Day 8--ATBC day 3

This morning my lab-mate Ana and I left the hostel on a mission: to find hot chocolate (of course!) and churros. Eventually we found a little café called Mesón Agustinos where I had a Chocolate Champurrado (hot chocolate thickened with a corn mixture called atole) and churros con sabor. The four flavors of my churros were: 1) cinnamon and sugar, 2) chocolate, 3) leche condensada (sweetened condensed milk), and 4) cajeta (caramel). They were really good and went well with my thick chocolate!


After breakfast, I went to the “Debating the tropical extinction crisis” symposium in the conference and stayed there for the morning listening to a lot of big-names talk about some (debatable) general trends in tropical ecology.

I had another lunch at the conference with friends then went to the “Multispecific interactions in changing environments” symposium. This was a really great set of talks and I spent the rest of the afternoon in this symposium. After viewing more posters, I went to this evening’s keynote speaker who talked about generalization and specialization between pollinators and plants.

Tonight was the ATBC banquet which started at 9pm but before we entered the Governor’s Palace to eat, there was a fireworks show staged in front of the cathedral. I couldn’t really believe that they were setting off huge fireworks right in front of the cathedral’s main entrance (this building is a UNESCO-designated world heritage site) where it could get damaged/burnt, but they were! The banquet was fun and I got to talk with one of my professor’s from UM about my field-work. Dinner wasn’t very delicious (mushroom soup = good, fish in mole sauce = blah, tequila ice cream = BARF!) but the venue was really pretty and spacious. The banquet was still going strong by 11:15pm and I had to have a good night’s sleep in order to be coherent while giving my talk tomorrow so I left and went back to the hostel. Tomorrow is the big day--my first presentation in an international conference!