Resting?

    Yesterday was our first rest day!  Though what did we decide to do on it?  Study? Sleep?  Actually rest? Not all of us.  No, eight intrepid explorers decided to get up early and go on a hike to town through the forest.  Of course, this involved 3 1/2 hours, rain, and the fording of a number of creeks and a legitimate river.  This was amusing with my leaky rain boots; after leaving the river, with every step water squirted out of the holes in my boots.  I can’t believe that one of the few people to go hiking was me, and I’m sure none of you can either! Let’s just say I was sore today, especially since we went on a two hour hike for class this morning.  We have a daily yoga sess in the house though (what else is there to do?) which helps. I’m aiming for the splits before returning to the States.

    We were talking about the things we were starting to miss from the States.  Sandwiches – for some reason, we never have any here.  No deli style meat or something.  Diet Coke – they do have Coke Light here which was a relief for me (I tasted some Costa Rican soda at the Coke museum in Atlanta last summer, and it was sugary disgusting), but it tastes like what they sell in Europe and no like my beloved American brand.  Not having mosquitos everywhere.  Pizza.  Snickers bars, or really any kind of lovely chocolate.  Four more months and I’m sure the list will be out of control. 

    By the way, identifying insects is one of the most terrifying experience ever.  Those things legitimately look like terrifying aliens.  They all have huge mandibles, nasty scales, and the way their heads attach to their bodies is just not correct.  Seriously, look at close up photos of even just mosquitos or horseflies.  Disgusting.  

    This is a Marantaceae plant, one of the nineteen families we have to memorize for our plant practical Sunday.  You can tell because of the S-shaped venation on the leaves and the pulvinas, which allow the plant to bend when wet and get the water off its leaves.  I feel like perhaps I won’t need to know this once I leave the tropics.  But now you know what I do all day!

    Here is a brief snapshot of a few things we’ve been doing!  Be prepared for a lot of nature pictures over the course of the semester:

    We have our first rest day tomorrow, which means I can finally go into town and get new rain boots and a poncho.  And turns out I also need a new watch — apparently the highly concentrated DEET we are using to repel mosquitos is corrosive and my watch stopped working (and I put this on my skin?).  Our first test is in a week, a plant practical where we have to do identifications (today we learned ten common families).  We also have to collect and identify to family ten insects, though its hard to find them because it is always raining!  I’m getting really good at catching small bees by hand though (without a net I mean;  I catch them with a small bag, not actually with my hands), so thats a skill I’ll be bringing back to America.  Tonight our resident Costa Ricans are going to take us out to the town, though they said not to expect much because the town near our station, San Vito, is extremely small. 

    Pura vida is a saying they use everywhere here, like a national motto.  It means roughly “life is good,” which basically encompasses the Tico worldview. For those of you who speak Spanish, they also almost never use the “tu” form, always the “Ud,” and seemed to think it wasn’t so much rude as just distasteful.  Unrelated, but interesting.  Anyway, I hope you all are feeling pura vida!  Congratulations to the duke football team for winning a game and no longer being a complete embarrassment to the school!

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!