6 weeks?!

A phrase that has dawned on everyone in our group this past week. We're going to go nuts... We have a few days left of our current modules (I am now on Intro to Marine Life) and then we are going to Isabela for a week and return with a 5 day holiday and then we will be touring a few of the islands. After that, we only have a couple weeks left! I'm so freaked out!

In other news, my dreds started molding, so I cut probably a foot of hair off. It was a liberating feeling. You couldn't even tell that I had dreads in the first place and they are itchy and stinky. It was something that I've always wanted to do, and having short hair was something I've always wanted to try and it's soo great having short hair in a hot place :)

For our marine class, we have been going snorkeling in a bunch of cool areas. Our professor was the director of research at the Charles Darwin Research Center for years before he started regularly teaching so we have got the in as far as going to prohibited parts of the islands goes. He also has terrible communication skills and he is deaf, which makes for interesting field trips, as he constantly ignores our questions - "Gunter, what are we doing. Where are we going. Earth to Gunter." Dos dias pasado, we went to a place that hasn't even been officially named yet, barely any traffic going through this place. I felt like an explorer. We were surveying the area and then writing proposals on whether or not the center should allow the area to be a tourist spot. So we hiked around, went snorkeling, took some notes... I vote no for tourism. For a few reasons, but most importantly that it's a nesting area for endangered tortugas marinas.

Here are a few creeper shots from Scott:

<-- picked the worst shoes to go hiking in! here's brett and i getting back on the boat - literally had no where to dock to so we all jumped off brittle ah-ah lava and onto the boat.

This next picture is the ohwee ohwee lava flow - i have no idea if that's even how you pronounce it. basically, the ah ah lava is brittle and sharp, and named after the ah ah lava in Hawaii (the indigineous Hawaiians would walk over the rock barefoot and go "ah! ah! ah!"

The other kind of lava is smoother and you can see the flows better. This one had less gas bubbles trapped inside as it was cooling down. Millions of years ago.

Here's where we first landed, up behind me is the turtle nesting area and we snorkeled over by the huge rock on the left. It was a beautiful place and it's amazing to think that no one ever goes there. The snorkeling was cool because there were so many schools of fish and they were a lot bigger than I've ever seen and a lot of them were grazing. This marine class has really opened up a new world... A lot of people think half the experience of the Galapagos is being underwater. Snorkeling is so relaxing - the water is pretty warm and you just float there with your snorkel and chill in Galapaguenan goodness. There is only one significant coral reef I think, but there is brightly colored algae that covers the rocks that is very beautiful. My new favorite spot is a 20 minute walk down the street from the uni which is a beautiful snorkeling area with huge rocks and caves and crazy fish. I really want to see a sea horse and a frog fish before I leave. Frog fish look like dead tufts of seaweed floating above the ocean floor but all the little tufts are actually their fins. I've been watching Blue Planet - just like Planet Earth (also narrated by d. attenborough <3) align="left">

I wrote a bunch more but apparently it got deleted - just me blah blahing about snorkeling and sea life. Oh well. Chau guys ! :)

feliz dia de san patricio

hola!

it came to my attention yesterday morning at breakfast with antonio, my host father...
Ecuador doesn't celebrate st. pattys! Our group collectively decided to inform everyone about this important holiday, fighting our hardest through the language barrier.
I think that my translation yesterday sounded something like this:
"It is a very important day for us. For good luck we wear green and drink a lot of beers. It has a small green man who is magic and likes plants with four flowers. Understand? Very important."
Hopefully he got the jist of it.

By the end of the night we had drank all the servesas the bar had, we made all of our Ecuadorian friends go home to change into green and come back, two girls were throwing all their st. patty's day fun up in the street and one of them was eventually carried home by the dive instructor (all the skeevi ecuadorians crowding around).
and i proposed to carlos, again. he said no, again. we're cool though.
aaand we played traditional american college student drinking games by the ocean. Ever heard of 21? that's a good one.

and the night ended successfully around 5am with me hammocking peacefully outside my bedroom. good times had by all. :)

french toast

For breakfast one day, my roommate Amanda and I made french toast and homefries for our homestay family.

