29 Enero
Buenas noches a todos!
Thank you all for your encouraging responses to the big blog launch.
I´m writing from Patricia's hostel in Guatemala City, the capital and largest city. Patricia and her son work with the language school to pick up students from the airport, provide lodging, and get us to the right bus station tomorrow to head to Xela.
The day started out on the wrong foot, unfortunately, when I tripped over my coat or a backpack strap and tumbled down a few stairs at home. I of course immediately took some ibuprofen, did a self-neuro exam (no focal deficits), and looked up "me duele el cuello" in case I landed in a Guatemalan clinic on arrival but I'm doing much better now. I nearly left my passport on the copier in Olney too but luckily my mom said something to the effect of, "as long as you have your passport..." at which point we turned around and grabbed it.
Everything has been lovely and gone very smoothly since then.
I met Mariah and Nicole, two other UNC medical students, in Atlanta and we had entire rows to ourselves on the flight to G.C. Nicole headed straight to Xela today but Mariah and I had a lovely afternoon lounging around Patricia's neighborhood and the hostel. We had lunch at a comedero around the corner, which was essentially a small restaurant. I'm not sure if I spelled the word correctly but comedero means like a feeding trough. We had omelets, beets, rice, and tortillas and sat with a woman from Lancaster, PA who has worked in El Salvador as a missionary most of her life. She was headed back there from PA, where she was visiting her mother for her 106th birthday. I asked her her secret: onion sandwiches and no pop.
Took a nap and sat in Patricia's garden. There are some really squeaky sounding birds, a citrus tree, waist-high basil plants, and pretty blooming vines. It doesn't feel like January.
The squeaky birds, as it turns out, remind me of my thought processes around forming our rank order list. Lots of competing interests that get louder and squeakier depending on the day. For those of you who are reading and feel some of this, I'll leave you with what Tyler wrote to me today. Amy L., I think there's something to our dating/interviewing theory!
I just sat down on the couch and started reading this magazine that was open to an article about online dating. Pretty interesting. One paragraph in particular was fascinating for its translatabity to the match:
"At the selection stage, researchers have seen that as the range of options grows larger, mate-seekers are liable to become 'cognitively overwhelmed' and deal with the overload by adopting lazy comparison strategies and examining fewer cues. As a result, they are more likely to make careless decisions than they would be if they had fewer options, and this potentially leads to less compatible matches. Moreover, the mere fact of having chosen someone from such a large set if options can lead to doubts about whether the choice was the 'right' one. No studies in the romantic sphere have looked at precisely how the range if choices affects overall satisfaction. But research elsewhere has found that people are less satisfied when choosing from a larger group: one study, for example, subjects who selected a chocolate from an array of six options believed it tasted better than those who selected the same chocolate from an array of 30."
I'll grant you, it's not a perfect comparison, but pretty interesting.
xoxo,
Rachel
Buenas noches a todos!
Thank you all for your encouraging responses to the big blog launch.
I´m writing from Patricia's hostel in Guatemala City, the capital and largest city. Patricia and her son work with the language school to pick up students from the airport, provide lodging, and get us to the right bus station tomorrow to head to Xela.
The day started out on the wrong foot, unfortunately, when I tripped over my coat or a backpack strap and tumbled down a few stairs at home. I of course immediately took some ibuprofen, did a self-neuro exam (no focal deficits), and looked up "me duele el cuello" in case I landed in a Guatemalan clinic on arrival but I'm doing much better now. I nearly left my passport on the copier in Olney too but luckily my mom said something to the effect of, "as long as you have your passport..." at which point we turned around and grabbed it.
Everything has been lovely and gone very smoothly since then.
I met Mariah and Nicole, two other UNC medical students, in Atlanta and we had entire rows to ourselves on the flight to G.C. Nicole headed straight to Xela today but Mariah and I had a lovely afternoon lounging around Patricia's neighborhood and the hostel. We had lunch at a comedero around the corner, which was essentially a small restaurant. I'm not sure if I spelled the word correctly but comedero means like a feeding trough. We had omelets, beets, rice, and tortillas and sat with a woman from Lancaster, PA who has worked in El Salvador as a missionary most of her life. She was headed back there from PA, where she was visiting her mother for her 106th birthday. I asked her her secret: onion sandwiches and no pop.
Took a nap and sat in Patricia's garden. There are some really squeaky sounding birds, a citrus tree, waist-high basil plants, and pretty blooming vines. It doesn't feel like January.
The squeaky birds, as it turns out, remind me of my thought processes around forming our rank order list. Lots of competing interests that get louder and squeakier depending on the day. For those of you who are reading and feel some of this, I'll leave you with what Tyler wrote to me today. Amy L., I think there's something to our dating/interviewing theory!
I just sat down on the couch and started reading this magazine that was open to an article about online dating. Pretty interesting. One paragraph in particular was fascinating for its translatabity to the match:
"At the selection stage, researchers have seen that as the range of options grows larger, mate-seekers are liable to become 'cognitively overwhelmed' and deal with the overload by adopting lazy comparison strategies and examining fewer cues. As a result, they are more likely to make careless decisions than they would be if they had fewer options, and this potentially leads to less compatible matches. Moreover, the mere fact of having chosen someone from such a large set if options can lead to doubts about whether the choice was the 'right' one. No studies in the romantic sphere have looked at precisely how the range if choices affects overall satisfaction. But research elsewhere has found that people are less satisfied when choosing from a larger group: one study, for example, subjects who selected a chocolate from an array of six options believed it tasted better than those who selected the same chocolate from an array of 30."
I'll grant you, it's not a perfect comparison, but pretty interesting.
xoxo,
Rachel
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