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Viva Chile!! 🇨🇱 Day 205 / September 18, 2026 The 18th of September 1810 marked the First Government Junta in Santiago. A meeting that would start the conversation of a route to Chilean independence (which was officially recognized on the 12th February 1818). For a better understanding of this history, read the following translation from Memoria Chile below: “In 1808, Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Spain and took King Ferdinand VII captive, installing his brother Joseph Bonapar

Day 198 / September 11, 2026 On Friday when Cathe, Eiber and I arrived to lab, we got straight to working measuring the remaining plants while listening to a rotation of reggaeton, romantic music, and hip hop. Once the plants were measured we packaged them up in brown cardboard paper and stored them in the freezer (mistakenly forgetting to weigh each one beforehand). By 5:30pm we were done and closed down the lab for the weekend. At home I changed then made a bean salad appe

Day 191 / September 4, 2026 With Professor Luis’s generous contribution of the nanodrop, I spent all day Friday performing duplicate and triplicate measures of all my previous DNA extracts. I wanted to be sure of the concentration for each sample and update the best candidate list accordingly. Although special elution tubes are used with the Qiagen kit, some DNA still binds to the tube walls which can affect the concentration measurements. To mitigate this I did a brief vorte

Day 184 / August 28, 2026 On Friday I was feeling slightly better and headed into the lab at around 10:00am. The Micropolis team had returned from Santiago and Cata brought me a surprise sopapilla plush!! It was the sweetest gesture and the starting point of “dieciocho” energy that would continue to ramp up for the next two weeks. As it was the end of the week, we spent most of the day planning for the week to come and tidying the lab for closure over the weekend. At 6:00pm

Day 177 / August 21, 2026 On Friday, I was focused on one thing, and one thing only…RANDOFEST!! This was the 6th edition of the Maule based event, hosted by Andes Sustainable, a group dedicated to conserving and protecting the high andes within the Maule region. Worth noting, in addition to organizing this huge backcountry event, they were recently involved in the ‘No a las Torres: Salvemos Alto Maule’ movement. Electric company Enel was looking to construct 72 towers to carr

Day 170 / August 14, 2026 No trip to Valparaiso would be complete without a walk through the iconic Cerro Concepcion neighborhood, so we started our day by doing just that! We left the Airbnb at 8:30am to look for some coffee and breakfast. Our wandering took us to WIP coffee, a specialty spot that does it just right. Alex and Val carefully chose their selections of coffees (a latte, a V60, and an espresso maybe?) while I had a hot chocolate. They split the lemon poppyseed ca

Day 163 / August 7, 2026 After a lovely late night dinner with friends, Val and I had an early start on Friday morning leaving the house at 4:30am to drive up to La Parva. I took the wheel for most of the journey up and Val took over once we reached Santiago for the final ascent to the resort. The line of cars at the chain checkpoint moved by quicker than we thought and we were in the parking lot gearing up by 9:00am. By 10:30am, we had taken the shuttle up to Sector B, Golon

Day 156 / July 31, 2026 Friday, the last day in July and Tash’s last day in Chile. I left the house solo at 9:00am to pick up a rental car from the airport which Val and I would use for the next two weeks. We still planned for a full day together in Santiago but with no place to put our bags, I figured this would be the cheapest way to do it. While I went to get the car, Tash and Val got ready to check out of the apartment. It was not the quick out and back as I had hoped it

Day 149 / July 24, 2026 It was another sunny day in San Pedro, it usually is in the desert, and we woke early for a high altitude day. After munching on the leftover steak for breakfast with a Tash egg scramble, we drove the hour up to the town of Machuca. We stopped just outside the city limits to get a high altitude soil sample, then continued to the parking lot. The comunidad Atacameña de Machuca was in the midst of their annual festival to celebrate their patron saint, Sa

Day 142 / July 17, 2026 My 24th birthday started off in true Rudy fashion: early. I boarded the 3am bus from Talca to Santiago, switched to the Centropuerto bus, then went straight to SIXT car rental and had our car by 7:30am. I parked up, had a lovely chat with my grandparents (hello Nanny and Grandad!) then waited in arrivals hall for my special British package to arrive… and there they were!! Lily and Tash came through with heavy bags and big hugs. It had been over a year

Day 135 / July 10, 2026 Our alarms rang at 2:00am and we were once again up navigating the dark Refugio to get down for breakfast. We had the same bread with jam and butter as well as a yogurt bowl before heading out to the mud room to put our shoes on. We were on the trail by 2:45am making our way up. It was another beautiful starry morning and we had it all to ourselves. The trail was incredibly clear and well maintained. This time my headlight was fully charged making the

Day 128 / July 3, 2026 TGIF! After a lovely evening out in Santiago on Thursday, I was certainly a little sleepy on Friday. There was a mechanic visiting the lab to perform an annual assessment on the autoclave. I waited with him until Cathe arrived and took my place at around 10am. At that point, I bolted upstairs to a small presentation room where Catha was doing a practice presentation of a paper about a cancer model in mice. She is taking a PhD entry assessment this comin

