Celebration in the Field

26 January 2014
I was very happy to hear that I would be in the field for my birthday - who could ask for a better present? It happened to coincide with our uplift date (the date we start trying to leave the field), so we moved our celebration earlier to Jan 25, which conveniently coincides with a Scottish holiday called Burns Night. We also hadn't used all our special food (stuff that isn't dehydrated) and there's no point in hauling that back. Our special food included a bit of alcohol as well. All of these things combined to create an absolutely amazing night of celebration.

Out in the Patriot Hills playing with boulders and building up an appetite with Scott, one of our Field Assistants

We started the meal off with a creative chicken dish. Phil (a field assistant) used the relatively mundane ingredients in the cooking box to create a delicious tomato-based sauce for chicken breasts (mainly tomato paste, honey, chili powder, and lime juice). Then we had a baked Camembert with a glass of red wine. The meal continued with a fantastic walnut and date bread (they call it cake here, but it's essentially a dense bread in American terminology). At this point, they broke out improvised candles and sang 'Happy Birthday'. Andy even brought presents all the way from Edinburgh!

Presents from Andy and Kate with a card from the whole field party. Andy gave me a book: The locals' guide to Edinburgh. We used it in place of Robert Burns' poetry on Burns Night - I learned some new Scottish words. It will probably require its own post later. So much new vocabulary on this trip!

Typically, Burns Night is celebrated in Scotland by reading Robert Burns' poetry (typically 'Ode to Haggis' at the very least) and then stabbing the haggis. We didn't have haggis (Kate is from Scotland and might have tried, but she didn't think that would have made it through Chilean customs on the way down!). Instead, Kate shared her homemade tablet (this is a Scottish dish - kind of similar to fudge, but a bit harder and it can be difficult to perfect, but it was delicious). We opened a bottle of Scottish whisky (Balvenie, 12 years for anyone who's interested) and hung out talking until we headed to bed late. It feels like we saved a lot up for one evening, but we had an amazing time in the field, successfully completing all our scientific goals for the trip, and we definitely deserved a bit of a celebration! I can't think of a better end to the trip...trying to start uplift today so we'll just have to see how it goes!