Our family was really excited that we wanted to spend more time with them and to try American food! One day I asked them if they liked American food and they said "Oh yes, we love french fries and hamburgers". Sigh. That is what I figured they thought American food was like, and I guess that is what our country projects. What food is really American, anyway?
My host mother hovered over us with a little notebook/recipe book and wrote down every little thing that we did (even the mistakes) - it was so cute. I def want to get some of her recipes as well.
So we put everything out in platters so people could help themselves and they just kind of blinked and smiled at us, expectantly and hungrily. Haha. Yeah. In Ecuador, as I'm sure with many south american countries, you get served with your plate already full. So we served them, realized we forgot the juice, and my host sister hated everything, and my host mother hasn't used the maple syrup since. And then we played Bingo - All in all a very successful Sunday morning.

homesick

dear mom&dad,

if you really, truly love me, you would send me a care package including but not limited to:
gatorade packets of the lemon-lime variety, nutella, samoa cookies, those fettuccini alfredo packets, and the little lunchable size things of motts regularly sweetened applesauce (non cinnamon), every episode of the l word and ocean girl, and a digestive tract cleanser. and a kitten.

love and miss,
your daughter, Alex

great week :)

It was great to show someone that I love from home what my life has been like here...




We did a whole bunch!

• Lookout
• El progresso which is some dead beat town and I'm not exactly sure why it's tourist area
• La soledad for the view and we ate pumarosas :)
• El junco for the glacier lake
• La galapaguera for the giant land tortoises
• Puerto chino and played frisbee and body surfed and got attacked by flies and swam out to the boobies
• La loberia and swam with the giant sea turtles
• Corola and swam with the smaller sea turtles
• Tijeretas
• Leon dormido and snorkeled with the sharks again (sorry mom...)
• Isla lobos and swam with baby lobos
• Puerto grande

I told Nathan to delete all his pictures off his camera because I thought they had uploaded to my computer. I checked today and I was wrong... whoops. This was after the "are you positive i can delete them off my camera. 'yessss i'm positive'" conversation. Hopefully he will get that message, but if it were me I would have deleted them by now to clear for Chile. I'm a terrible girlfriend...

Nathan!

Nathan came yesterday! :) :)

It is so surreal seeing him here in the Galapagos. I could barely kiss him, I had to keep pushing him away to make sure it was him and not some typical Ecuadorian homeboy. Ahhh! He's here!!

I saw him right when he got off the plane - for one thing, the airports in the islands have to walls. And another - he's so white he was blinding everyone. so cute.

Enough of my gushing - we got here and he immediately (and obviously) befriended everyone in the program and even some islanders. I have to go to my class because it is for my major and missing one class is like missing two weeks of class at Emmanuel. Anyway, i got out of class and walked across the street to the beach and Nate is playing frisbee with some Ecuadorians. So we all got a game of ultimate frisbee (Galapagos style in terms of the rules - "nuestra!") and played until the sun set. We went to dinner and I made him try ceviche - a weird sounding yet delicious 'soup' - it is served cold, usually with seafood and mixed with fresh veggies and served with banana chips. mmm. Then we drank with the locals on the pier and went to one of two bars here on the islands. Ahh :) A fun first day.

The pirates came and called it hell

Buenas.
Much to update on.

I left you at carnival - popular 4 day celebration before lent begins and it's celebrated differently around the world. In the Galapagos, people pelt passersby with eggs, water guns, paint, shaving cream, etc.

I wasn't able to participate too much in the celebrations because during the prime of them we had class. Class ends a week early but it's more intense during the weeks we do have it. I did manage, however, to be attacked with lipstick by the locals when I walked outside for a break during class.

