I heard a nice quote today: weekends really are necessary for sanity, but sanity isn’t necessary to do science.

This program is incredibly intense.  Not only do we not have weekends (we have Monday of this week off), but we are in class and in activities much more than I am at Duke.  The most free time we have had in one chunk is an hour and a half (plus, of course, sleeping).

Schedule:
    630am breakfast”
    8am field activity
    12 lunch
    2pm  lecture  (these run about an hour and 1/2)
    4pm lecture
    6pm dinner
    7pm lecture
and by 10 i’m like passing out.

It’s really bizarre having time so scheduled in these ways.  I keep thinking what it is I used to do with so much free time at school (I have no idea).  The field activities, however, hardly feel like school.  Today we took a two hour hike examining the forest structure (I know, who would have thought, I’m enjoying hiking!). The teachers took us to a river half an hour in and let all the students go — we promptly forded the river in our rubber boots (turns out of course that mine have a leak, but we don’t have the option to go to town until Monday).  We have a lot of independence in that area, which is really cool.  Plus we have a lot of interaction with our professors – they eat with us and of course spend obscene amounts of lecture time with us.  And turns out Organization of Tropical Studies (my program) is internationally renowned.  Out of just one of their field stations, over 260 papers are published a year.  

So I suppose I should better explain our set-up.  Currently we are at Las Cruces, a field station about 2 km from Panama owned by my program, which protects 200 hectares of forest.  It is 5 miles from the nearest town, San Vito.  It is a “premontane tropical wet forest,” which I haven’t learned the characteristics of yet but there you go.  I do know it gets over 13 ft of rain a year.  Normally it is dry in the morning and raining in the afternoon, a condition exacerbated by the presence of Gustave in the Gulf.  But when its really raining it feels so much like a rainforest.  Everything is also really damp and humid, so my stuff WONT DRY!  Haha it is gross; when I put things out to dry it’s like they get wetter.  But I’m guessing that is one of those things I will just have to get used to.  The station also includes a botanical garden that includes over 3,000 tropical species (including a covered cactus area, which is really cool in the middle of the rainforest), and we spend a lot of time wandering about these gardens.  The rest of the forest I could barely describe.

The forest is surprising in a lot of ways – for one, there’s no color.  Everything is green green GREEN, thick in every direction.  There are very few flowers, the main reason I think because not enough light reaches the forest floor.  We also haven’t seen very many animals (though considering the 25 of us go tramping around singing Disney songs and making more noise than a buffalo herd, I’m guessing we scare them away).  There are a lot of ants, spiders (including my friend Francisco, a spider two inches in diameter who inhabits one of the bathroom showers), and I’ve seen a fair number of butterflies (including one of those really large (5 in?) black butterflies with the blue wings).  And some agoutis, which are really cute guinea pig-like mammals the size of a small dog. The other day a hummingbird flew into the lodge, and today walking out of breakfast there were two toucans sitting on a tree outside. 

This is certainly an adjustment, but everyone in the program is so fun so they are helping a lot!  And the food is shockingly good (yes we do have rice and beans every day, but you’d be amazed at how many different ways you can make them).  The other students have really interesting experiences, especially in science — someone studied plankton in the Oregon northwest; another did work with a lizard in Colombia.  So we have pretty diverse experiences to talk about and information to share, especially concerning different aspects of science (and yes, our conversations are so nerdy and we play trivial pursuit using only the science category).  I really miss everyone from home!!  Keep your fingers crossed for me, and I’ll cross mine that duke wins a football game for only the second time in three years!