Last Few Days

We've been taking it easy for the last few days. Sunday we had a formal dinner, where dinner crew made sushi (all cooked fish-we get sick often enough without raw fish!), and had a massive picture-taking session. Then Monday everyone else presented their DRs in Spanish at the high school...except we got there and no one had told us that they had the day off for their version of Labor Day. We did have some of the fishermen show up, so we still had presentations. When we got back Vero gave a practice presentation of her conference talk, about the crab fishery in Magdalena Bay.

Then we had "disorientation," where Brady talked about reverse culture shock. I've been expecting it, and people raised a lot of concerns that I had thought of, and a lot that I hadn't. I realize that my friends back home all had interesting things happen in their lives without me, but I didn't think that people would have changed since I last saw them. Especially with other people who went abroad (like Sarah who went to Spain), the two of you may have changed in different directions and it may be weird. I'm also really going to miss some of the people I've met here. I'm thinking I'm going to miss Laura, Christina and Jenna the most. And Jenna and I have gotten fairly close, and we get along beautifully. It's going to be weird not having them around. And as for the Mexicans, it's soo hard to think I may not see them again. Especially Guadalupe, she's like a cool cousin or something, and a lot of time kind of acted as my guide to Mexico-language and culture.

Today we all went to the dunes for one last panga ride, and everyone, staff and students, spend the morning on the beach. It was nice and relaxing. Then we came back and packed. I think I've got everything in, but I'm almost positive my big bag's overweight. I just can't move stuff around, my smaller bag is packed to the gills. But Dad would be proud, I got everything in and just about the only thing I'm leaving is one towel and some shower stuff I didn't need.

Brady suggested we write a letter to ourselves that she'll mail us some time in the next year. It's crazy, there's so much I don't want to forget. I feel like I've changed here, and I think it's a good change and I don't want to forget everything. I was also thinking about how a lot of people are going to hear that I studied abroad in Mexico and think "oh man, she went to Cancun and partied for a semester." I also already know some people who think that it's not a real abroad experience because it's not sophisticated like Europe. But I think it's an even more important experience, because even though Europe definitely has a different culture from the US, it's in the same sphere of experience. Rural Mexico is a whole different ballgame, where the government is so corrupt you can't prosecute anyone, where some people have never heard of global warming, where fishermen die because they're diving using a hose for a breathing tube. I think it makes it more of a study abroad experience, and also more important because we live so close to Mexico but most of us know so little about it. It's going to be really hard to hear people talk badly about Mexicans, because I'll be thinking about Vero, or Poncho, or Gustavo.

We've been working a lot again this past week, trying to coordinate research projects. We had tests Monday and Tuesday, and then for the past three days I've been editing my paper, which I think is at 24 pages of actual text, 28 with the copy of my interview questions.

The staff decided that my group shouldn't present to the town, because they're worried that the fishermen in town will be jealous that the island guys are getting so much money and help from so many people. Also, their "marine protected area" sounds a lot like the "natural marine park" that is proposed for the entire bay and has people up in arms. So they're also worried that people will get confused and angry.

Today we had a cooking class with the cooks. They showed us how to make all the salsas we have (which are very easy-all a combination of chiles, tomatillos and blenders). Then we made empanadas. You get corn flour and add water until it's about the consistency of Play-Doh. Then you squeeze off a ball of dough, flatten it with your tortilla press, fill it with whatever you want, and fry it. Of course, the only tortilla presses readily available in the US are at Williams-Sonoma and cost like $200. So I'm buying one and packing it in my luggage. Goodbye 5 lbs of personal property. I'll definitely be leaving things here to try to lighten my load, or just to fit everything!

We also had a tour of the sardine cannery today. I have to say it wasn't that impressive. They weren't working at the time, and AJ said that when they're working there's fish guts flying everywhere and it smells awful and it's just really disgusting. Instead we got to see rinsed concrete floors and machinery. Not as effective an "ohmygod look at this" tool.

I'm not horribly excited to come home right now. Yesterday or the day before that I couldn't wait to come home. But now I'm a little depressed. I'm in Mexico studying ecology, and I get to come home to a country that just created a racist immigration law and had a massive oil spill.

Speaking of which, now for a bit of soapboxing. That oil spill is the size of the state of Rhode Island. Imagine taking Rhode Island and wiping all of the living animals (not even considering effects on plants) from the surface of the state. That's what that means for the environment. It's essentially ecological genocide. Some ecologists are predicting that the Gulf may never recover. Not just "not our lifetime" but never, in all the time you could give it. Now take the Arctic Sea. It's the migratory and breeding home of many species from all over the world, including important fishery targets and endangered marine mammals (such as the gray whale we've been studying all semester). An offshore drilling accident there, similar to the one in the Gulf, would be catastrophic. Not only would it be hitting really sensitive wildlife, but they probably wouldn't be able to get to the problem for much longer due to harsher conditions. So maybe you'd be interested in signing a petition to stop offshore oil drilling in Alaska. It takes 5 seconds, and doesn't cost you a thing. Off soapbox.

Finally caught up

So I haven't blogged at all about this last week because there's not much to say, we've all been working our butts off and stressed out of our minds. This past week we had AJ's IIAT paper (10-20 pages) and presentation (12 minutes), plus our results/discussion for our DRs, plus a report for Eduardo, plus two tests yesterday and one test today. So we didn't really have time to do anything. For this week we have to hand in our final DR paper and do a 10 minute presentation to the center, and a 3 minute presentation in Spanish to the town.

We did go to a kindergarten (literally jardin de ninos) class and try to teach recycling. We thought we were doing ok and then the teacher got up and put us all to shame lol. But I think most of them got it.

We leave in a little over a week and I have mixed feelings. I have a list started of all the things I want to do when I get home, but at the same time I really don't want to leave. I also think I'm going to have major reverse culture shock. I'm expecting to get sick off all the fat and grease in American food and be overwhelmed by all the consumerism, and driving my car. I think I'm also really going to miss all the other students and staff, and chances are I won't see many of the Mexicans ever again. At the same time I can't wait for a long hot shower (you can get like 5 minutes max here) and American tv and being able to go places by myself.

In other news-new photos are up. EarthShip and updated album with camping pictures.

Last day of camp

So the last day we of camping we broke camp and drove to an Earthship, which is just about the coolest thing ever. It's a house that's made with almost all recycled materials and completely off the grid-no power, no water, no energy. The walls are made of tires packed with dirt, stacked, and spaces filled in with cans. It's all then covered with adobe. They have solar panels to collect light, and it's built into a hill to conserve heat. The roof collects rain water, which is then filtered for drinking water. Once you're done with drinking water it goes to showers and toilets, which is then filtered again and filtered by plants before it's released to your yard, at that point cleaner than most water sanitation places can make it. The place we went was still under construction, but it's still very cool and actually pretty too. One of the coolest thing is that they don't have to be millions of dollars-the one we went to is like $150-200k, less than a lot of people's houses.

After the Earthship we drove through La Paz for lunch. Most people went to go find American food, but some of us tagged along with some of the professors to this place that does Mexico City food. It was really good, I had a quesadilla with flor de calabaza (pumpkin flower), and a gordita filled with cheese, both with blue corn tortillas. Most of our professors are from Mexico City (chilangos) and they were really excited to have chilango food for once.

We then drove all the way home to return to massive amounts of work.

Day 5 of Camping

Saturday we broke up camp and then went back to the snorkeling place. We split up into boats and snorkeled in 4 different places. First we went into a massive school of bigeye jacks that also had some triggerfish. And at one point I looked down and 15 ft down from me was a bull shark. AJ was already telling everyone about it by the time I popped my head out of the water, and we had to get back in the boat. Apparently bull and tiger sharks are the most likely to attack people...

