More evidence of aliens in Roswell

Today I continued my quest to find aliens in Roswell. I found a crashed spaceship on main street (photo) and a t-shirt extolling the taste of barbequed aliens ("just like chicken"). Finally, checking out of one store my cashier was an actual alien (photo).

Where are the aliens in Roswell?

This afternoon I went in search for aliens in Roswell. Where? In the Wallmart of course. Where else would aliens blend in with the rest of the crowd? In fact, the Wallmart seems to advertise that they are alien-friendly. Here are some pictures of the murals outside the Wallmart showing aliens shopping inside. Here also is a photo of me with a large alien inside the Wallmart and another photo of me outside waiting for the bus with some aliens. Stay tuned with my blog, tomorrow I go in search of flying saucers.

Christmas in Roswell?

Time to travel to Roswell, NM, for Christmas. Some people think New Mexico is a foreign country (after all, Mexico is in the name). I brought my passport just in case. You never know if you will need it to get back to the "real" U.S. How exotic and far away is Roswell? It takes over 12 hours to get there from New Jersey. I can get to Rio de Janeiro in 9 hours, Tokyo in 12 hours, almost any city in Europe in less than 10 hours, but Roswell takes forever. Why? It is in the middle of nowhere. On my favorite airline Continental I need to first fly to Houston, wait a few hours (good time for lunch, excellent restaurants in the Houston airport), and then continue to Albuquerque (another airport with a good restaurant). Then after a few hours wait a small airline called Mesa flies a tiny plane the last 45 minutes to Roswell. Wait … the departure schedule in the Albuquerque airport says the Roswell flight is cancelled? A quick check at the Mesa desk confirms: no pilots are available to fly the plane. Hmmm … should I take the offer of a free hotel room plus a free dinner and breakfast and fly tomorrow at 1:30? And take the chance that they might cancel that flight also? Or should I rent a car and drive the three plus hours to Roswell? Since I only plan three days in Roswell I decide to rent a car and reserve one online (the Albuquerque airport has free internet!!!! Why can't other airports do this?). Now, should I be nice and volunteer to drive the other stranded passengers? Or should I be naughty and simply ignore them? Since I want lots of presents from Santa this year I decide to be nice. Luckily there are only two other passengers going to Roswell that evening. I make them a deal: if they promise to keep me awake while I am driving I will give them a free ride to Roswell. It turns out that they are both singers: one sings in Las Vegas and the other in Nashville. Quite an interesting mix as they kept calling me "the professor" like on Gilligan's Island. They kept up their end of the bargain and played some of their CDs and sang solos. We had a lively conversation to pass the boring time driving through the mountains and across the plains after dark. Finally we get to Roswell and have coffee in the Starbucks in the giant Wallmart parking lot on the north side of town while waiting for their relatives to pick them up. My good deed for the day.

Sunday - back in NJ

Sunday we landed in Newark. In a mild snow storm. Quite a difference from Brazil. Immigration went really fast and we got all our luggage except for one bag right away. The last bag took another 40 minutes or so to come off, supposedly one of the luggage compartments was frozen shut. Our limo driver drove us back to Rutgers in the snow fall. When I got home I made fresh squeezed orange/tangerine juice and Brazilian coffee to drink with fruit for breakfast. Of course eating fruit and drinking juice and coffee for breakfast in NJ is quite a bit different from eating fruit and drinking juice and coffee for breakfast in Brazil. A very big difference in state of mind.

Saturday - where is everyone?

Saturday morning in my hotel I waited and waited and waited for my group to call me. No one did :( My friend Helaine from Piracicaba called my hotel room twice that morning because she wanted to meet up with me and the students for one last day together. Helaine agreed to drive two hours to Sao Paulo to meet me late in the afternoon. So I went to a flea market and a shopping mall just to walk around and window shop. Late in the afternoon I met up with Helaine and we went out for passion fruit ice cream (the best!) plus coffee (Helaine) and fresh orange juice (me). Then Helaine drove me to the airport where I met up with my students, they couldn't get their boarding passes without the paper tickets in my backpack.

Friday - Food poisoning!!