Hello! Hola! Iorana! I am now back in Talca after a very long hiatus and here with so many fun updates from travels I was able to go on during the University holidays throughout July. It has certainly been a minute here, so to refresh you on where we left off, Leslie and I had just recently arrived in the Atacama Desert at the end of June… Day 121/ June 26, 2026 We started our Friday off with a breakfast in the hostel. There were a few more goodies remaining from our Jumbo ha

Day 114 / June 19, 2026 Hello and welcome back for this Week 16 recap! Taking us back to Friday, I was in the lab for most of the day. Catalina and I helped Catherine with her plant experiment assessing the viability of various beans with and without the addition of a biostimulant across various levels of water availability. Shrabana arrived with some yummy pistachio Bon Bon chocolates which we snacked on between plant prep. It was time for a proper lunch at that point and I

Day 107 / June 12, 2026 Fridayyyy!! After a busy first week performing the antimicrobial assay, we wrapped up by measuring the results from the 72h samples plated yesterday. Then, I helped Cathe water the beans in the incubator for an ongoing drought resistance study and prepared materials for next week. After work I went for a quick trip to the climbing gym then met Catalina to go watch the Paraguay USA World Cup game. We walked to Bar Estado together and settled at a table

Day 100 / June 5, 2026 Wow! 100 days in Chile. I am one very very lucky duck! And so so so excited for the next 100+ to come!! :)) Mina and Jula walked to campus with me to see the office and drop me off for the day. They walked home shortly after to allow time for Mina to prepare for an interview. She was on the call from 11:30am until 3:30pm… a very long day indeed! Meanwhile, I was in the lab planning for next week with Nicolas and Catherine. Nicolas is going to Concepcion

Day 92 / May 28, 2026 Nicolas and I worked to innoculate the various media plates prepared the day prior with the respective bacteria. As we were working together in the laminar flow cabinet, things got shuffled around and all of a sudden the brown paper on top of one of the sterile jars got too close to the open flame and caught on fire. I saw flames, grabbed the jar and started to frantically pat the flames out with my hand. In just a few fell swoops the fire was put out. W

Day 85 / May 21, 2026 Thursday was a holiday so there was no school today! After the late night at the disco, I slept in and woke up at 11:30am. At around 3:00pm I headed out for a walk and did a lap down to the river and back home. I had a quick nap then chatted with Val all about his progress on Dune. He is working it!! Every time he goes, he says he learns something new. Climbing is rad. Day 86 / May 22, 2026 On Friday, it was unclear if people were going to work or taki

Day 78 / May 14, 2026 Thursday Thursday!! Today Katelyn, another Fulbrighter, is coming to Talca. She is currently a PhD student at UC Davis and is doing a research project about local sustainability practices in agriculture (agroecology!). Both today and tomorrow she is having interviews with vineyard owners in the Maule region. I spent the morning catching up with Amber on the phone (Australia time is going to be here so soon!) and cleaning my apartment (delayed because I

Day 71 / May 7, 2026 On this lovely Thursday morning I reviewed the slides for my lecture with Education USA at 6pm tonight. I will chat for 45 minutes about my education at UCL and Brown, then touch on my experiences in industry, and wrap up with a discussion about my Fulbright project. I enjoyed a carbonada with a side of cauliflower and carrot cake for lunch from the nearby Sibarita Gourmet. Carbonada is a traditional soup served in Chile and northwest Argentina with beef,

Day 64 / April 30, 2026 Thursday and the last day of the work week this week! Tomorrow, May 1st is a National Holiday for Day of the Workers. “May 1st is a special day for workers in Chile and the Western world. In the country, Carlos Ibáñez del Campo decreed it an irrevocable holiday in 1931, but its origin dates back 45 years earlier in the United States. A historic day for humanity occurred on May 1, 1886. More than 80,000 factory workers in Chicago went on strike and foug

Day 57 / April 23, 2026 This week started out SO strong as I finally got my RUT card! YAY!!! The Rol Único Tributario, or RUT is a national identification number used for almost everything in Chile. You need it to open bank accounts, purchase Wifi, pay utilities, sign contracts etc. After collecting my card at the Civil Registry, I headed straight to Entel to purchase Wifi for home. Within 10 minutes I had selected a plan, filled out the necessary forms, and scheduled the in

A shorter blog this week as I start to get into a routine with projects at work, and hobbies outside. Winter is coming! Day 51 / April 17, 2026 TGIF!! Friday :)) In the morning I was in the lab to record the PHA results from yesterday. I measured the radii of the halos of inhibition for the respective antibiotic treatments and will perform a replicate next week. Aparna messaged Dr. Charles about meeting to discuss the proposed antimicrobial characterization project, and we sc

Day 43 / April 9, 2026 Thursday thursday! I started the morning finishing the blog post from the week prior then published it. More computer work followed after. At around 3:00pm Aparna invited me to join her, Cynthia, and Eiber for a meeting at CEAP (Centro de Estudios de Alimentos Saludables) near University of Talca. They had scheduled to meet with the ‘Bean Master’ leading legume scientist, Bacilio Carrasco, to discuss plans for Eiber’s undergraduate thesis. He showed us