... whammy! After I got most of it off.

The professor that I have now for evolution is actually the codirector of GAIAS and we have to be on our best behavior and work our very hardest. It's the evolution section - the one that I wanted the most! - and of course, it totally sucks. All math. Horribly thick accent, I would probably get more out of it if he just taught in spanish. Nothing interesting, nothing I will retain. To make up for that letdown, I've been doing my own reading and research, which has been my absolute favorite thing to do. Evolution is crazy and complicated and incredibly disorganized. It's crazy to think that we all just as easily could have not existed. And, obviously, I couldn't be in a more perfect environment.

So we went on a field trip on Saturday around San Cristobal.

First we went to Leon Dormido ('sleeping lion'), or Kicker Rock as it's called in english. It's these two giant rocks that are a ways off the coast of the island. As you know, the islands were formed by volcanos, and when that happens, there is a lot of pressure. So rocks jutting off from the main island are like little offchutes of all that pressure. Pretty bright red algae covers the rocks and there are lots of tropical fish, starfish, and... *gulp*... sharks. I swam with sharks! The visibility at Leon Dormido was terrible so we couldn't see that far below us, which makes it a little scary. Sharks are my number one fear and I think that's pretty rational. Sharks kill things all the time. They have scary sharp teeth. They are bigger than me. ...Rational. So when I jumped in the water and checked out the big blue below my flippers, seeing the silouhette of sharks lurking a couple meters below me freaked me out a bit. A lot a bit. It's crazy being scared in the water - being a land creature, you aren't in your element at all and there really is nowhere you can go if something comes after you. I don't really remember being scared like that at home. So I tried exploring for sharks a bit but pretty much stuck to the algae and the fish. Call me a baby, but I'm not worried about it. I choose life.

Then we went to Punta Pitt for a hike. It's still part of San Cristobal. This is where the pirates landed, and upon looking at all the semi-desert plantlife - prickly thorns, cactuses, black serpent lizards (marine iguanas), and giant black basalt rocks - called the Galapagos 'hell on earth'. If only they had spent some time looking around, right?

The photo to the left is right when you get off the beach. Those rocks are all volcanic ash and very easily eroded. We wented hiking for a while and we came to the photo on your left. I can't just over the top and around the corner of that area is the lush jungle-like parts like El Junco with the miconia bushes and the banana and coconut trees. We saw some red footed boobies and Nazca boobies.

Boobies and sex - Now, I bet you are wondering what's the difference between red footed boobies and blue footed boobies and Nazca boobies. That would be sexual selection and siblicide.

Blue footed boobies use their brightly colored blue feet to show off to potential mates (thus their bobo dance). The brightness of the blue are indicators of health, and women like to picky the really healthy ones to mate with.

Red footed boobies are also sexually selective, but they evolved a little differently on different islands and instead of using brightly colored feet, they use markings on their faces. So they have normal, reddish orange feet but they are still of the booby genus.

Nazca boobies aren't so much sexually selective as they are brutal. They participate in obligate siblicide, and I'll explain that from the beginning.Mom lays 2 eggs, one big & one small. Eggs hatch several days apart, larger one first. Older, bigger chick pushes younger sibling outside of nest under the supervision of Mom. Younger chick peeps for mom's attention and gets eaten by frigate bird/mockingbird/just sits there dying while Mom ignores. Crazy right? The moms let that happen because they would be exerting themselves so much trying to care for 2 chicks rather than one and they wouldn't be able to participate in the next reproductive season. And they favor long term reproductive success.

Thanks for letting me geek out!

Last place we went to was isla lobos, where we snorkeled and played with sea lions. They literally played with you! They blow bubbles in your face, swim around you, there are pretty fish, I got knocked into a large rock and now have the bruise the size of a modest watermelon on my upper thigh, there was a sizeable shark so we all had to band together..... good times.

La vida

A few instances of the everyday life on the island.