Friday morning I woke up feeling very bad. I think it was a mild case of food poisoning. Probably from the truck stop the night before. Everyone else checked out of the hotel and moved to the one that USP originally reserved for us for Friday night. I stayed in bed the whole day sleeping while everyone else went shopping in Sao Paulo. Here is the view from my hotel room window. The "Christmas tree" on the right looks very nice lit up at night.

Thursday night change of venue

Thursday afternoon we decided ourselves to alter the schedule. We wanted to go to Sao Paulo that evening. So, Evelyn found us a great hotel in Sao Paulo and called and made reservations for us. We convinced the bus driver to leave that evening. We left the San Carlos bungalows just after 8:00PM. We stopped along the way at a Brazilian truck stop. A REAL truck stop. We had dinner there against my better judgment. We finally got to our hotel in Sao Paulo just after midnight. Here is a photo of one of our roommates saying goodbye as we left Pirassununga.

Thursday USP Pirassununga flower photos

I was a little bored today so I walked around a few times and took pictures of flowers.

Thursday USP Pirassununga poster session

Today the students put up their posters. While the USP students only had to put up their posters for a half a day (either morning or afternoon) our students put up their posters all day. The biological sciences judges decided to evaluate the posters so they spent a lot of time asking the students questions. I wonder if we will get the scores? We also attended short hour-long symposia in the morning and early afternoon (in Portuguese, of course). There was also a short concert by some young students.

Wednesday afternoon USP Pirassununga campus tour

Wednesday we went for a campus tour starting at 6:00. The Pirassununga campus is the largest campus by size but the smallest campus by number of students (only about 800). They have a lot of farm land and a lot of animals: horses, cows, buffalo, sheep, etc. There are only two departments: Aninal Science and Food Technology. We went to the barn to see the horses. Then we went to the on-campus swimming hole where we met some students (can you read the sign by the water?). Then we stopped at a Jabuticaba tree. This is a funny tree because the fruit grows out from the trunk and the branches. Looks a little like a cherry but tastes a lot different.

Wednesday Day 1 of the USP Pirassununga symposium

Wednesday morning we went to the USP Pirassununga symposium with our posters. Surprise! Our poster day is Thursday. The Rutgers students went for a tour with the USP students. I sat in a corner and did some more writing. Then I used the very sloooooooow internet connection to e-mail my document. I can't check my e-mail because the connection is to slow. I see I have over 90 messages waiting for me from only a day and a half. I had lunch in a nice fish restaurant and took pictures of the birds in the river outside the restaurant. After lunch I gave my presentation. I showed the Biotechnology video again and challenged the USP Sao Carlos students to do one also. I also gave a presentation on my research. During my talk I asked who knew where New Jersey is and all the Rutgers students raised their hands. Ha Ha Ha.

Tuesday afternoon arriving in Pirassununga

I apologize for my absence from blogging. We moved to Pirassununga Tuesday afternoon. A long drive (2.5 hours) because instead of going "straight across" the bus driver took the "freeway" which means going far to the east until a fork in the road and then making a U turn and coming back on the other side of the fork (see the map on one of my previous posts). Upon arriving in Pirassununga we were told by our USP hosts that we would be staying in converted farm houses. More like small cottages, must have been for the farm hands in the old days. Each cottage has 3 or 4 bedrooms and 1 or 2 bathrooms plus a living room, kitchen, and front porch. But …….. no internet access. Oh no! What am I going to do without 24 hour access to the internet? The next day we were allowed to use computers at the symposium but internet access was incredibly slow. I had to go through internet withdrawal! But the bungalows are nice, in the middle of a farm, near the cows. Very rustic setting. Nice except for the nearby freeway with road noise. And … oh … the bugs! Because we are on a farm there are the occasional big nasty-looking spider, beetle, mosquito, and other creepy crawlers hanging around trying to get into the beds with us. But, we Cook College people know how to handle bugs - Raid!, better living through chemistry. One trip to the grocery store and we were fortified. I am more worried about the Capivara that I heard may be in the woods around the farm. Capivara are rodent-like animals that weigh 140 pounds and are almost 3 feet tall. I don't want to meet one of them when out for a walk at night.

