June 8, 2012-- Second Week :D

Soooo its Friday and I don’t really want to be working… haha who does? I think all Fridays should be half days. People who really want to continue to work on a Friday can, but I think we should have the option of half days on Fridays… I’m just saying!

So it’s been another lovely week in Puerto Ayora, with plenty of fun things going on! Monday was just any other Monday: worked worked and played Bananagrams (my new addiction… ask everyone here). Mondays are never too exciting, except that this Monday Maria and David got back from their weekend at work! Yayyy!!! But we still didn’t do much haha just relaxed mostly.

Tuesdays I think have been dubbed kioskos and bongo bar night because I seem to have gone to both of those on Tuesdays since I’ve been here. Kioskos happens at night. There’s a street that is blocked off and its lined with restaurants and they all put tables out in the middle of the street. You pick a spot to sit and then whatever table your at, the server comes and takes your order (the food and beer are super cheap! It’s pretty nice! :) and you also get a tonnnn of food… even nicer!!) After finishing out meals we walk over to the Bongo bar, pretty much the only actual bar in the city, that doesn’t also involve a restaurant. Its super chill up on the 2^nd level of the building, and on the 1^st level it’s a dance bar (with cheaper drinks and lots of super young people haha of course, the first night we were there, there was this crazy older lady trying to dance with groups of younger people… and her dances moves consisted of flailing her arms around and swinging her hips… her friends just sat back and laughed at her… so did everyone else haha)

Wednesday we heard big news!! David Attenborough had been spotted!! For those of you who don’t know who he is (I don’t remember if I mentioned this before or not) He’s the British man who narrates BBC movies/series like Planet Earth, Frozen Planet, Life, and Blue Planet. We’ve watched a lot of clips from these in my biology classes over the years, and we all LOVE him!! So we all started freaking out. We were determined to get pictures! We would be hunting him down. While at work during the day, I had a professional photographer from England help me and give me tips of my photography and he gave me information on another program (that I might get to work with now! It’s suuuuper nice!)  His advice has helped a lot!! Also on Wednesday, I had to pack up all of my stuff and switch rooms. Deb was leaving Thursday morning to head back to the states to teach her Bio 320 class (which she will be bringing down a week from Monday). It doesn’t pay for me to stay in a room by myself (it costs too much), so I moved into Joe and Jon’s room down the road.

The move happened Thursday morning before work at 8. Then, while at work, around 9:15, Josh came to get me. We were having a meet and greet for Sir David Attenborough!! We were finally going to meet him!! Yayyy!!! We went over to the conference room and got to chat with him for 15 to 20 minutes (The whole time we were all being filmed because this footage is going to be in the Behind the Scenes section of the new 3D IMAX movie that the BBC is filming down here right now!! I’m going to be almost famous! :P okay not really… but still…) We also got a group picture with Sir David, in which, I am literally standing RIGHT next to him!! (Cool beans…). That was a pretty big part of my day :)  Then we had to go back to work (sadly… the event had made going to work seem super boring). After work, Rob, Josh, and I made a run to the supermarket to grab some supplies for the night/weekend. This whole ordeal was pretty eventful, riding back with our supplies on our bikes. Bags ripped, things fell, people almost died… yea… it was nuts (we didn’t almost die, it just sounded good). I came back to the room after our run into town and Joe and Jon had made a fantastic dinner of the fresh fish that was just caught like an hour before we cooked it. So delicious. Then started our night.

We started by playing a few rounds of drinking bananagrams. I never thought that it could actually be so brutal. But it is. Everything happens so quickly. And (for me anyway) things go downhill very quickly when trying to come up with words. Then we played a couple more games (Ride the Bus, in which most people used the whole deck, and Thumper) and said a few more ridiculous things and came up with a few plans to hang out with the tortoises (I’m not touching the animals, the animals are touching me) .  Thursday was our pregame to the pregame…

So today! I work.. until 5.. because its not a half day like I wish it to be. I think its 100 times worse right now too because of the events planned for the weekend. Tonight is the ACTUAL pregame party which is going to follow the soccer game in town tonight (the guys are going to go play, Maria and I will be the cheerleaders! Ha) Then we’re going out to the Bongo bar to have some fun!

