Perfect for those who have suffered at the hand of the local cows heart... oh ya, that street meat I've been eating is cow's heart. Neato!
I haven't really got much to report as far as activities. Before getting sick on Saturday I went to 2 hours of salsa lessons, which are provided free for people at my Spanish school. The only thing I learned other than some of the basic footwork is that I was not meant to be a salsa dancer (go figure, right?). Oddly enough, I also attend the school for spanish lessons. I've been taking 5 hours of lessons a day this week and will hopefully continue with the same amount next week as well. Originally this was 1 hour of private lessons and 4 hours of group, but the amount of lessons I'm taking allowed me to surpass the first group in a day. So, they've put me in an "Intermediate" level group that contains only me (2 hours of private for the price of group lessons!). It's definitely starting to come together and I think I should be able to make basic conversation by the time I head out of Cusco.
Things I've noticed:
You can buy anything on the streets. Pick something and I guarantee you'll be able to find it somewhere. Want a universal remote? A rather grumpy man on Avenida El Sol sells them exclusively. Individual roles of toilet paper, BBQ lighters or pocket sized containers of maintenance oil? They're there too.
People here are incredibly short. I fit XL pants in Peru...
Relevant Info:
I haven't mentioned anything about why I'm in Peru as of yet, so here we go. I'm here with a professor from my school (Jill Jankowski at UBC - though she isn't actually in Peru until August) to study, in general, the reasons behind birds geographic distribution in the tropics. For a bunch of background info on the project, where I'm living and what I'm doing; take a look at her website: www.zoology.ubc.ca/~jankowsk/Manu_Project.html.
Here's a short video describing one of the components of the project (not what I'm working on but at the same location): http://vimeo.com/25010852.
One of many fascinating aspects of tropical bird distribution is that they often have what we call "shoestring distributions" with very distinct replacement zones among species. Imagine tying shoestrings of different lengths into loops and then draping them over a model of a mountain range. They're all spread out across the mountain range but every one sits at a different height. Similarly, you find many birds with large ranges stretching along the Andes but very narrow distributions when you look at their elevational range. Furthermore, as you change elevation you hit a point where one species abruptly stops occurring and another, often similar species, replaces it. Our project looks at why this happens. It's essentially niche modeling with as many variables as we can measure (which is a lot, but only a small fraction of the actual amount of constraints). In specific, I'm studying the variation in Corticosterone (a hormone that broadly reflects stress levels in birds) levels within species as one moves from the center of their elevational range to the fringe. Hopefully this will fit in well with the other data that's been collected and give us an idea of how much pressure these birds are facing as they reach the edges of their range.
Irrelevant Info:
Crowd-sourcing is a (as far as I know) relatively new phenomenon on the interwebs. I recently came across a fascinating application of it at www.petridish.org. For those of you who haven't heard of it, crowd-sourcing allows people to pitch ideas to the internet and readers can then donate to fund these projects. They are either rewarded with a share of the outcome of the project or set rewards depending on the amount donated (as on petridish.org). This is absolutely fantastic for many aspects of scientific research, which are generally underfunded. Ecology, for example, is difficult to find funding for but often requires very little money to get meaningful results (just enough to send a researcher and field assistant to live in the rainforest for a few months). Considering the amount of nature programming on TV and the hoards of people who call themselves animal lovers, one might think ecology would be well funded. With projects like this, people can give money to researchers in need that will directly accomplish something (sending cool people to cool places to do cool things). Anyway, check it out. Maybe someday you can help pay for me to go somewhere cool! Me, or starving kids in Africa... it's your choice.
* I'll put up some pictures when I get a chance to take some. Been a bit sidetracked by the stomach issues and spanish lately.
** The other two posts are acting weird. I'll make em pretty when I get a chance.
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