Peru, Paper, Stanford

I can’t believe it has been so long since I’ve updated. I was doing good for awhile but then life happened.

Peru was amazing. Ash and I saw many animals in the wild and to our delight, we even saw a jaguar! I especially loved the monkeys and the colorful birds but the whole amazon experience was amazing. I only wished Dave had been there too.

The second half of our trip was spent hiking to Machu Picchu. There were some real highs…Salcantay mountain, making a wish to the gods, and seeing macchu picchu. We went through the company Viajas Cuscos and it was dirt cheap ($250 for 5 days 4 nights including meals and entrance to the Macchu Picchu). However, the downside was we had to carry all our stuff the fourth day and we felt there was some mistreatment going one with the cooks/porters. We were shocked by how little everyone was tipping. I know the entrance to Macchu Picchu alone is 150 so the last 100 dollars were split between the guides (who probably got more), the 2 cooks, and the porter. That’s like $20 for each of them if split evenly and some people couldn’t be bother to tip more then $5 for the 5 days! I know a lot of the people in our group were students but seriously!?!?! If you don’t have enough money to tip reasonably, I don’t think you should be on the trip at all.

When I got back from Peru, I got my paper back and the editors wanted a few minor changes. It took about a week but we got it in and within 2 days, they accepted it! I am so happy because we were worried about another paper that got published in April essentially scooping us. The editors acknowledged the scope but since our paper was under review when that paper came out, they still gave us the chance to publish it. I feel pretty lucky.

Now I am focusing on a second paper. I had a committee meeting at the end of May and it looks like everyone is on board for me to be done next year. Though these events all happened rather quickly, I feel very blessed to have so much good news in such a sort amount of time.

Finally, last weekend Dave and I went to Lilly’s graduation at Stanford. It was fun to hang out with her again and to get some yummy Chinese food. I really liked the area and the weather. Now Lilly is in Hong Kong doing an internship for the summer. Though I am sad she is not spending more time at home with us, I am glad she is having fun and enjoying her life.

I probably won’t be updating this as much with all the sunshine outside and my goal of squeezing every last drop of fun out of this last PhD year but wow…I am so happy.