Tomorrow is the actual party! Wake up and possibly go to Tortuga Bay (probably not though) Then go to the Volunteer cookout, where is will be drinks all day, including lots of food as well as games and such! Then going out again at night for another round of fun.

And Sunday is the after party, where we will lounge (possibly by a beach) all day until the Colombia vs. Ecuador soccer match will be airing on TV. It’s kind of a big deal… (Go Colombia!! ;) )

Bring on the weekend!! ;)

June 1, 2012- The past week.. :D

Soooo I’m sorry about the delay on blogging!! I’ve been getting settled in at work and in my new city, and meeting some new people!! I’m not going to give you a play by play of my days, because frankly, I don’t think you want to hear about my work days, since they are pretty anticlimactic! But I’ll let you know the basics of what I’ve done this past week!

We’ve been snorkeling a bunch (I’m still trying to get the hang of my mask… pretty sure I’ve drank like 5 gallons of saltwater since being here… yummmm)! I’ve seen a bunch of cool fish and sea urchins, but I haven’t ventured out to far yet, so I haven’t seen the sea lions swimming or the sea turtles! But that’s my task for this weekend! :D We walked to Las Grietas, which is like a huge crack in the earth’s surface that has filled with water! It’s super deep and the water is really blue! Its super pretty and there are some big fish in there! Let me tell you… I was super excited to be walking on lava rock before I got here, because I mean come on… its lava rock… but its not so great. In fact it really hurts. Especially when you aren’t watching where you are swimming or walking in the water and you kick a huge rock. I’m a little scraped up. Oh well… at least its lava rock and not concrete, because lets face it, its less cool to say “I kicked concrete” compared to “I kicked lava rock.”

Besides snorkeling, I’ve been working! We started working on Monday. Kind of. That was suppose to be our first day. But a few things happened at the station the previous week, so they weren’t 100% prepared for us. So all we did on Monday was fill out some paper work, tell them what shirt sizes we needed, and had a small meeting with Frank about our individual tasks.  Tuesday, I met Henri Herrera (probably one of the nicest guys ever!). He’ll pretty much be my boss while I’m here. I was given a bunch of things to do over the summer, so I’ll stay pretty busy! The first task I was given was to type up a table of all of the Universities, Institutions, Museums and what not around the world and their addresses and contacts that we have to contact about their Arachnid collections. Then Joe and I were put in charge of helping Henri organize the papers he is using for his thesis paper so its easier for him to set up his bibliography. He gave us a file (a huge file) of hundreds of papers. We had to find all of the ones that deal with ants (because that’s what his thesis is on!) and throw out all of the other ones. After that, we had to organize them all into files by the primary authors last name… Joe and I split the task, so I took ‘A’ through ‘K’. I seriously worked on that for the past 3 days. And I finally finished today! SO MANY PAPERS! The thing that will be my primary task for the summer, is taking pictures of all of the specimens of invertebrates in the lab. I’ll be taking dorsal, frontal, and profile view pictures of all of them. I’ve got the camera all set up so I get to play around with it and make the insects look all pretty :) The program that I’m using is also really cool! I can actually control the entire camera from my computer! All of the functions show up on my computer, just like they do on the camera. I control the flash and everything! It’s pretty nifty! (yes… nifty!) After taking some pictures, we have to upload them to a library computer, where it will go into the database. Then we have to label and tag every species so its prepared to go online and into Datazone. It’s a pretty complicated program, but I think I’ll be able to get the hang of it pretty quick, since I’m going to be using it all the time.

So that’s my work for the summer! With a few other little tidbits in there! Like… Henri asked me to go out in the field with him to take pictures of specimens out in the wild! Woot!  I’ve also made friends with some other people working on the islands (I’ll talk more about them in a bit!) and I might be able to go out in the field and help them observe, catch, and band Blue Footed Boobies! (they’re birds, for those of you who, I know, thought of other things).

