Such a good weekend. I still don't have internet in my house, hence the lack of posts, but it means I have lots of time to do other things. On Friday night I taught some Colombians flip cup, but they wanted to play with full cups, and I haven't been drinking that much the last few months, so I could only play a few rounds...We went out to a club we went to last weekend, and one of the really nice things about clubs here is that they place a variety of music. Doing the same dance move over and over for hours gets a little boring, so lots of clubs here switch between electronica, salsa, merengue, hip hop, etc, and it's a lot more interesting. It's also really hot and humid here, so you get really sweaty really quickly dancing. I also tried Viche for the first time, which is possible the most disgusting alcoholic beverage I've ever tasted. It tastes like sweet pee (not that I've ever tried pee) with the burn of alcohol (but it's not warm like I would imagine drinking pee is).

I also bought tickets to the FIFA U20 World Cup, which is in Colombia this year! Saturday night was Colombia's first game, which we watched in a Cuban restaurant. They destroyed France. I also ran up/climbed the Tres Cruces again, the hill that tons of people climb on the weekends, and went to the zoo, high. SUCH a fantastic decision - I've never enjoyed animals so much as I did yesterday. We spent several hours watching the monkeys fight with each other, and the fish swim around and around, and tons of butterflies land on us in the butterfly house.

I do work a lot here though, even though I never post about it. I finally started working on the project I came here to work on last week, which was really exciting. It took that long to finally get everyone in the same meeting to present about the project...everything here is really inefficient. It's a project with CIAT and Apoyo de las Poblaciones Rurales de Ascendencia Africana de América Latina, a non-profit which somehow gets abbreviated to ACUA. I'm working with several community organizations that produce either medicinal herbs or beauty products/essential oils from plants they grow. We're helping them develop their products and find more profitable markets, and also investigating the medicinal plants, which is the part of the project that I find the most interesting.

A lot of the commercial drugs in use now are just concentrated doses of active compounds found in plants, or synthetic versions of compounds found in plants. Investigating traditional medical practices can offer leads as to what plants we should be analyzing chemically for medicinal properties. Additionally, a good portion of the developing world doesn't have access to medical systems other than their traditional, plant-based system, and so research of the plants they are using could be helpful in making the ethnobotany (impressive big word?) more effective. Anyway, it's really interesting, and I'm honestly starting not to mind the 5:30am wake-ups as much.