Hey all! I’m Ricardo Cabral, just coming off my freshman year at the university. I am planning to major in neuroscience and psychology, and currently I have found my way to the city of Valladolid, located in the Yucatán peninsula in Mexico. It is a small city, with a population of around 80,000, and it is located in the heart of the peninsula, leaving me surrounded by wilderness and Mayan ruins. In the picture below (that has been cropped a little) I am actually inside an ancient field used by Mayans to play their ball game, located in the ruins of Ek’Balam. The city itself is very nice, the people are warm and friendly and at every corner you can find a good place to eat for cheap. I am already on my second week here and I have loved every second of it. Another great thing about here is that in the region there are a lot of cenotes, or natural pits where water resides, and they are great for helping someone cool down as the summer here gets really hot and humid for most of the time!

The program I am participating in is done through the university’s Center for Latin American Studies, or CLAS. After doing a seminar class in the spring term prior to this summer, me and a group of a few others now are in Valladolid to carry out individual research projects we have built over the past few months. In my research, I am looking to study the current presence and uses of mushrooms in Valladolid and the surrounding region of Yucatán. I am doing this through finding different primary sources, trough written and spoken information as well as interviews with locals and others who work with mushrooms in the area. In the end, I know that this experience will help me get used to research and give me a good head start to hopefully carry out many other projects in the future. I also hope that I will be able to publish my research, helping me advance my career and education goals at this point in my university years. Not only will this experience help me advance academically and career wise through the research I will be carrying out, it will also help me in other ways. Firstly, by living here for 6 weeks with a host family, and by obviously speaking Spanish all the time with everyone, I hope to bring myself one step closer to Spanish fluency, and I know I will be much better at the language after its all said and done. Furthermore, living in another culture and having a wildly different day-to-day will probably help me see things from a different angle, giving me new perspectives and insights toward many different aspects of life, something that will probably carry over to the classroom and other parts of my life. Overall, I’m really excited for what’s to come and I know that in the end this will be a great opportunity for me!