For the first week of our trip we are going to be studying at La Herradura, the spanish school in Montevideo. Today was the first day and the staff and teachers were very friendly and helpful. I am in the intermediate class and some of my colleagues are also in the beginners class and both were very helpful to further devlop our spanish before heading out into the field. Even for strong spanish speakers there is a lot of dialect differences between different countries and being able to talk to official teachers and to see how the slang and cultural conditioning changes the language can make a huge difference in your ability to enjoy your time traveling and to understand what's going on around you.
After class we were able to go to Al Museo Nacional de Historia Natural (The Nacional Museum of Natural History) of Uruguay to see the snail specimen collections donated by other researchers and get a better idea of what we would be finding in our own escursions. We also met up with some of our UR colleagues and world renown malacologist Fabrizio Scarabino who will be helping us in our research.
We spent the rest of the day exploring the city a bit and overall it turned out to be an information overload kind of day but very fun.
ErraticallyAbstract