Then we went to the second place, over coral. We had to wear lifejackets there so the park officials knew we couldn't dive down to touch anything. But it was really cool, I saw a moray eel, a golden grouper (which is supposed to be really rare), more queen parrotfish, lots of butterfly fish, schools of Chromis, and more.

The third place was a sea lion colony that we swam with. I did get pretty close to one, but these guys weren't as friendly as the ones in Loreto, so we got back in the boats pretty fast.

The last place was another reef-some fish from there: surgeonfish , King Angelfish, Rainbow Wrasse, Cornetfish, and Leopard Grouper.

After we got back from snorkeling we drove through Cabo (where we stopped to get lunch) and went to Todos Santos. We stayed with one of AJ's friends, all of 3 doors down from the awesome surf hotel we stayed at for spring break. She's planning on making it kind of a mini-camp ground and it was completely beautiful. It was also fantastic to stay somewhere with a roof and a kitchen and a shower, even if we slept in tents. It was a nice break.

Day 4 of Camping

Friday we got up ad drove 40-50 minutes to Sierra la Laguna National Park, stopping in this cute little town (Santiago) on the way. Sierra la Laguna is kind of a chain of oases that provide water for a large portion of Baja California Sur. It was originally preserved because it provides all that water and because there are so many endemic species-species that are found only in that place.

Once we got to the parking area we had a rocky downsloping hike for 10-15 minutes to this awesome oasis with a waterfall. We had a distracted lecture with Vero for 10 minutes, then got to swim for awhile. It's soo nice to swim in freshwater when you're used to going to the sea. It's like taking an hour long bath when all you've had is like sponge baths. It was cool too, there were a lot of species that I'm used to seeing in PA ponds, like the dragonfly larvae my lab works with, and the snails that my friend Emily works with, as well as some diving beetles and we even found a tadpole in a stream! I didn't expect to see any tadpoles when it's surrounded by desert! I managed to jump off this high rock, but I needed some major help from Poncho & Chilaco, the pangueros. Chilaco eventually jumped with me. After we ate lunch we walked for another 10-15 minutes (another semi-mountainous hike) to a small lagoon. It was funny, I was thinking "it smells so good here, what is that? It reminds me of home" and eventually realized it was leaf litter on the ground, since we were in forest.

I got a little burned because you aren't allowed to wear sunscreen if you swim in the lagoons, since it's someone's drinking water and they can't exactly filter out chemicals. A couple of us also got a little dehydrated and felt pretty shitty until we stopped in Santiago and loaded up on Gatorade.

In other news, I started the book Lolita and so far I love it, even if it is kind of weird. Once we got back I just layed around in the shade and listened to music and watched people play volleyball. It was nice, I didn't have to walk far away to feel by myself.

Day 3 of Camping

So Thursday was our first full day at Cabo Pulmo, which is Mexico's only Marine Park (as in reserve). We were supposed to go out snorkeling within the reserve, but once we drove up to the tour station we found out they had us booked for the wrong day. So we snorkeled just off our campsite instead. It was a rock reef with tons of fish-goatfish, queen parrotfish, a trumpetfish, trunkfish among the coolest fish.

We also had women come from CONANP, Mexico's park service, and the President of Amigos Para Cabo Pulmo, all to talk about the park. Cabo Pulmo was a really interesting park because it was basically started by one extended fishing family, the Cortez's, who realized what the reef held and decided that it needed protection. They started by restricting their own actions in the area and then enlisted the help of Mexico's national parks service to create it. It's now in danger because there's a large development group planning a massive resort just 2 km north of the reserve. It'll have over 2,000 houses just for the workers. They are creating a 400 boat marina (which they're carving out of the coastline!), and a golf course with grass watered from the wells...in a desert! Judi, the president of Amigos para Cabo Pulmo was telling us how people keep saying how this resort will bring good things like electricity and paved roads, and how people living in Cabo Pulmo don't want that, not at that cost. They'd much rather keep living the way they're living.

Day 2 of Camping

So Day 2 we drove from La Paz to Cabo Pulmo, but had a few stops along the way.

First we drove into La Paz. The original plan had been to look for whale sharks, but the day before we were told that the weather was going to be too bad, so we were going to a reptile house instead. But come Wednesday morning, the weather was beautiful, so we got on some glass-bottomed boats (not as cool as I expected) and drove out to the bay at La Paz. And we found one! It was huge, and swimming fairly slowly. We had to limit how many people were in the water at one time so we didn't stress it out and cause it to dive deep, so only five people went in at once. But we got to swim with it a couple of times each. It was a little scary, even though they only eat krill (tiny shrimp-like crustaceans), just because it was soo big. But it was awesome, just watching it swim. I stayed near its head the whole time and just watched it.

After that we had lunch in La Paz. My group found a restaurant with some really good tacos (which are basically the Mexican version of sandwiches-everyone eats them for lunch) and a trampoline! Expect trampoline pictures eventually.

Then we drove to UABCS (Universidad Autonoma de Baja California Sur) to have a lecture with someone from a Cabo Pulmo NGO. It was weird being on a college campus with kids our age, most of the people in San Carlos are either high schoolers or 30yr olds, or kinda sketchy. But it was funny, the classroom looked like it was straight out of Pitt's Cathedral of Learning (no, not the Nationality Rooms). Found out an interesting fact from Vero-La Paz is the highest educated city in all of Mexico, meaning it has the most PhDs per capita in the entire country, higher than Mexico City. It's a relatively small city and there's a ton of research centers that take advantage of some really cool ecological features of the area, like the bay, the Gulf of CA, and the deserts.

We then drove another two hours to Cabo Pulmo Marine Park and set up camp on this deserted beach. The road to Cabo Pulmo is a fairly long bumpy dirt road, so we were happy to get there.

Day 1 of Camping

So I kept a mini-journal of our camping trip because we've done a ton and I wanted to make sure I remember everything.

So on Day 1, we left early in the morning and drove four hours to La Paz. We stopped at CIBNOR, which is the main research facility for Baja California Sur. There are various CIB centers throughout Mexico, each specialized on area-specific subjects. We toured the facilities and saw agriculture experiments on desert farming, aquaculture experiments which looked at conditions for raising different types of fish and crayfish (which are blue in warm waters!), massive pools set into the bay for shrimp aquacultures, and typical labs that look at water quality, tissue studies, etc. We also looked through some of their specimens, which included a talk with a spider/insect expert (some people held a tarantula) and their stuffed bird collection. We also saw their Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) which science nerds will know is a really cool piece of equipment. Instead of using light as an energy source, they shoot electrons at things and can see very tiny images-like the hairs on a fly's body. That was awesome, and equally cool was I understood the guy's Spanish pretty well. In general, CIBNOR has a really pretty campus-lots of white buildings. They offer MS & PhD programs, and that's where Vero got her PhD, so she knew just about everyone.

We camped at a beach on La Paz, best part was the most awesome bright red sunset which my camera didn't even begin to capture.

New Pictures!

Old Album


New Album

We had a ton of DR days this past week. We've been out to Isla Magdalena twice so far, and got stuck at the center for a couple of times as well. I hate getting stuck here, because it means I have waaay too much time on my hands. I end up using a small portion to get things done, but most of it I end up sitting around thinking "ugggh I have so much to do." I'm much more productive if I only have like 3 hours to work.

This morning Kay & I got up early to interview an agricultural extension agent for our pesticide project. He brought up some really good points about pesticides boosting productivity, and how we still can't feed everyone. He also pointed out that pesticides are expensive, so most farmers will try other methods first, and if they do have to use them will limit their use and try to do it in a way that keeps as much of the chemicals on their crops as possible. He's exactly the kind of person we wanted to talk to, besides the EPA. I'm just going to call them soon, I haven't heard back from half the sources we emailed.

