Inside Student Blogs Grace Glynn 
Galapagos, Spring 2013
Grace's Posts
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Galapagos Cuisine
Class gets out at noon every day, and we spill out of the school to begin the search for lunch.
Ecuador, food, Galapagos Islands, Quito, Study Abroad, Travel
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Why the Elderly Visit the Elderly
My hope for the Galapagos is that the rapidly expanding tourism industry does not transform it into what some of the Hawaiian islands have become, with skyscrapers and malls and development destroying fragile ecosystems. As tourism shifts from academic to recreational, it will be necessary to reevaluate the restrictions placed on it in order to preserve this paradise.
Ecuador, Galapagos Islands, Quito, Spring 2013, Study Abroad, Travel
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Walking With Reptiles
For the hundredth time this semester, I felt like I was walking on a different planet, there among the old giants and their guava trees.
Ecuador, Galapagos Islands, Quito, Spring 2013, Study Abroad, Travel
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Spring Break in the Galápagos
But the islands make me consider that life doesn’t need to be centered around stress and competition and overworking. Every day that I spend with my host family I’m reminded that there are other ways to live. They go about their lives with much less urgency and they smile more than any people I’ve ever met.
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Vestigial Traits and Perpetual Summer
This weekend a little bus took us up to the highlands of San Cristobal. It was a clear day and we could see to the other end of the island from El Junco, a crater lake at 2,000ft above sea level.
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Grains of Rice and Salt and Sand
The family recently took me along on a weekend camping trip to a remote beach reachable only by boat. Here lay the real test of my host mother’s abilities, and she rose to the challenge.
Ecuador, Galapagos Islands, Quito, Spring 2013, Study Abroad, Travel
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The Capital of Paradise
So this is island living. School is located approximately ten steps from the beach, and after three hours of class in the morning everyone walks over to the stretch of perfect sand.
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Punto Caliente: Arrival on the Galápagos Hot Spot
Last Sunday brought us, finally, to the Galápagos Islands. We flew to the island of Baltra, then a two hour boat ride took us to Isabela, the largest in the island chain. Sixty miles long and shaped like a seahorse, it boasts a population of three-thousand clustered in a quiet coastal town where you can walk day and night without a care, down the middle of the roads made of soft packed sand.
Darwin, Ecuador, Galapagos Islands, Quito, Spring 2013, Study Abroad, Travel, volcanoes
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Breaking the Rules to Eat Sensibly
In the centers of Ecuadorian cities and towns, vendors line the sidewalks selling everything from pig skin to papaya beneath colorful umbrellas. The smoky smell of cooking meat wafts through the streets from little grills on wheels.
Culture, Ecuador, food, Galapagos, Quito, Spring 2013, Study Abroad, Travel
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The Amazon Basin as a Time Portal
To watch these bizarre-looking birds fly clumsily amongst the palms, then, may be the closest we can get to seeing a dinosaur. So, I sat in the canoe as our professor paddled quietly, clutching my binoculars and trying not to blink lest I be brought back to the present from this prehistoric lagoon.
Amazon, Ecuador, Field Trips, Galapagos, Quito, Spring 2013, Study Abroad, Tiputini, Travel
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A Field Trip at 12,000ft
To the delight of a classroom full of amateur field biologists, though, most of our class days are spent outside. We take trips to many different ecosystems within this incredibly biodiverse country and learn more than we ever could inside walls, no matter how vibrant their color might be.
Ecuador, Field Trips, Galapagos, Paramo, Quito, Spring 2013, Study Abroad
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Self-Awareness, pt. 2
It’s true that this city is so vastly different from home that it’s nearly impossibly to forget how far I’ve come while walking down its streets. Light-headedness and hot, dry skin remind me that I’m just below the sun, 9,300ft above sea level, in the highest capital city in the world.
Ecuador, Galapagos, Quito, Spring 2013, Study Abroad, Travel
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Self-Awareness
Here, Lantana blooms in the sun along mountainsides, roadsides, and up telephone poles. It’s everywhere. I stared and I knew that three-thousand miles North, in the greenhouse of my New England college, they were growing the plant between protective glass walls, pumping heat at its buds and begging it to bloom.
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Happy Solstice
One-hundred-and-eighty-one years ago, in the snowy shadow of another winter solstice, Charles Darwin left England for warmer waters. His now-published journal was written more than a century before anyone thought up the word “blog” (his entries took three years to reach the public instead of three seconds), but it was a prototype study-abroad journal, the original blog before the invention of glowing screens and yellow fever vaccines, and now I read each pre-departure entry closely.
Ecuador, Galapagos Islands, Pre-Departure, Quito, Study Abroad, Travel