Tuesday early afternoon Biology Education Center

Tuesday afternoon we were taken to the biology student center in town. This is like the Liberty Science Center but much, much smaller. It is a place for middle school students to go to learn about biology. Here are photos of a bacterial cell with it's DNA hanging out, a manual for microbiology experiments, a poster for cloning, and a poster about mosquitoes and Dengue Fever. The mosquito photo is for Mary. She wanted me to bring some mosquitoes back to test in her laboratory. I told her that I didn't want to get arrested by the USDA people when I went through customs on the trip back. The mosquito poster is my compromise (Hi Mary!)

Tuesday morning USP Sao Carlos Symposium

Tuesday morning the students put up their posters in the USP Sao Carlos gym. Here are pictures of all the SEBS students with their posters. I sat in the bleachers all morning and got some writing done on my computer.

Slow Internet - Blogging Delayed

Internet is really slow here. Will post updates later. Sent from my cell phone.

Monday in Sao Carlos

Monday was a slow day. We went to the opening ceremony for the USP Sao Carlos campus undergraduate research symposium. I had to give a very short speech. I also showed the Designer Genes club Biotechnology video (see http://youtube.com/watch?v=3oW1sUrTGLc). I challenged the students in Sao Carlos to make their own video in response. I told them to look ours up at youtube. The afternoon was mostly free so I worked again in my hotel room :( In the evening we went to a grocery store attached to a small shopping mall. I got coffee for Sinead, the kind she told me she liked that I bought for her two years ago from the same store (Sinead, are you reading this???). I also got Passion Fruit gatorade, Passion Fruit jello, and Passion Fruit concentrate juice (500 ml makes 8 liters!). We had dinner at a small restaurant in the mall with outside seating on a small cliff so we got fresh air and a nice view of the lights in the city below. To bad I didn't bring my camera to dinner. I went next door to the juice stand and got a 50/50 mix of orange juice and passion fruit juice for dessert. Can you tell from this post that I like passion fruit? I even had fresh passion fruit for breakfast this morning. Here are photos of the view of Sao Carlos from my hotel window and a photo of me at the head table at the symposium (I suppose I need to teach my students how to take good pictures with my camera). And ... oh ... big thanks to Mukund Thakore, Rotem Naftalovich, Davinder Sandhu, and Manoj Thakore for making the video.

Sunday to Sao Carlos

Sunday morning we checked out of our hotel at 4:30AM. I don't think anyone got more than two hours sleep. Our cab driver picked us up at 4:45 and our TAM flight to Sao Paulo took off at around 6:45. We all slept on the plane even though it was a short ~45 min flight. Upon arrival in Sao Paulo we had an adventure because the plane let us off in the international terminal (the plane was continuing to New York). We had to explain to the immigration and customs agents why we hadn't filled out the proper entry forms ("because we flew here from Rio" … "but what are you doing in the international terminal?"). Our Brazilian friends were waiting for us and we had a little breakfast in the airport while waiting for the Rutgers engineering group to show up. Then it was a 3.5 hour bus trip to Sao Carlos. In the evening we went out for Brazilian pizza (a lot of cheese, no tomato sauce, and different vegetables and meats) and ended the day at a nice ice cream shop. Sorry, no pictures today.

Saturday in the Botanical Gardens

Saturday was a fun day. In the morning I worked again :( in my hotel room while some of the students went shopping on the beach. I heard that some of the students were to tired to do anything, what is wrong with kids now days? We met up at about 2:00 with Helaine and we decided to go to the botanical gardens over by the big lagoon in the south side of the city (see my pictures from Corcovado for an aerial view). We spent a couple of hours walking through the gardens. There was a free concert of Brazilian music in the Botanical Gardens at 5:00 which Helaine and the students listened to. I missed the concert because I took Vanessa back to the airport since she had to return to the U.S to work Monday morning. We met up at our hotel at 9:00. We then went to an arts and crafts flea market near the beach and bought some more souvenirs (I got some paintings). We ended the day on the beach after midnight watching the larger than normal waves crashing in.