Got the morning off (during which I did very little), then went to the island at one. We had three interviews with coop members, including some good ones. One guy told us a lot of people were worried about the NGO that's working with them, COBI (Comunidad y Biodiversidad) because he doesn't know what they want from the coop. A lot of these people aren't familiar with NGOs, so he thought that COBI would want a percentage of profits or something, he didn't realize it's totally free. Even (actually, especially) the government here wants a cut of everything.

Our last interview of the day was a knockout. The guy worked for CONAPESCA, the fisheries management/enforcement agency, and was also a member of the coop. He had some very different answers about how much people obey the rules and what needs to be done to improve enforcement. Everyone has been saying that they don't want outsiders watching the area, because they don't trust them. But this guy said that he does want an outsider, because half the time the coop members go out and the guatero (theif/bandit) is their cousin, or their brother-in-law or something, so they pretend they don't see them. This guy thinks that if it's a third party they won't be swayed by connections.

In general, this guy was very knowledgable and very dedicated to conservation. As just a normal fishermen, no extra education, he noticed that the fish stocks were going down and decided that they had to be protected. So he started patrolling the area. At one point, with CONAPESCA he completely cleared out the bay of guateros in fifteen days. Within those fifteen days people burned out his car while he was out patrolling. On the 18th day they beat the shit out of him. In that month he was driving down the highway and got chased off the road. And the worst part is that it's so hard to get anything to stick to anyone, he sends people to court and they just pay off the court and are back out in a few days. He knows one guatero that he's caught three times named his boat after him as a joke. But he keeps at it, because he says that after years of doing this, even with little judicial backup, he's seen results. Talk about amazing people. He's facing all kinds of challenges, literally risking his life to protect the bay, and didn't even go to high school.

Also! Turtles!

Almost forgot!

Last night I joined Eduardo's DR group for a turtle monitoring camping trip. We packed up and had probably a 45 min boat ride (and a bouncy one at that) to a mangrove island. Set up camp, ate some dinner the cooks had made us, and I had my shift at 8pm. Nicki, Eduardo, AJ's friend Erik and I went out on one of the pangas to pull up the turtle nets. We didn't have any in ours, but one of the morning groups did catch a rather large turtle. I'll get pictures up sometime, I'm overdue but I can't seem to coordinate my memory with my internet service. But anyway, around 7 the turtle DR group measured the turtle's shell and head, weighed her, tagged her, took a skin sample and set her on her way. They have one more turtle monitoring trip left, which I may or may not do. I'd like to actually catch a turtle one of these times, but on the other hand I got like no sleep last night because it was so windy.

Aaand I´m an idiot...

I just realized that I do not, in fact, have my account set up to let me know when I have a comment on a post. So for everyone who´s been commenting, sorry for never replying! I didn´t even realize I had comments!!

Today wasn´t horribly exciting, but not bad. Started out with Eduardo´s class, which was pretty much analyzing labwork from the bird exercise and a mangrove thing we did earlier in the semester. The mangrove one is fairly cool-I forget if I mentioned it, but we went out to this area of mangrove forest that was dug up for a pipe. The center had put in permanent quadrant markers (PVC pipe stakes) and we laid out the square and took a picture of the area. The point is to see what kind of colonization mangrove has-does it sweep across an area gradually or does it get picked up by the wind and "jump", are there some plants that prep the area? So we have the pictures and there´s a computer program (Vidana) that´s a lot like paint. You color different areas (in our case, different plants) colors, specify your quadrant, and it calculates percent cover. For anyone who´s ever tried to estimate percent cover (coughWillcough), you know it´s VERY hard to get repeatable data. This program still isn´t fantastic, but it´s much better than eyeballing it. We don´t have to write up the data, but we do give to Gustavo because it´s a project he´s been running for awhile.

After lunch we had site cleanup (boys bathroom...yay...actually literally yay, it´s a lot nicer than the girls!). Then we went into town to do prep work for the mural we´re painting. We´re doing it on the side of the recycling center, so we split into shifts and painted the wall white, as much as we could reach until our paint ran out.

Not much else going on today. Found a calendar template online so I could have a copy of due dates on me...oh my god our schedule is horrifying. We have at least two reports or papers due every weekend until the end of the semester. And the end of the semester is less than a month away! When did that happen??? Just when I was starting to get a little homesick (or at least "ready to go home") I realized that. It makes me feel like a little kid hanging on to my blanket: "No! You can´t make me leave!" And it´s terrifying that I have so much to do in such a short time. A short paper and a large paper (+ interviews) for AJ, two reports for Eduardo, one report for Vero, and the laaaaarge DR paper which involves not only doing more interviews, but sitting down and translating those interviews, which will take at least as long as the interview itself, which is running 30-40 minutes.

Which reminds me! We went to Isla Magdalena yesterday and got a FANTASTIC interview with this one fisherman. He was very eloquent, seemed like a very kind man (or at least came off that way, since he has both puppies and a kitten right now lol) and gave us a lot of information. He also started tearing up when we asked about why protect the area. He said "Our fathers gave us this island and said it´s yours now, you´re in charge. It´s our duty and responsibility to take care of what they gave us" He started choking up and Guadalupe (Eduardo´s wife and our translator) and I almost lost it. I´m loving these interviews for those awesome moments when you get to see someone else´s life and stories.

Went kayaking for real this time today, out in the lagoon behind the school. I'm fairly tired, because paddling didn't really click until about 15 minutes before we left. I was having a hard time and pulling at the paddle rather than pushing with the other arm. Finally realized that if I think of it like pedaling something with my arms, I could get the feel right. Saw some more birds-pelicans, great blue herons, a White Ibis, some small shorebirds, lots of gulls, and an osprey. And then once I got back to school I saw a great egret.

Before we went kayaking though we watched this documentary called de Nadie (Nobody). It was about central americans going through Mexico to get to the US. Getting through Mexico is the most dangerous part for these people, there's a gang called the Mara who target immigrants and will rob, beat, kill & rape immigrants. A lot of people try to jump on the trains (immigration doesn't really check them), but sometimes the Mara will be in control of a train and require payment. If someone doesn't have the money for the Mara they'll throw them off the train. And the Mexican police are just as bad, robbing people and beating them. A lot of the people they talked to were leaving because they couldn't earn enough money in their country to feed their children. One man had a distended stomach-literally coming out of his abdomen-and was trying to get to the US to get an operation, and then send money home to his children. Brady told us about how she's helped some of her Mexican friends apply for visas. Her one friend paid over $2000 on applications, got to the interview and was turned away. When she asked why, the guy told her "no reason." The people who want to, and need to, come to the US can't afford to do so legally and by the time they get to the US border they've already come through 4/5 of the journey and have probably gone through worse than most of us could imagine.

Today was the first day this week that I've done anything more than sit in class or work on my directed research paper (hence no blog posts, I hate writing a post "I wrote a lot today..."). We have three sections of our research paper due on Sunday, including a literature review which probably took the longest time as I had to find articles that applied and then read them and pull out the important parts. I wasted a lot of time looking at papers that ended up not having much to do with my project.

But anyway, we did some fun stuff today! We had two quick lectures in the morning, one from Vero on tourism and one that an intern Nicki taught on birds, mostly on the main types of birds and how to identify them. Then we got into pangas and had a bird field exercise, where we drove around the bay counting the different species we saw. I actually liked it a lot more than I thought I would, I may have the potential to become a "bird nerd" as Nicki called it. I also somehow knew all the random silhouettes she used in her powerpoint (stuff like herons, warblers, swallows). We saw the obvious ones, like gulls (no such thing as a seagull!) and brown pelicans, but we also saw Brant geese, cormorants (diving/fishing birds), 2 American Oystercatchers (largest species of shorebird), Royal Terns, lots of Magnificent Frigatebirds (which also do this and I think what Nicki decided was a Least Sandpiper which were little tiny birds on the shore. I liked birding, it seems pretty easy to get started in, and you can do it wherever you go. I may pick up a bird guide when I get home, I already have a pair of binoculars.

