Day 106: November 28, 2007 In Salta
Trip Start
Aug 15, 2007
1
106
202
Trip End
Mar 01, 2008
Salta,
Argentina
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
I went down to the office after doing my morning writing. The first thing I did was check my email to see if my proposal was received at Brevard but there was no confirming email--that was bad news. I called the Postgraduate Office at UNSa to see if te certificates were ready for signing. They assured me that they would be ready by noon.
I got Elena going. She and I took a cab out to the university at 11:15, arriving at 11:30. Having a little time to kill, I took the tuff sample that I collected in Río Chuñapampa to Chiqui Peyrera's lab and left it there for preconcentration and eventual handing over to Claudia who will send it to me with her samples.
I looked around for others but no one seemed to be in their office. I got to the Postgraduate Office and was given a big stack of green certificates-55 of them. I dutifully went through and signed each one of them. I was then presented with a certificate of my own. Knowing that the oversize piece of paper would undoubtedly be destroyed before I returned to Brevard, I asked if they could just mail it to me there... we'll see if it gets there.
I almost got out of the building when José and Berta arrived. He reminded me that we needed to order some books for the library, as a part of the Fulbright grant. I sat in his office for an hour watching chaos unfold. It was eventually agreed that they would send me the list by email tomorrow and I would place the order on Amazon... we'll see.
I said good-bye to José and his son, José María, and took the bus into town. I ate a light lunch of empanadas at the Plaza Hotel sidewalk café, getting a table in the shade, out of the intense heat under a clear sky. After lunch, I went to the farmacia to get a prescription filled but they were out of Diovan. I was destined to failure after that because of siesta time. None of the other farmacias were open so I just took a cab back to the office.
An email from Denise Poole claimed to have one of the two papers I needed signed attached to it but I couldn't open it from the Brevard system's remote access page. I forwarded the file over to Toyo but Denise had sent him both pages already so we opened them; printed them; I signed them; Hector scanned them; and then Toyo and I assembled them into a single .pdf file with the proposal in Acrobat. It went very smoothly. I noticed a problem in the final product so we fixed it and reassembled the file. It was all very easy. At about 7:00, I submitted the proposal, electronically, to the Petroleum Research Fund. What a relief! I can't believe it all came together before the deadline.
At around 8:30, I took a bus to El Centro, stopping at several farmacias looking for Diovan but not finding any. I met Elena and Carlos at the Central Plaza. After he left, Elena and I walked down to Caseros and Pueyrredon, stopping without a success at two more farmacias. We were meeting a group of people from the office at a neat restaurant called La Plaza de Almas. The farmacia next door, on the corner, said they could get me what I needed in ten minutes so I went to the restaurant and ordered beer. Twenty minutes later I went back to the farmacia and picked up my medicine.
The restaurant was very nice. We ate in the courtyard. The gathering was a farewell sendoff for Elena and me. It was attended by Tuity, Estela, Luchi, Alejandra, Luis, his wife, Marcela, Suki (Marcela´s English teacher), Gabriela, Toyo, Jorge, and Bernardo. We all ate very well at a good price. Afterward, we caught a ride back to the apartment with the boys, Toyo at the wheel. Elena went right to bed while the four of us had a nightcap out on the balcony, watching a spectacular moonrise over the mountains to the east.
