Some Photos

Here are a few of my favorite photos from the trip.  There are many more to come.  Also, you may want to check out the article about our trip which was published in the Blue Banner, here.

Back Home

It was a crazy adventure trying to get through the Miami airport which involved several delayed flights, missed connections, and a trip the the beach that ended with a burn.  We left the hotel in Montero, Bolivia at 5:00 am on Friday and didn't make it into Asheville until 7:00 pm on Sunday.  Thankfully we all made it home safe and after a couple of days of rest we've all made it back to school and are getting caught up on our classes.  My original plan was to be back in town very early on Saturday morning and get some photos edited and uploaded to the blog because of the technical difficulties which prevented me from doing this in Bolivia.  Unfortunately the extended travel time has put me behind schedule both on the blog and on my school work.  I am almost caught up with the school work and plan to have the photos ready and posted on the blog this weekend.  Also, I have several observations about Bolivia that I would like to share on here during the coming weeks as well as plans for fundraising in an effort to bring XO laptops to Bolivia.  More on this later, for now I'm going to get back to work on catching up with school assignments.

Dinner

We went out to an interesting restaurant in Santa Cruz during our trip there yesterday.  Several people ordered uniquie foods which are traditional Bolivian cusine.  Among these were toung, crocodile, heart, udder, small intestine, blood sausage, tripe, and the usual steak and salads.  My table ordered and tried all of these with the exception of the toung and crocodile, which I didn´t know were on the menu until after we had already ordered.  To everyones suprise the heart and udder were the favorite meats while the tripe and blood sausage were tied for least favorite.  The steak and the small intestine were alright, although they were among the meats leftover at the end of the night.  There were no leftovers of the heart or udder.  After I get back home and have the time and a place to edit my photos I have some very interesting shots of the meat market which will complement this post well.  Check back for updates.

Menu

Below is a list of the foods I will be looking for in Bolivia as well as the source where I heard about these foods and beverages.

Coca-Coya (NPR)
Crunchy Coca Puffs (NPR)
native fruits (unique to the region) such as achachairu, guapuru and guabira (Wikipedia)

Photos Comming

I got up early this morning and put in about an hour on the computer checking emails and moving photos around.  Later today I will likely have a collection of photos from our adventures in Bolivia over the past few days ready to upload to this blog.  I will add them to this post when they are ready and when I have internet access again.  We have been very busy with multiple events scheduled every day and have each created a list of several research projects which we would like to explore further.  Now the hard part is going to be narrowing our lists down to one or two projects we could actually complete this semester.  Check back here for some of the photos of our trip thus far.

So here´s the deal with the photos, they are too large to be uploaded with the slow internet speeds and the computers here that I have access to are too slow to edit them down to a more managable size during the few times that I have down time.  I´ll keep trying, but the photos will likely materialize on the blog after we return.  Hopefully everyone else will post their photos as well, we´ll see.

Bolivian Internet Cafe

I am just doing a quick update at an internet cafe because we have been running non-stop since we got here.  I am looking for a more perminant internet connection to use for uploading the many photos I have taken and may have to take a day off from working with the rest of the group just to get this done.  Also, you may have noticed that I have not used any contractions in this entire post.  Can someone please tell me where the apostrophe key is on a Bolivian keyboard?  Others in our group had trouble finding the shift key and I keep hitting the wrong buttons because the keyboard is layed out different here.  More to come, but I just wanted to get some type of message out because I have been out of communication with the rest of the world since Tuesday.

ATL

We're in our hotel in Atlanta.  Luckily, it has wifi and some of us are catching up on homework which is due even though we left early while others are chatting or catching up on facebook.  Our flight doesn't leave until tomorrow afternoon, so we'll have several hours to kill at the airport.  If you have any suggestions about ways to waste 2 - 3 hours at the airport, I would love to see them in the comments.