We were supposed to go kayaking in the mangroves for more birding after lunch, but we all decided that the water was too choppy for it to be very enjoyable. So instead we had more time to write (which I happily wasted) and are tentatively rescheduling for tomorrow afternoon. It should be fun, I've liked kayaking when we've gone, even if I'm still not very good at it.

Oh! I almost forgot to retell my April Fool's successes. I really love April Fool's day, probably too much. I got both my postdoc Rickey and my mom. I've spent probably the last three months designing my own project with Rickey for the summer, and we've gotten funding for it and everything, so I sent him an email telling him that I got offered an awesome job in Mexico for the summer and couldn't pass it up. I was already planning on doing it, then Rickey sent me the perfect entry in an email confirming my summer start date. Mom also gave me a perfect opportunity when she sent me the usual "I haven't heard from you in X days, are you ok? Are you still alive?" So of course I sent her an email that casually mentioned I had typhoid and that if it didn't get better in the next week I'd have to go home. But don't worry. I let Rickey sweat it all day, but Mom would probably have a heart attack and die after news like that so I killed it within the same email.

Awesome Camping Trip!

I just got back from the most awesome camping trip yet. We went to Loreto National Park, which is a protected island system on the Gulf of California. It's protected against commercial fishing but still allows artisanal (small scale) and sport fishing. It's about 3 hours north of Puerto San Carlos, and on the opposite side of the Baja peninsula.

The first day, Wednesday, we packed up early and drove for a few hours until we got into the main town of Loreto. There a couple of different towns encompassed in the park, but Loreto is the largest. It's a fairly pretty town with the main road running parallel to the coast. It's touristy, but not as bad as some of the places we've seen. We stopped at a government office and had a mini-lecture from CONANP, National Commission for Natural Protected Areas (which by the way, has the coolest logo). They went over the creation of the Loreto, what the park offers, and what the rules of the park are. Then we had less than an hour off to get lunch in Loreto before we had another lecture. We ran around looking for a place to eat and by the time we found one, we had 30 minutes to eat. Ended up getting fajitas, which were amazing, but had about 10 minutes to finish them and pay. We had to practically run to the next meeting place. The lecture we had there was with Eco-Alianza de Loreto (http://www.ecoalianzaloreto.org/ in English) where we met the director, Laura Escobosa, who is a friend of Vero's. Vero had asked her to tell us about how she came to be director and how her career goals changed. She started out wanting to do strict, hard science but started to get more into community involvement and eventually got her master's in natural resource management at UC San Diego. While at UCSD a couple approached her and asked her to help them set up an environmental NGO (non-governmental organization) in Loreto. Now Eco-Alianza does a lot of outreach in different areas. They do education both of students in the area and of tourists/visitors. They also helped reassess the management plan for the entire Bay. To do that they had to work with different stakeholders: fishermen, tourist companies, the local government, etc. Apparently it's the first time a management plan has been truly reassessed (instead of a government agency just handing down new rules) in Mexico.

After Laura's talk, we drove another hour to our campsite, which was absolutely beautiful. We were on a sand point with part of the bay all around us and an island just across a sandbar. The first day was really windy though and we had a rough time getting our tent down at first. Luckily my roommate Jenna's Miss Outdoors and handled the situation. The next day we got up early and had breakfast, then got ready to snorkel around the island. We could wade all the way out to the one side point of the island, then put on our masks and fins. Eduardo had us do a short check to see what types of fish we could see, then we split into teams and did abundance transects for those fish. One person would hold the end of the transect line, two would count fish on either side of it, and one person would swim along and record bottom conditions. We counted the Cortez Sargeant Major fish. We also saw a ton of Cortez Damselfish and the best were the Cortez Angelfish which were fairly large-from top to bottom probably the size of a dinner plate. We also saw a bunch of sting rays and sea bass. It was definitely the most fun snorkeling I've had-much more interesting than looking for scallops. On the way back into camp I snorkeled for most of the way, despite being in a good wading depth. I figured that this way I wouldn't have to look out for stingrays and might see something cool. And I did! I saw a seahorse, and fairly large too, like 6 in flattened out! He was bright orange and holding onto a piece of seagrass. At first I thought he was dead, but I waved my fingers near him and he moved. He tried to flatten himself out, maybe to look like a snake? Anyway, I was super happy to see him, and kicking myself that I hadn't gotten the underwater camera back from Dylan (who got some awesome fish pictures).

After snorkeling we had some time off and one group went to a nearby town, Mision, to check out an old Franciscan Mission and the little town. The mission was sparse but pretty and I bought a skirt in Mision. Also got an awesome popsicle from an ice cream store.

The next day (Friday) we packed up camp and drove back in to Loreto. Then we went out to one of the large islands there for more snorkeling. Before we pulled up to the island I pointed out a dolphin pod to the boat driver, so he drove over to them. It was sooo cool! It was about 4 bottlenose dolphins and they played under our bow for a good 10 minutes. They kept turning their heads to look at us. If I had been hanging onto the side of the boat, I would have been touching them, they were just underwater. We'd seen dolphins before, but never that close. They're much bigger than I realized! We stayed with them and they played with one of the other boats, and then we left to go snorkeling on the island. We were supposed to be doing more transects but Eduardo packed the equipment at the bottom of the trailer, so we just had free time to snorkel. That was amazing, there were so many fish! There were twice as many angelfish and a lot of other cool species that I have no idea the name of. I found some rock crevasse and saw this bright blue fish, maybe 4-5in long, that had florescent blue spots along his back. And lots of large starfish and sea urchins, I got to hold a couple that Eduardo or Vero brought up (no spiny urchins though, they would hurt!). I got some pictures but unfortunately I don't think I have the right cord to upload the underwater camera's pictures. In any case I ran out of battery before I came across the really cool fish. After we had been swimming for 30-45 minutes Eduardo and Vero rounded us up and said we should get back on the boats so we could go snorkel with sea lions!! We drove around to the other side of the islands and were in the water almost before the boat stopped moving. There was a colony of maybe 20 sea lions on the rocks and calling in the water. Some of them would swim right by you-at one point I was within arms reach of one, but figured he probably wouldn't like me touching him. We swam with them for another 30-45 minutes. Again, I was surprised by how big they were-the size of a large man but in sea lion form.

After snorkeling we had two hours in Loreto, and my group got ice cream and went to this juice place that AJ recommended. It was awesome, it was set in these trees and the guy had a bunch of birds and reptiles. It was like being in a mini-jungle, and the juice was awesome. I got Megaton, which is a mix of date and coconut and tasted like Humma's nut roll in liquid form. After walking around Loreto we got back into the vans and drove out to this women's coop. It's a group of nine women who collect and sell ornamental/aquarium fish to buyers in the US. They're the only group who fish ornamental fish, and the only women's coop in Loreto. They actually hire their husbands and sons for the diving, and they do it all sustainably. Some NGOs have helped them cut out middlemen and make the business more eco-friendly, which also allows them to increase their price. It was really cool, some of those women were 50+ years old and talking about how they're the boss of their husbands.

Just wanted to let everyone (ahem Mom) know that we´re going on a camping trip, so I´ll be out of contact for awhile.

Spring Break

Spring break was pretty awesome. It was great to get away for a couple of days and not have to worry about tests and presentations and papers.