So back to life on the islands! Basically… its awesome. Food here is amazing (and that’s coming from someone who doesn’t enjoy seafood, which we eat a lot of here!) and fresh fruits, veggies, and fruit are super cheap! You can get a pound of yellow fin tuna or a pound of wahoo fresh from the water like 5 minutes prior cut up right in front of you, for two dollars! Its awesome! All the while, there are frigate birds and pelicans and sealions sitting around to get the scraps! Its pretty entertaining!

The shops and such here are pretty cute! (a lot of tourist-y shops haha). On the weekends they pretty much shut down though, same with at lunch time. Everyone shuts down for lunch, except restaurants haha. I love just walking around the town. The people here are so friendly!

Every once in awhile, during the day I stop by the internet café to check email (when I decide to go into town on my hour and a half lunch break). I think we’ve all kind of been going to the same place. Either way, I was in there a couple days ago, and I had a little girl (about 3 years old) come up to me and ask me my name (in Spanish of course) and she asked me a bunch of other questions that I could not understand… and I didn’t really know how to explain to a 3 year old that I don’t speak Spanish… it was quite an entertaining ordeal for the both of us. After that, I was just sitting there minding my own business and I turned to look out of the shop, and there was this 30-something guy walking passed and he saw me and stopped in and talked to the shop owner. I thought, “meh whatever, friends, not a big deal” then I comes over and asks my name, and if I speak Spanish. I said it was Jordan, and that I knew very little Spanish. He laughed and then continued to talk to the owner. A little while later he came back over and asked if I had a phone number (umm…) I said no I don’t. he’s like “well can I see you again?” I was just kind of like.. well.. uh… ha.. I’ll be around I guess? But I don’t know? And then said I had to leave. Its crazy how forward the guys are here. They aren’t trying to be creepy or anything its just their culture. Its just okay for them to go up to someone and talk to them and stuff. I was definitely caught off guard but it was kinda funny. I haven’t seen him since haha.

Two people I have met and hang out with all of the time, though, are David and Maria! They live right next to me! They are the ones who are working with the Blue Footed Boobies! They leave me every few days to go and do some work, but whenever they are here and I’m not working, we all hang out! We make dinner, and lunch together, and sit around and play games (like skip-bo, which I got second in but I beat David, so now he owes me a beer! Ha) and we go swim together. They’re planning a few fun things for us to do in the next couple weeks which is super exciting! We have plans to go into town and go dancing and have dinner and a few drinks. On Tuesday we did just that and had a blast! Maria is 22 and from Colombia. She’s just here for a month working with David on the Boobie project. She’s super awesome! And I know we’ll be keeping in touch! :) David is 27 and is working on his Master’s here. He’s lived here for 4 years, but is originally from Guayaquil, Ecuador. He goes to school at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. Both of them are working on my Spanish with me, and I’m helping them with their English. It’s a pretty decent trade haha.

Its nice at nice and on the weekends when no one is working at the station, we can go sit on this patio area overlooking the ocean and sit on the internet and update things. Its so nice and peaceful! Last night while I was sitting there I had a night heron (pretty birds!) jump up on the bench and freak out at me and the light from my computer haha. Always entertaining with the animals here! I love it! I could totally live here! I just wish I could have all of you here with me, so I wouldn’t have to miss you so much!! :D

Besides that, not much is going on here! I’ll add more pictures soon! I’m ganna take some more this evening when I go into town so you guys can see what a pretty town it is! I think we’re going to walk around the town tonight, since it’s the weekend, it’ll be a bit more lively, and it wont take as long because I finally have a fixed bike! haha

When we went into town for lunch today (super cheap! Juice, soup, and full entrée for 4 dollars!), they were setting up for some sort of festival! So I think we’re going to check it out! :) I have to go into town for some supplies this evening anyway! So much going on! I don’t think I’ve remembered everything! I’ll think of it sometime! Haha! Ciao! 

