The background

Dear friends,

If you have gotten a strange email and you really don’t have a clue what you are doing here, let me help you out. I have put you up on an email list so that you will get updates on what’s going on with my trip to Quito. If you don’t give a Flying Dutchman about what I am doing you are of course free to sign off. Otherwise, let’s enjoy the ride.

I know many of you don’t really know what I am actually going to do down there. You can be calm. I don’t either. At least not to the full extent. However, it all starts with gas.

Gas can be found everywhere in all materials. In some places you can find more than others (places around my father’s dog Ludde seem to be surrounded a little bit more than other places for example). If you shoot a laser beam through gas it absorbs some of the light. You can use this to determine what and how much of a gas there is in for an example in a banana. I know what you are thinking now: “Gee, exciting! Banana gas! Stop the presses!”. Well, if you know how much oxygen there is in a banana you know how ripe it is, or more important, how ripe it will be in a couple of weeks. Then you know if the banana shipment you jut sent will arrive as a nice, yellow ingredient to a perfectly mixed banana daiquiri or as a brown mushy thing surrounded by certain flies us students know of far too well. Sooooo, in order for you to drink nice drinks. I need to go to Quito to measure gas. As simple as that.

Of course, it is all a little bit more important than that. We will actually establish and mount a laboratory equipment for Escuela Politecnica Nacional donated by ISP at Uppsala University, Sweden. No one in Quito knows how to put it up and no one in Sweden who knew had the time to go down and help them put it up: Entrez Märta and Christoffer! So we will go down to Quito for a couple of months, mount the equipment and hopefully do some experiments together with the two professors there, Cesar and Edy (as far as I have heard we are considered being the “experts”). Then, when we leave, there will hopefully be a fully functional, very modern laboratory that only exists in Lund, Zimbabwe and Quito. The idea of it all is for Ecuador to be able to do frontline research. The idea for us is to do High Altitude Physics Training. I mean, if we practise here on 2 800 metres, what wouldn’t we be able to do at sea level!

These last six weeks we have been in Sweden preparing for this project, trying to mount the equipment and trying to have as many problems as possible before we leave so that when they occur in Quito we can say “Ha! You though you could get us there little problem but we have a cure for you!!”. The biggest problem we had was with a stupid list though. Apparently, some bright guy(s) (no names mentioned) sent a list to the customs in Ecuador without double and triple check with what was actually to be sent. This is an extremely important list since everything has to match in order for the equipment to reach the university and not only the border. Since the list didn’t match the equipment we had to match the equipment with the list. Basically we had to go to the Electronic Guy and pick stuff from his storage that seemed to match pieces on the list. Like “Oh, this seems like a KEMO modulo plus flasher 2000 X, doesn’t it Märta!?“It most certainly does Christoffer, let’s bring it!” and so on.

Anyway, everything seems to work out fine. I was even able to move out of my apartment thanks to the lovely help of mother Yvonne, sister Jessica, Fidde, Annika and Tobbe. Thank you all so much!! Thanks also to Dominika and Kalle who let me use their storage rooms until I get back! Thanks also to all the people helping us at the department, especially Linda then of course.

Now you know the background. Let’s continue with the trip!