Dylan, Jenna, Christina, Will and I rented a car in La Paz and drove about an hour SW to Todos Santos, this small tourist/surfing town on the Pacific coast. Our hotel was about 20 minutes from town, on axle-breaking dirt roads, which we had to navigate in our rental sedan. We got stuck once, on a hill with a perfectly tire-shaped hole halfway up. Luckily Christina caught it quickly enough and just let the car roll back down the hill so she could try again. The San Pedrito Surf Hotel, when we finally got to it, was absolutely beautiful. It's kind of like a collection of mini-apartments, with nice beds and full kitchens in each room. Our back door looked right out onto the beach and ocean. When we got there, there were probably only 5 other people at the hotel (which is pretty small) and maybe 50 staying at various hotels along the beach. The owner/manager Andy is a friend of AJs and is super cool.

Since Jose has been doing so much translating for my DR, I offered to do some surveys for his project, which is looking at the economics of surfing. I ended up surveying a bunch of the guys staying at the hotel, who ranged from a 28 year old who just quit his high-paying job to a 45 year old retired pro surfer. I didn't know he was a pro until I was done talking to them, and Andy came over and told me "now, you don't know who he is, but he's a legend." I then surveyed Andy for awhile and he talked to me for awhile about surfing in general and in Baja. Apparently Andy moved to Baja at around age 30, specifically to learn to surf. He said he'd never been on a surf board before, but his friend was a good surfer and Andy thought it looked like a lot of fun, so he just picked up and moved. Now he's been here for 10 years and in my opinion, lives the life. He has a couple of hours of hotel work every day, but beyond that he can just live in Baja and surf his heart out.

We did have a surfing lesson the first day, and I liked it a lot more than I thought I would! I expected to get thrown into the surf all the time and hate it, but I ended up being pretty decent. I managed to stand up on my second try and rode that wave almost all the way in. By the end I was catching waves without the instructor (Chuy)'s help. I did bite it a lot, but you could usually feel it coming and prepare yourself.

We also spent a day walking around Todos Santos, where we randomly ran into Bailey and Jose, who were kind of just wandering around Baja for break. We put their gear in our car and kept wandering for a couple hours, seeing the sights. We went back to the hotel room and were just starting to worry about Bailey and Jose getting their stuff back (around 9) when they showed up, having hitched a ride from the beach. They hung around, had dinner with us, and struck a deal with Andy to sleep on the floor for like $30.

We got up the next day and drove into Cabo for a day. I have to admit, I really didn't like Cabo. It didn't feel like Mexico, and there were definitely more Americans than Mexicans. And it was super expensive. Will and I saw a Haagen-Dasz and figured we'd get some. I thought it would be a problem when the guy brought the ice cream to our leather chairs...and then brought the bill in the same holder they use in restaurants. I spent like 109 pesos (about $10) for an ice cream cone. For reference, we stayed at San Pedrito for 3 nights and paid 362 pesos per person. But we did meet up with the other group that was staying in Cabo and had dinner and went out to the bars with them. I have to admit, the one bar was pretty cool. It was essentially a beer pong hall, with like 10 tables set up and the bartenders doubled as waiters that would supply you with cups, balls and beer.

The last day we drove all the way to La Paz, ate at an Applebee's to cure our "I need American food NOW" craving, turned the car in and rode home on SFS vans.

On Saturday we had to present our mini social projects for AJ, the one where Jenna and I interviewed professional women. We pretty much ran it down to the wire as far as preparation goes. The night before I was still translating some interviews and Jenna was working on translating and coding the surveys we got back. We finished in time to present Saturday morning, and AJ told us we did really well. We definitely got some interesting answers. For instance, when we asked the professional women if they would be fulfilled as housewives only, one said "No, I'm not one of those." And there was one who said she told men "Don't tell me how to run my business" all the time.

The next two days were a flurry of studying for our midterms, which were yesterday and today. We still have a final presentation in Spanish, Dylan and I chose the Day of the Dead-I've only heard about it in every spanish class I've ever taken. The ecology test was the easiest out of all of them for me, since I already knew all of the terms and the vast majority of the concepts. We did have to spit out the scientific names and identification of the 7 species of sea turtle, but I'm pretty sure I got all of them. The hardest one for me was actually AJ's. I had a total "duh" moment when I couldn't remember what ESA stood for: Endangered Species Act. For this class and for this group of people, it should have been an giveaway question, but I kept looking at it thinking "Ecological Society of America? That's not right!" and making something up.

Tomorrow we leave for spring break. Dylan, Will, Jenna, Christina and I are all going to Todos Santos, this small surfing town for four days, and then going to Cabo for the last night before coming back. We've been coordinating with a couple people around Todos Santos for surfing lessons and potentially horseback riding. The woman I talked to for that said she only knew one woman who did like tours, and a couple others who only did lessons. If no one else wants to do a tour, I may spring for a lesson, just to get my horse fix and to say I took a riding lesson in Mexico! Although I'm thinking a riding lesson in Spanish would be super hard haha.

Last night there was a meeting in town about the proposal of a national preserve in Bahia Magdalena. This is different from the small marine protected area that the fishermen are setting up. This large reserve is completely funded and proposed by the Mexican government. It's Mexico's 200th anniversary of independence, so they want to have 200 national parks. The park they want to make includes only the outer islands that create the mouth of the bay and the waters on the Pacific side of the islands. Fishermen are really worried because they think that the government means to close the inside of the bay to fishing, which is where all of the fishermen go. They also think that the school is involved in the process, or that we're spies for the US government or something. So Gustavo and the professors went to the meeting to explain to the town what we're doing. So this morning Gustavo and Brady held a meeting with us to explain the results. Basically, they think we shouldn't worry about it too much, but they're going to ramp up community involvement and education about our mission.

Today was another DR day. We set up some questions for the coop's biologist who was supposed to come visit campus. He was supposed to come almost 4 hours ago and so far hasn't shown up, so we don't have a lot of faith in that. But we did get an interview with another fisherman in town. Eduardo's wife Guadalupe came with us to translate. She's lived in both Mexico and the US as a kid, so she's pretty perfectly bilingual. She was a really good translator, telling us exactly what he said when we needed her to, and rephrasing and explaining our questions when needed. It seems I've also fixed some of my Spanish problems. Apparently I was asking the questions too quickly, and according to Guadalupe the vocabulary we're using is a bit too much for some of the fishermen, since a lot of them haven't even been to high school.

Tonight I have to go out with some of the girls to volleyball to try to get some interviews with housewives. These interviews are for the mini project in AJ's class, about the professional women. It's funny, they're easy in comparison to the DR interviews since it's a larger population and we only have 5 quick questions for the women. AJ suggested we bring a bunch of Cokes and a sign saying "house wife interviews" lol. I'm just feeling a little spanish-ed out. All day I've been either translating something into Spanish or trying to understand someone else's Spanish and my brain's in a weird place. So I'm a little grateful that the biologist didn't show up, it's given me a little bit of a break.

Catching Up

Monday we started out working at the recycling center again. I got some pictures this time but only a handful before my camera died. We made some major progress since last time though. We managed to clear an aisleway through the plastic and drastically reduced one of the mounds. There were tons of bags that had lots of trash in them, they shouldn't have gotten in the door. We of course had to pick through all of those to find anything recyclable. I was really glad to have bought work gloves from the falayma (local grocery store).

