Well, the last full week of my internship has come and gone. Time has definitely flown by. I’m happy to say though that I finished everything I had to do for the incubation experiment. These last few weeks I completed the fractionation of the post-incubation soils and, thanks to Ana, an undergraduate student that started a work-study position at the lab this month, my samples are now almost all finely ground. Soon they will be ready to be weighed for the 13C isotope analysis, which in the end will be carried out right here at UB. I’m still waiting for confirmation from the isotope lab technician to be able to weigh out the samples. Once that’s done, she just runs them on the machine and we’re done! Although then I’ll have a whole bunch more data to analyze and write-up, so really just one part done.
Soil fractions
Besides finishing up lab work and cleaning up, I had a chance to make a long-weekend trip a couple weeks ago when a holiday fell on a Friday. It was a new holiday (Santa Eulalia, another patroness of the city) that just started this year so it was a pleasant surprise to find out we had a day off in February. So my friend, Luisa, flew down from Germany and joined us for a quick trip to tiny Andorra. Andorra is just over two hours away from Barcelona and although there wasn’t much snow this year, seeing the Pyrenees for the first time was amazing. We spent two mornings snowshoeing in the Naturlandia park followed by some shopping in Andorra la vella, which is basically a one street town. Saturday night we relaxed our sore muscles in the thermal baths of Caldea. This place is a huge thermal baths/spa complex which honestly I didn’t enjoy so much because it was so crowded and felt so commercial. The Valentine’s Day weekend probably didn’t help. Still, the sauna-freezing water combo worked great to put us right to bed after (and practically even during) dinner. We couldn’t complain, it was a pretty fun weekend!
