Our journey to Puerto de Real began at about 5 p.m. on Friday and we fell into bed exhausted around 6 p.m. (eastern time, 12 a.m. in Spain) on Sunday night. The eight of us in the NSF REU program are living in an apartment complex, each in a different building but within shouting distance from one another. We dropped our bags in the rooms and ventured out into the town of Puerto Real to explore and find food on Sunday night. The town is very small, with a couple streets with shops and cafeterias. From our apartments, the beach is about a 15- to 20-minute walk. We found a place to have dinner and after much difficulty (hardly anyone could understand the menu) we ordered tapas and had our first dinner in Spain.

So this morning we got to go into Cadiz for the first time, which is a small city that is very beautiful and has good restaurants and nightlife. (Sorry Puerto Real.) Next month, all of us Americans on the trip are pushing to be moved to the University housing in Cadiz.

Tuesday was the first day we went to the University of Cadiz (UCA) in Puero Real. It is about a 20-minute walk from our residence, across a couple bridges and through the town. For the next two weeks, we will need to be at the university by 8:30 for our Spanish class. The class is from 8:30-10:30 and is taught entirely in Spanish. The best thing about it is that the director of the program, Joanne, and her husband, Michael, are taking the class with us. Joanne has been coming to Cadiz for 10 years now and knows a ton of Spanish ... Micheal not so much. We are all struggling together.

My second day of lab went a lot smoother than the first. I arrived around 10:30, after Spanish class, and we left at 2:45. This weekend is La Feria in Puerto Real, a huge carnival for the town with rides and tons of food and dancing. We were let out of lab early to go to the feria and we have no work on Monday to continue the celebration! I am sure of one thing -- this weekend will be loud. We live in apartments that are mainly rented as off-campus housing by students of the university. The main method of communication here is screaming from one apartment to the other in order to talk to your friends. The eight of us NSF students have started to embrace this habit -- today I planned a trip into Cadiz while sitting at my desk and yelling to my friends (they live in another apartment building but we heard each other perfectly). This morning I was awakened at 5 a.m. by lots of yelling. I thought my alarm clock hadn't gone off, and it was the middle of the afternoon. In reality, I was hearing my neighbors returning from la feria. It seems with each passing day, la feria gets bigger and bigger. I can't imagine what Monday will be like, especially since it is important enough to give us a day off work.

Rachel, Randy and I are going to be working for the next two months on extracting and analyzing three different species of Antarctic lichens. We are trying to identify secondary metabolites in the lichens. Secondary metabolites are chemical compounds that may benefit the lichen but not be necessary for survival, in the strict sense. An example of a secondary metabolite would be an anti-herbivory toxin produced by a plant so insects would not eat the plant. Plant specific secondary toxins (PSST) are also responsible for the bright colors of some insects and frogs because the insects and frogs eat the colored toxic compounds of the plants. But instead of digesting them and getting sick, they store them for their own protection. Antarctic lichens live in very rough conditions and so have a large amount of secondary metabolites, which we are trying to identify so to then determine their function.

On Sunday, we caught a train in the late morning into the new part of Cadiz. Cadiz is divided into the old city and the new city somewhat by an old wall that kept out invaders around the Napoleonic times. Cadiz is a peninsula that juts out into the Atlantic Ocean and on the train ride to the beach the peninsula gets so narrow that there is only room for one road and one set of train tracks and on one side is a small beach and the ocean and on the other side is a small beach and the bay. The train let us off in the new city about two blocks from the beach and from there we went down to the beach and set up shop under our solitary umbrella, our lone respite from the hot, strong Cadiz sun. The beach, as foretold, was beautiful, but I did not think it was much better, if at all, than nice beaches on the Atlantic coast of the U,S. Anyway, it was nice and I would spend all summer on the beach if allowed.