We've been having discussions in spanish class lately for an activity. Martin brings in a paper with a summary of what's going on in Mexico concerning some issue and then we compare to the US, give our opinions, etc. A few of the more recent ones were adoption, abortion, internet dating, and then college today. I was absolutely dumbstruck by Mexico's system. UNAM is the absolute best university in Mexico and in all of Latin America, and it's public. Not only is it public, it's dirt cheap. Each semester costs-brace yourself-3,000 pesos. 3,000 pesos converts to a little under $240. I've spent more than $240 on books in a semester!! Martin says he has a friend who goes to a public university and also has two scholarships. With her scholarships it costs her 100 pesos each semester (=$7.90 USD). Can I please go there??? I have 2,000 pesos in my room right now!! According to Martin, the public universities in Mexico are the best, and the cheapest. But there's really steep competition, you have to take a test to get in, and there can be 40,000 kids applying for the same major at the same school. He says that the private schools cost a lot more because you don't have to take an entrance test or anything. He also said they tend to be "prettier" than the public universities, that don't spend a lot of money on equipment oranything. But seriously, $240 a semester?? Hello grad school.

Today we had another DR day. We got together to revise our interview questions, since we noticed that some of them were a little difficult to understand or leading people to answer in a certain way. There's still more to be done, as we realized in some interviews today. AJ said that he went through 6 revisions of his dissertation interviews. It's somewhat frustrating to have four or five people sitting a table trying to figure out how to phrase something, and then have to translate it into spanish. Luckily Jose has been really helpful with translating everything.

After lunch we went out to the house of Juan Carlos, the administrative secretary of the coop. He had said that he knew the houses of some of the coop members who live in Puerto San Carlos. Once we got there we met a couple of coop members who happened to be hanging around. We interviewed one in Juan Carlos's house. He was interesting and at least half drunk towards the end. Then they introduced us to some other fishermen who didn't have time, and they directed us to Ramon, another fisherman. Ramon gave us an awesome interview. Our interview lasts about half an hour so far, and Ramon went almost to an hour because he answered just about every question with paragraph instead of a sentence. His spanish was pretty clear too, so I understood a lot of it. I also worked up the nerve to start asking questions myself instead of asking Jose to translate something. We have all of our usual interview questions written down and we just read from the sheet, but if you think of anything it's nice to be able to ask follow up questions.

We had a couple of DR days last week, where my group worked on our interviews for the coop members and had Jose help us translate them into English. Then we went out and talked to two guys from the coop, one an average member on the island and the other the coop president's secretary in Puerto San Carlos. We've realized that the coop isn't as far along in their planning for the Marine Protected Area (MPA) as we thought. An MPA is an area that is designated as a no-fishing zone, sometimes for all types of fish, sometimes for only a few. They can be voluntary, cooperative-driven or they can be government recognized and enforced. My project is looking at how the coop is going to coordinate making it, if they're going to work with different NGOs like ReefCheck or COBI (Comunidad y Biodiversidad), if they're interested in making it government recognized, how they're going to handle surveillance, etc. Based on the conversation with the president's secretary, they're still in the early planning stages.

Yesterday was pretty cool, we had a field exercise/lecture on mangroves. The group split into two and my group went out kayaking for a couple hours to look at the mangroves from the water (in an estuary). Mangroves look like this (only not as high in our area). They're really crucial to ecosystem function because they filter the seawater, prevent erosion, and act as a nursery for a lot of marine fish and shellfish. Kayaking is fun, but I haven't quite gotten my stroke right. Paddling in a kayak is different from a canoe, you shouldn't be pulling the paddle at all, but instead pushing with your opposite arm. Since I wasn't really doing this, my shoulder started to get really tired, and the trip back kind of sucked. After kayaking we ate lunch and went with Gustavo to catalogue a mangrove experiment they're doing. A few years ago the thermoelectric plant had to dig a belt through a mangrove forest to put in a pipeline, and SFS is looking to see how the mangrove fills back in. To do that they set up some permanent quadrants and are asessing where the mangroves return to first.

Last night we all went into town for the whale festival. It's really just an excuse to have a carnival and crown a "whale queen", what a great title! SFS had a tent and we painted faces for all the kids. Apparently I'm better at drawing cartoon whales than I expected. Afterwards we had some free time to roam around and I ended up getting a pina colada, a ring made out of a shell, and a bracelet. We're going back tonight and I'm considering getting pink extensions in my hair, the interns and Laura got some last night. I also had some awesome tacos that had cactus in them, it looked like a slice of green pepper but it tasted really sweet and was awesome combined with everything else.

We're supposed to go back to the festival tonight for more facepainting, but it started raining a few minutes ago, so I'm not sure what happens now. In any case I have a ton of papers and projects due next week, and tests the week after that. I'd like to go back to the festival, but at least I'd maybe get something done if we didn't go.

Jenna and I

 

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La Purísima

Today we had a field trip to La Purísima, an oasis two hours north of Puerto San Carlos. We drove through two hours of the typical flat desert scenery. At some point I fell asleep and when I woke up we were next to a virtual forest of date palms with red rock mesas and mountains surrounding us. We stopped in the forest for a lecture from Vero on carrying capacity, which being an Ecology major, I’ve encountered in every semester for the past three semesters. It was such a change to be in a forest with shade and a canopy. It definitely confirmed my sneaking idea that I may be more of a forest person than a coast person. I loved listening to the birds and walking through the trees-even though they were date palms and the ground was still essentially sand. There were sightings of someone’s horses further in the stand but I couldn’t find them when I looked. I did find a bunch of goats though, which are in the picture album (or will be once I upload…). To fulfill my equine craving I saw a lot of horses on the drive, apparently a bunch of people keep them for ranching. I even saw one guy herding his goats on horseback right next to the road. Which reminds me of another interesting Mexican anomaly. You’ll have like 2 miles of really nice roadway, then 200 ft of awful potholes, then 2 miles of really nice road again. And there’re full-on road signs for what appear to just be someone’s small ranch.

After Vero’s lecture we climbed back in the vans and drove another 15 minutes to the edge of a mesa or something like it and climbed down (a much shorter and less intimidating hike than our last one) to get to the oasis itself. It was so pretty, where the desert just burst into green. And it was so nice to be in freshwater again! I don’t particularly like swimming in saltwater, it’s such a shock if you get any up your nose or in your mouth, and you feel grimy after swimming in it. This water was fairly warm and there was a great ledge that everyone put their stuff on and ate lunch on. The only downside was that the rocks leading into the water were super slippery, but I just kept a hand on them as I went down. We swam around for probably half an hour, then got out and had a lecture from Eduardo on oasis ecology, right on the rock facing the oasis. That was one of those “Well, I’m glad I chose this study abroad program!” moments, how many people get to have class while wearing a bathing suit, looking out on an oasis surrounded by palms, cacti and mesas?

We had another two hour drive back to the center to two pieces of good news: the student server, and therefore internet, was back up and there were hamburgers and French fries for dinner! We really do all like the Mexican food and happily eat it 24/7 but it’s really nice to get an all-American meal occasionally. The fries were surprisingly good, they reminded me of O-fries but with less than half of the grease.

So today was pretty sad for everyone at the center. Two of the students had to leave for misconduct reasons and one of the interns, Antonio, got a job offer that he had to leave for immediately. So our male population was practically cut in half and we lost some pretty cool people. I'm not sure what it's going to be like without them.

Just to make the day even better, we spent the morning sifting through trash and recyclables at Brady's recycling center. Trashbags full of plastics and cardboard were stacked almost to the ceiling in some places. It hadn't been gone through in two months I think so we had to go around picking up everything that spilled and pulling things outside the building for a truck to collect. I'm really starting to get the "plastic kills" thing, especially here where there's soo much of it. And it's so easy to just refill a reusable bottle instead of buying water bottles. Another thing I've learned is that if you have to buy something and have the option, glass is easier to recycle than plastic. And I'm going to make an effort to carry reusable shopping bags from now on. Puerto San Carlos is absolutely covered in trash, the vast majority of it being plastic. It never degrades, it just fragments into small pieces that hang around forever.

