Here's a picture of me in my “office” where I'm writing from today. We haven't had internet at the real office for 2 weeks, but this hotel is 2 minutes away from our house + has good wireless, so is our second home. (Just as I was writing that the connection died!)
Dreams can come true... the day after writing about how good a cheese sandwich would be, I was in Kigali and found some decent bread and cheese! No pig's ear unfortunately, but that can wait. I hadn't eaten all day either as we had a meeting with the important players in the coffee industry in the afternoon, but we got distracted at lunch time by visiting a Swiss coffee roaster. You can substitute food for coffee to some degree, but it doesn't work forever. The sandwich reminded me a lot of travelling in Eastern Europe as I made it whilst driving along, using a bucket lid as a plate and my penknife to cut the cheese. Had some more cheese yesterday and then had a dream about making a cheese and onion sandwich last night!
On a food related note, here's a picture of the chilli oil I mentioned before. I hope it's not just me who thinks it looks like eye drops.
I spent all of Monday meeting the ~10 students I've started to help with their dissertations. It was pretty tiring and as I predicted it took a long time to explain to some of them what the problems were, but I think I got through eventually. That said, they they have sent us new versions of their research proposals and they haven't changed a great deal! There's also a lot of plagiarism, both from the internet and from each other, but I think it's because no one has told them they can't do it before. It's pretty obvious when in the middle of some dodgy English, up comes a passage that's perfect.
Jean-Marie is leaving for Texas on Tuesday. I thought that it might mean I had some spare time, but no - I'll be working 6 days a week for the next three weeks and staying up until 7am for a few days a week, all in the name of science! Think I mentioned it before in one of my first posts but I'll recap – coffee cherries are pulped to get the seeds (beans) out and then they are “fermented” for about 12 hours (I use the quotes because it's not anything to do with alcohol). We want to know how the quality (taste) of the coffee changes as it ferments, so will be taking bucket loads of beans and then stop them fermenting every hour. The beans start to be processed at about 3pm, and will be sampling up to 15 hours later, which is why there might be some late nights! I was the one who designed the experiment too, maybe I'm going to regret that...
I finally saw some coffee being washed last week too - the harvest is about a month late and at the nearest washing station they only just started. Here's some coffee in a tank "fermenting".
Me and Mario might have found a new species! We were talking about the thrips I mentioned last week and trying to work out how they manage to roll the leaves up, when we put two and two together and realised that normally leaf rolling is caused by viruses, and a lot of viruses are vectored by thrips. So I'd be willing to bet that that there is a coffee leaf rolling virus. I want to try and prove it, but it might have to wait unfortunately. In honour of our inspiration (we were drinking Mutzig) we will call it something mutzigae (after Mutzig beer) and it will be only the second virus found in coffee! If we're right it's pretty cool as the thrips have basically found a way to make themselves a house by eating. It's a bit like if we could walk up to a tree, bite it, and then it turned into a tree house. Here's another photo to show the real size of them:
There are a few random things I've meant to talk about before but couldn't weave in or forgot about, so here's a few random factoids. Matches here are made of wax, quite why I can't work out, but I guess that they are cheaper than wooden ones. When you drink here you get a little bit of paper with the price on, which accumulate every time you order a drink. I don't think it would work in the UK as people would try to lose the bits of paper before they pay. To get the best deal on calls here, some people have several simcards which they swap round depending on who they are calling. The problem with that though is that two of your numbers will not work at anyone time, so you have to try three numbers to get through to someone. And finally, in Burundi, there is a mobile company called Smart Mobile (I have a simcard)!
Not sure if I'll have the internet next week, what with the experiments, so don't get too worried if it's a while 'til I next post!
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