Today in my lab, I began to run a silica gel column to separate compounds based on polarity. I finally knew what my mentors were talking about in lab, even though I couldn't understand all the words. Last summer, I did research in Dr. Casteel's organic chemistry lab at Bucknell. It was great preparation for the work I am doing this summer. My mentors, Rosa and Anita, try really hard to communicate with me -- in Spanish, English, Spanglish, and sign language. I think we are communicating pretty well now. I'm a fan of the thumbs-up sign and pointing. I am not sure my friends and family are going to understand me when I come home... I feel like my official language will be broken Spanglish after seven more weeks.

Friday night we experienced our first Spanish "discoteca." I don't know the name of it, as all clubs have strange names, and so seeing strange names in Spanish makes it even harder to remember. I think one place was called Mu Cho Teatro and another one was called Juegue Conmigo. Or something like that. We took a train into El Puerto Santa Maria and went to a club that had a concert that night, with a band that was fronted by a singer who was an old guy from America, but had been in Spain with the army, had married a Spanish girl and had settled in Spain. After hearing this, I wasn't surprised when he started to belt out a lot of old Motown songs from the 1970s. We ended up seeing an administrator from the University of Cadiz there with his wife, and he knew the singer and tried to introduce us to him after the show, but the singer was swept up by someone else as soon as he had said hello.

Now in my third week of lab, I am beginning to get a feel for the work I will be doing for the remainder of my time and Spain and the long-term goals of this project. Like I said last week, I am working with just one fraction from previous extractions (mine in particular is the acetone extraction) of a Brazilian plant root. The plant, Guarea, produces secondary metabolites during various times in its lifecycle. These metabolites are of interest to scientists and my goal is to begin to isolate one compound present in the extract. This process takes many years and the project seems huge. I am working on a fraction of a fraction of a fraction (and so on) of the large project.

This is a picture of the building my lab is in

On Wednesday night, at around 9 p.m. (the sun is up until like 10:10) I went to play a pickup game of soccer (futbol) with the two guys who live in my apartment with me, two guys I know from working in the allelopathy lab, and three other guys (I was the only American). So it was pickup soccer, and I played soccer all through high school, so I thought I would do fine, as the guys are older than me (like 24-27) and they said they weren't very good at soccer and were out of shape. So anyway, the point of this long introduction is to set the stage for the butt kicking given to me by these guys. Not all of them were good players (two were only OK), but there were three guys who were very good, and hit give-and-gos like they had been playing together for years. I also was the first person to leave, at 10:10 when it got dark, because I was dead tired and had been standing in a fixed position for the final 15 minutes like I was rooted in the cement we were playing on. They kept playing until 10:30. Yeah.

This weekend, we took a three-hour bus ride down to the Strait of Gibraltar. The earliest bus out of Cadiz was at 11:30 a.m. on Saturday and our bus left La Linea De La Concepcion (the Spanish-owned land just outside the Strait at 3 p.m. Sunday. This didn't give us long in Gibraltar, but we did a ton of things and it was one of the most beautiful places I have ever visited. Our hotel was in La Linea, meaning the currency is euros and everything is in Spanish. We made the 20-minute walk from our hotel to customs, and found everyone speaking English and all prices in pounds. For the short time we were in Gibraltar I felt literate again- reading signs and understanding bits of conversations from people around me. Here is a view of the rock of Gibraltar from La Linea

Seven of us went to Gilbraltar this weekend, which was 99th on my list of 100 things I want to do while I'm in Spain. 98th is to riot after a soccer game and 100th is to be thrown into a Spanish prison. I'm just kidding, though.

This past Friday after Spanish class in the morning we hopped on a train to El Puerto Santa Maria to take a tour of the Osborne sherry winery. It was cool to walk around and see all the old-fashioned equipment that they used to use to make the wine and also to walk through the winery gardens, which were impressive considering the bland exterior of the building that you see from the street. The tour was in Spanish (clearly) though and the tour guide talked way too fast, so I actually didn't catch 95 percent of what he said. But it was still fun and, of course, they let us try some of the sherries they produce at the end of the tour.