After we got back we had a couple of classes, including a discussion in AJ's class of a book on saving the gray whale and a discussion in Spanish on love in the age of the internet. It quickly devolved into what you value in someone and if you believe in love at first sight. Martin's also been starting each Spanish class out with a song in Spanish, usually by some pop singer. Today was Nelly Furtado, who actually sings Spanish fairly well. There was a mad rush around dinner time to turn in a report for Vero on lobster habitat. Then after dinner we watched a documentary on gray whales and the hazards they face on their migrations.

We found out our DRs yesterday, I'm working with AJ on a project that looks at the designation of parts of Isla Magdalena as a Marine Protected Area (MPA). The fishing cooperative got together and decided that they've overfished the area and want to close certain portions to allow it to recover. This specific sub-project would look at how the cooperative works with NGOs and government agencies to create the MPA. The other project of AJ's is looking at "Surfonomics," or the economic and cultural effects of surfing tourism on communities. There's apparently a lot of really good surfing in Baja, and fairly close to us. I'll find out soon, since some of us are spending a good amount of our break in Todos Santos at a surf hotel.

There was a lot of anxiety about the DRs, everyone got at least their 2nd choice, but some people really had their hearts set on a certain project and were pretty upset when they didn't. It's funny, I would have been equally happy with any of the professors, but now I'm really really glad that I got AJs.

The whole day was pretty much filled with DR stuff. AJ met with each subgroup (mine has Lindsey and Bailey in it) to discuss what to look at, then we spent the rest of the day doing literature searches. I wish I was back on the Pitt network so I was permanently logged in to all the databases. It's a real pain in the butt to have to try to remote log in to either Boston Univ (SFS's home institution) or Pitt before accessing anything. I'm really sick of looking at papers though.


Today we had another scallop field exercise, where we threw PVC squares into the water and snorkeled to see if there were any scallops in the quadrant. My group didn't find any, again. The other group in our boat found 2, but only brought one back because the other was too small to keep. Once we got back Vero showed us how to measure and weigh all the parts. It's crazy how little of the animal we eat, maybe a tenth of it's weight, and the rest generally gets thrown out.

There was a little unrest as far as the earthquake and tsunami went, but Gustavo made sure to keep updating us. Apparently Cabo San Lucas, which is more exposed than we are, only got waves a foot taller than usual. We haven't experienced anything and aren't expected. Gustavo said that if they did predict anything for this area we'd be driven inland to Ciudad Constitucion, about an hour away. We took some time out of one of our DR classes trying to watch the tsunami live via the internet, but as anyone else who watched it knows, it was less than exciting and we eventually gave up.

Earthquake/Tsunami

Just to let everyone know, we're fine here in Mexico, we haven't experienced anything. Gustavo said that any time there's an earthquake in the Pacific there's a tsunami warning and that we shouldn't worry about it. In any case, we're fairly sheltered because of the large islands at the mouth of the bay.

Today we had a lecture from Vero on marine reserves in the Baja area. We read two interesting papers from one guy (Richard Cudney-Bueno) who studied a marine reserve for rock scallops and black murex in the Gulf of Mexico. The first looked at how to select the location of a reserve to best benefit fisheries. For example, both of theses species have free-floating larvae stages that become attached to a substrate at a certain age. You need to have the reserve located so that the larvae will drift to the area of your fishery. The second paper followed the community response to the marine reserve. I thought this was super cool because the fishing cooperative was really good at regulating itself via social punishment (disapproval, guilt etc). But when bandits began fishing in the reserve, the co-op essentially dissolved because there was no government enforcement to back them up.

We also had an interesting spanish class where we pulled subjunctive words out of spanish songs. It made me miss Sra Warda (high school spanish teacher for 3 years) because we listened to her favorite person ever, Juanes! It made me a little reminiscent, I should go back and find some way to contact her, she'd probably be really excited to know I'm studying abroad in Mexico and speaking lots of spanish.

After lunch we went into town again to conduct more interviews. We didn't get as many as last time, partly because we didn't have Brady to drive around and talk to people she knows. I'm thinking that she knows half the town. We went to the doctor's office to try to talk to a nurse, but she was out for the day, so we walked to La Roca and talked to Armida, the owner (and Poncho's sister). We asked Antonio if he would do some interviews with men, because Jenna and I thought they weren't being totally honest with us, because we're women. We were asking questions about how they feel about professional women, and we weren't getting any negative answers, but almost all of the women we talked to said that men, especially their husbands, were the largest obstacle they faced. One man told us that he thought professional women were great, and after he left his wife told us "He's a total liar! He's the reason I had to quit!" We still didn't get any real negative reactions, so that in itself is an interesting result, compared to the women's experiences.

We had to hand in our DR choices to Brady this afternoon. I ended up putting AJ first, then Vero, then Eduardo. It would be cool to do whales, but I feel like AJ's and Vero's projects have a greater effect on the people of Puerto San Carlos, and since I already know about hard science, I'd like to focus on the human aspect of conservation while I'm here. I didn't really realize that until recently, I had thought that I wanted to experience hard science in a different ecosystem with an interesting cultural component. What I've since realized is that I can do hard science in any type of area, but that SFS provides a really good opportunity to look into community involvement and motivation. I wrote in my request that no matter how many papers you publish, nothing will happen if you can't get the community involved. I'm also thinking that my "home" may be in forest ecosystems, I really miss trees here! It's great to explore something different, and that's part of why I came, to figure out where I want to go, or at least to get ideas.

Banderitas Camping Trip

So the camping trip to Banderitas went well. We piled all our things into the pangas and I got stuffed in a panga with a cooler up against my knees, which led to a very uncomfortable boat ride. The camp site is maybe 30-50 minutes away by boat in an estuary. There´s a beach and then a small cliff (maybe 6 ft high) where we actually pitched our camp. There were a ton of burrs the size of my thumbnail. If you´ve never experienced burrs, I highly suggest you NOT. They got stuck on everything and hurt like hell when you tried to pull them out. Every now and then the point would lodge in my finger, so I´ve got about 5 sore spots on my fingers from them. The campsite itself is classified as desert, with lots of dry grasses and cacti and Dr. Seuss-like trees.

At one point yesterday we went on a hike through it with Gustavo stopping every now and then to point out interesting species. Some were these cacti that are endemic (native) to Baja, which looks like they´re a dead piece just laying on the ground, but are still alive. We also saw a huge cactus that looks kind of like a saguaro but isn´t, Gustavo said it takes 100 years for it to start branching, and this probably had 7 branches to it. There was also a caracara that was building a nest on it-some kind of black and white hawk or eagle, I´m not sure what it´s English name is. At one point Gustavo stopped and told us all to back up quickly because there was a massive rattlesnake across the path. We stopped a good distance away and looked at it for a while before it started moving towards us and we had to leave. Some people were saying they wanted to hear it rattle and were wondering why it hadn´t, but we´d stopped far enough away that it didn´t feel threatened. Eventually we got to a salt flat that fills with seawater at really high tides. It was really cool, part of the water was reddish from a combination of algae and excess minerals.

We also did turtle monitoring at night, where each cabin has a shift where they have to go out in the pangas and go through the nets we put out to look for turtles. My cabin had the shit shift of 12-4, where you can´t really fall asleep early, and only have like 2 hours of sleep before you have to get up again. On top of that, it was freezing and we didn´t find any turtles. But the other groups did, 1 Monday night and 5 last night. In the morning we all got up early to measure them, mostly measurements of their shell length and width. If they had never been caught before, we also named them, tagged them, and took a skin sample. Sea turtles are really cool, their flippers are a lot less armored than I expected. Their skin really just felt like a lizard. And they´re pretty large-probably the size of my torso. And although no one got bitten, apparently they can, and do, bite really hard.

