Getting settled; Flavours of Colombian culture

We are now here for 4-5 days, still struggling a little with jet-lag, but life is good here. Staying these first days with mi querida Suegra (schoonmoeder), Cecilia, in the north of Bogota makes life very comfortable in one sense. She loves to cook and always when we get here after a long time she prepares a great bienvenidos ponque (taart).

In addition, Emperita (on the left, who comes to clean and do other things in the house)made once again the delicious traditional dish here called Ajiaco, a potato soep with many, many other ingredients as you can also see at the other picture. You can also see Catalina on the picture, Marcela's niece.

So, that is the good part of spending time in the north of Bogota. However, the university is quite close to the center, maybe something only like 7-8 kilometers from Cecilia's house but going by taxi/bus takes in the rush hour (which is most of the day) about an hour. So we are happy to move tomorrow to our appartment which is quite close to the University. Now we only need students since unfortunately only four have signed up for the course I will teach on System Earth.

Despite having sent all the info on the course already a long time ago it seems that at the University they were "a little late" with circulating the annoucement of the course, despite a couple of reminders from my side inquiring about the status of the annoucement. Have to admit that this is quite a bummer but it has one big advantage; I can spend much more of my time to get all the work done that I didn't get done last months because of the all the many other activities; proposal and paper writing but also reading papers again. By the way, have already established many contacts here with the air quality-climate change community in Bogota/Colombia and hope that this will result in some nice joint projects. Hasta la proxima, Lorenzo

First day in Colombia

Sitting here at 8.30PM struggling with the jet-lag, which appears to be heavy especially due to the intense days before departure, I am going through the things we did this first day. We wanted to take it easy, actually did quite well but it was still intense as it usually is arriving again in Bogota, that large, 7 million (or 1 million more?) people, superactive polluted city where we will stay the next 3 months. Tomorrow first meeting at the Universidad de Los Andes to discus all the practicalities to secure that I can start teaching next week; I am curious to see how many students there will be. Of course I don't want to put too much text here but especially have nice photo's but that will come the next week(s) when I have recovered the cable to download the pictures of my camera. Anyhow, last week I was still completely in the campaign with the Zeppelin over the Netherlands

They should come here with the Zeppelin; there is enough poor air quality to measure here and even after all the previous 10-11 visits I never get used to some of these less pleasant features of Bogota. On the other hand, we look so much forward to spend some good time here and really have now 3 months to experience life here with all its facets including working at the University, Later more,