Pilsener -


Pilsener is the only beer in Ecuador. I'm almost kidding. There's another beer called Club, (pronounced Clooooob, it was the most popular beer tenish years ago) and another called brama or something, which is popular in a few south american countries. Well anyway, it's a pale wheat ale and in the beginning, I was in disbelief that I would only be drinking one type of beer for 5 months, but it's grown on me for sure. Aaannnd, it's only $2.50 for 24oz of Pilsener! Wahhooo for my budget! Also, the style of Ecuadorian drinking is a lot more communal than that of the states. People buy a couple of beers at a time and a few people have glasses. The glasses and beers both get passed around and people share and talk and the beer stays cold (no stale, warm last sips of beer) and there's no conflict over what kind of beer to share because there is only one kind at the bars. That's definitely something I want to do at home with my friends :)

Mopeds -

Mopeds are big here on the island, as they should be. One interesting thing about mopeds is that entire families ride them at once, include infants and pets. I've seen a moped with parents a small child, an infant, and a puppy mopedding around the island. If mopedding was a verb. I actually will work on getting a picture of that because I'm sure that I'll never see it again once I leave.

American mothers would be shitting their pants realizing what kind of child saftey exists in vehicles here... (which is none) Frequently you will see pick up trucks with the kids horsing around in the back, suburbans with kids jumping around, no seatbelts, mothers holding infants in the front seat, etc etc etc. But here, there is no car insurance. So, when people get into accidents, they are immediately incarcerated until they can prove that they can pay for the damage of the accident. So, drivers may seem crazy, but there is a lot of beeping going on in the streets of the mainland because everyone needs to let each other know what they are doing and what's going on. Also, interesting fact... if someone is pulled over on a bridge, you cannot pass them for any reason. If their car is broken down, you have to wait until they get it towed. I have nightmares that I'm driving in Ecuador and I get into an accident and then I just have to chill in jail until my parents realize I should have been home already.



Taxis -

Chevorlet is doing a project on the islands - they've provided a bunch of white trucks to all the inhabited islands and we basically can go anywhere we want around town for a dollar, and then to the highlands for 15 bucks. Sweet deal. I don't remember exactly what the promotion was for, but surely it has to do with the environment and conserving all the endemic species.

We all ride in the back of the pick ups, mainly because it's a few thousand degrees in the equatorial sun and the breeze keeps us alive. But also because it's awesome and fun and absolutely illegal in America. Riding through the highlands in the back of a pick up is one of my favorite things to do here. The vegetation zones change from semi-arid to straight up jungle complete with banana trees, coffee trees, avocado trees, guayabana trees...

Passing people in the street -
Married men/bachelor men/especially teenaged young men give you a few times over and say "holaaa mamacita, te quiero, como te llamas, you're sexxyyyy"
But everyone else just smiles and says hola, little kids say "Hi How Are You" in English and then giggle and run away.
Some people are annoyed by all the gringos in town but most of them are used to it.

Politics

Every Friday and Saturday there have been political rallies, all inhabited islands have to elect a governer. This means that every friday and saturday, right outside my house, there have been parties going on until say, 4 or 5 in the morning. I mean, hey, I like to party. I like latin music. I can get my groove on. It's just that they pick a song - one song - to be their campaign song, usually a popular song from 8 years ago that they change the lyrics to - and then they play this song on repeat from about 9 at night to 4 in the morning. Uhhhmmmm... So anyway, the governer now is named Zapata and hearsay tells me he got caught shark finning this past year, a highly illegal and environmentally destructive activity that will end up hurting the tourism industry in the Galapagos, an industry which is their main source of income. And he wants to full on populate San Cristobal, which will destroy everything. Everyone educated wants to light Zapata on fire and throw him into a barrel of Amazonian gasoline, but the truth of the matter is that many people on the islands are not educated and he will likely be reelected. For now, we will just have to enjoy the free cana liquor he passes out at the rallies...