Meeting the students

I met Coral in the afternoon with the students. Excited to see who we will be teaching and working with out in the field these next couple months! There are four; Alex, Betsy, Elizabeth, and Tim, and they are all quite different, make that vastly different. Alex is at one range of the spectrum, from the Midwest and going to school at a small liberal arts school in Wisconsin. He has only minimal experience abroad and this is certainly his first study abroad experience of this sort, he also speaks no Espanol. On the other end of this spectrum is Elizabeth, from Portland Oregon but going to school at Saint Mary?s College in Maryland. She has traveled widely and recently participated in work/study abroad in Gambia, West Africa as well as studying in Spain, where she picked up plenty of Espanol. Betsy hails from South Carolina and goes to school at a small college in Minnesota. Unlike the others, who are all biologist majors more or less, she is a physics major. She has visited the Galapagos before and speaks some Spanish. Finally there is Tim. He proudly hails from Port Angeles Washington. He is a little older and only two years my younger in fact, having taken off some time from college. He seems like the most outdoorsy of our group with a passion for field research which has taken him to Alaska and Costa Rica, where he picked up some Spanish.

Here we go! Introductions and that inevitably awkward figuring each other out phase that will pass after a few days together. Excited to get to know this group of eclectic individuals from far and wide brought together by common interests. Coral and I took them out to a typical Ecuadorian restaurant for dinner in the evening in el centro. Taking in the downtown and getting oriented a bit with the city. I snapped this shot of the city scene bathed in street lights and moon shine?