May 26, 2012- Galapagos... Day 1 :)

Another early morning! This was a big day for us! We were finally heading to the Galapagos!! :) We arrived at the airport at around 7:30 am and went through all of the things we needed to… you know.. the fun stuff everyone likes to do when they’re anxious for a trip (yea…right…).

Our flight left Quito around 9:45 and we made a stop in Guad???? To let people off and pick people up. After about a 40 minute wait to take off (while listening to some little Ecuadorian kid listen to his ipod and sing the same song over… and over… and over… and kicking my seat to the rhythm… yay… :/) We took off for the Galapagos! I read a whole bunch in my book (The Snowman… great book…!) and had a light meal of a salad with seasoned chicken, a sweet roll, fruit and a coke. Finally the Islands came into view! :) We flew into Baltra’s airport, which was literally like a large park pavilion (not a building, but a shelter)  where we went through “customs” and grabbed our luggage. Then we quickly hurried to the bus, and packed ourselves in with a whole mess of people. We drove to the other side of the island (BEAUTIFUL view of the bright blue ocean!) where we hopped on a ferry that took us across the channel. We met a local kid, named Tanto (he’s ganna teach us to surf! And show us places around town! Woot!). When we got to the other side, we quickly grabbed our luggage, and then tracked down 2 taxis to take us to Puerto Ayora! Our driver drove super fast! We drove through a couple little towns, until we finally reached the city we’re going to be living in for the next 3 months!

Just driving through, I seriously think I fell in love with the city. Its not very big, but still seems like it has a ton to do! There are a lot of shops, cute restaurants, and such. And its all on the coast! We got up to the station to find our places to live; Deb and I are in a one room part of a duplex that has a kitchen in a separate building right around the corner. And the guys are split into 2 rooms. Their place is sweet! It has a beautiful few of the ocean! But it was HOT when we got here, so we didn’t stay to look around too much. We quick grabbed our snorkel stuff and headed to the beach right on the stations property! The water was perfect! Cool and refreshing; a perfect temperature to cool me down after sweating soooo much coming in! My goggles kept fogging up (a problem we hopefully fixed tonight using a lighter and toothpaste!) so I didn’t get to see much (definitely tore up my feet on the rocks though! I’ll get the snorkeling thing down by the end of the summer! After we had all cooled down, we walked back to our rooms to change and then walked around the station to find where we would each be working. The Entomology lab has a sweet roof that we’ve decided we’re having barbeques and dance parties on haha. We walked around and looked at all of the enclosed animals (tortoises, iguanas, BABY tortoises!) When we came up to Lonesome George (a huge male tortoise enclosed with a bunch of females), we saw an American man with his daughter. He was doing research and the BBC was documenting it for a series called “Galapagos in Detail”. Turns out he knows Dr. Dave Lonzarich (for all of you UWEC Biology students!) and he told us (brace yourselves… this is SUPER EXCITING!!) in a couple of weeks… SIR DAVID ATTENBOROUGH will be on the islands!!! All of us (except for Jon, who wasn’t sure who he was… geography major…) freaked out!! We got sooo excited! We hope we get to see him!! :D For those of you who don’t know who he is, he does the documentaries like Planet Earth, Blue Planet, Frozen Planet, etc… EPIC!! After freaking the heck out for awhile… we decided to walk into town to look around and grab some diiner! We went to this restaurant (Ashley should know which one… it has her bananas haha) and it turns out that our friend Tanto’s mom owns it!! Had a lovely dinner of pollo apansado (breaded chicken), papas fritas (french fries), una salada (a salad), y baditos de mora (raspberry shake)!

We then had to go and get groceries! So we went to the supermarket and grabbed a few things to tie us over for awhile! Then with our bags in hand, walked all the way back to our rooms (most of the walk was in the dark… note to self… bring a flashlight next time…). We put our stuff away, unpacked our luggage, went to the guys room to check it out again and have Joe (hopefully) defog our goggles for tomorrow! Since it’s a Sunday, we don’t have to work! So we’re going to head out to do some more snorkeling and then looking around the city! :) Finally in my home for the next 3 months… and I love it! :) xx