Our second week in San Juan has brought lots of laughs and a few challenges. After spending the entirety of our first week recruiting participants, we took this week to contact and schedule their sessions, but this proved to be more difficult than we had anticipated. Since our experiment requires pairs of two people who must know each other well, it takes much more planning to coordinate the sessions. We struggled with this in the beginning of the week, but eventually found a system that works, so we will run our first participants on Tuesday.
I have been loving the coffee, which is all grown right here on the island!
On Tuesday night, Katherine and I met up with one of my friends from Penn State who is originally from the west coast of Puerto Rico. We got dinner with her and her family and they gave us plenty of recommendations for things to do around the island. I was able to try my first mofongo, a staple Puerto Rican dish made of mashed plantains. ¡Que delicioso! Afterwards, they showed us around Old San Juan. I look forward to seeing El Morro, a fort overlooking the Atlantic Ocean that was built in the 16th century.
On Saturday, Katherine, Snow, Wendy and I went to Escambron Beach with Wendy’s family. Although it started to rain, we still had a lot of fun. I returned to the beach on Sunday because I couldn’t resist the clear blue water, fluffy sand and the abundance of sand crabs.
I look forward to getting our project in full swing. I expect this coming week to be one of the busiest and most difficult, but I think that once we get our feet on the ground, we will be able to solve any problems that come our way.