The last cool thing we did was snorkel through a rhodolith bed. Rhodoliths look like this http://vis-pc.plantbio.ohiou.edu/algaeimage/jpegs/ball.jpg and are coraline algae. They´re fairly round and depending on the area are either scattered along a sand bed or densely packed together. We saw a bunch of sealife including a couple of pufferfish, sea bass and a stingray.

As for camping in general, I think my life would be a lot happier if I could sleep better. My one roommate kind of spreads out in her sleep and she kept rolling onto my sleeping pad, which isn´t very large to begin with. It´s also not horribly comfortable. And I was too nervous about oversleeping for both turtle monitoring and measuring to put in earplugs. The burrs also really really sucked, they were everywhere and there was a constant chorus of "effing burrs!" around the campsite. We had to check our gear carefully before returning so we didn´t bring any back to the school. Overall, it felt really natural to just hang around outside a lot and not shower, and go to the bathroom behind cacti. Actually, I could do without the sharp object part, but whatever. But it was a pretty nice way to spend three days, and Gustavo said it´s the worst campsite of the semester, so things only get better.

Two pretty slow days for this weekend. Yesterday we had spanish class where we did more work in the dreaded subjunctive and finished watching a Spanish chick flick that was pretty predictable and fairly bad lol. Then we had a talk about Leave No Trace camping since we´re going on a three day camping trip starting tomorrow. The main points of the talk were how to reduce your impact, and how you do that differently based on whether the environment is heavily used or pristine. Another main point was how to go to the bathroom while camping, which should be...interesting. I´ve never been camping before, so it´s all new to me. Luckily I have Jenna in my cabin, who´s super outdoorsy and leads trips for her school, so I should be fine. After the talk we had to get all the gear and food together. Since my only job is to help with Monday dinner I helped José carry things from the equipment shed. After that I spent a good amount of the night finishing an essay for Martín about corruption in Mexico (bottom line: it´s pretty bad) and went out onto the beach to hang out with people after that.

Today we hired a boat to take us to the Dunas, which is kind of a island in the bay that´s just made up of dunes and beaches. We were out there for five hours just laying out, going in the ocean and playing on the big sand dunes. Jenna, Laura and I figured out that it´s pretty fun to jump down onto the dunes because it doesn´t hurt and you just kind of slide for awhile. We really loaded the boat down with too many people, so the rides to and from were painfully slow. I took a shower, but I still have sand in my ears and hair, and now we´re just waiting for mac and cheese for dinner. The cooks don´t work on Sundays, so a group of students is in charge of Sunday dinner and so far we´ve been trying to do something American each time. Last week was grilled cheese and tomato soup.

This past week has been fairly academic-heavy, so I haven't really had a lot of time to blog. We had a paper due on Monday for Vero, then a lesson plan to do for an English class, then a project on climate change for Eduardo, and a Spanish essay due tomorrow. And among all this we had to be planning a project for AJ.

The project for AJ is kind of a mini-project to get us used to qualitative research methods, and an opportunity for us to find out more about town. Jenna and I decided to look at professional women (nurses, business owners, teachers, etc) and how they're viewed. We wrote out and translated our questions on Wednesday and today went into town with Brady to conduct interviews. I think we ended up getting 6 total, including 2 business owners, 1 seamstress, 1 pharmacy-worker and 2 men (husbands of two of the women). We have questions planned for professional women, housewives, young girls, and men. Most of the women said that they didn't really face a lot of obstacles becoming a professional, but some of them had experienced some kind of pressure from family members. And all of the women were fairly adamant that they would not feel happy or fulfilled if they were only a housewife. I think it's especially interesting because I think that's how I would feel, and I know people from home on both sides of the issue. I think we're running into problems with the men, in that for the two we interviewed their (professional) wives were in the room and I think at least one of them wasn't completely honest with us. It's also a problem that Jenna and I are both women obviously in college to have a profession, so they may just tell us what they think we want to hear. On the upshot, I understood a lot more in the interviews than I expected to. We recorded everything but also took notes afterward in case something went wrong, and between Jenna and I we could summarize pretty much what everyone said.

This past week we went whale watching twice-both times I went in Eduardo's boat and we cruised around for awhile looking for mammals other than whales as well. We saw a bunch of dolphins-bottlenose and white-sided, and sea lions. Yesterday was funny, we were in the boats for maybe 10 minutes when Will's sunglasses blew off his head. Usually the pangueros can find hats and stuff, but we all assumed that sunglasses would sink and be lost. But Chilaco turned the boat around anyway and we all looked around on the sea floor, which is fairly shallow in that area. Sure enough, Chilaco spotted them and then came the question of how to get them. They fell off in really polluted water, so you wouldn't want to jump in after them for risk of coming out of the water glowing green. Will was hoping for a stick, but those were in short supply on a small speedboat. Chilaco ended up pulling out a fishing line and hook, and amazingly pulled them up on the second try! The rest of the pangas were waiting for us further up the shore, and when we caught up we saw that there was a whale in between the two boats and super close to them. So that was neat, that if Will hadn't lost his sunglasses everyone would have missed that.

On Tuesday or Wednesday we went into town to Brady's friend who's a dressmaker. We got to pick out fabric and tell her what we wanted for custom made clothes. I ended up ordering brown yoga pants with a green rollover top and a strapless sundress in a big blue foral print. I'm super excited I've never had anything custom made, besides Halloween costumes.

I seem to have a time lag on posting which doesn't totally surprise me. I was never very good at diaries or any of that. Anyway, new pictures are up! Both from whale watching and our death-defying (ok not really) hike through Isla Magdalena. Just so you don't have to go digging through my posts again, here's the album.

Yesterday was fairly slow, even though it wasn't supposed to be that way. We were supposed to split up into two groups and have kayak lessons and some free time (sound like summer camp yet?). But the first group took twice as long kayaking as expected, so my group basically had the entre morning off. They got back at lunch, so we grabbed lunch to go (this awesome kind of Mexican shepherd's pie with potatoes, ground beef, cheese and guac) and drove out to the beach where Brady was waiting with our kayaks.

Kayaking was interesting, I think I like it. You're much closer to the water than I expected, and you're fairly locked in once you have the spray skirt up. I feel like claustrophobic people (Mom) would probably have a problem with it. And the stroke is different from canoeing. If you do it right, your paddling force should be coming from your core rotating, not your arms rowing or something. I was just starting to get it right before it was time to leave. We also had to do a wet exit, which is fairly miserable in a cold lagoon. Since you're so locked in, it's important you know how to get out. So we had to flip ourselves over then pull up the spray skirt and kick out of the kayak. Then there's a process to get the water out of your kayak before you get back on (at which point you pull a sea lion move). I didn't plug my nose when I flipped, so I was dripping seawater for the rest of the day, and of course you're soaked and cold. I managed to do it, but I don't plan on flipping very often after that.

We got back and had Spanish where we went though conditional tense. We had a couple of minutes left, so we finished with Scattergories in Spanish. We had some time off again, where most people worked on their lab reports due for Vero on Monday. Then we went to dinner...and there was none! On Saturdays the cooks make something in the afternoon and staff of the day reheats it before dinner, only Martin forgot it was his turn. So dinner was a little late, but it was great anyway.

After dinner we all went out to Alcatraz, which is the only really nice restaurant in town. There was a soccer game that Jose really wanted to catch, and Alacatraz was the only place likely to have it. It's a nice hotel with a big open patio and good food and a complete gringo magnet. For reference, in Mexico "gringo" just means American, with none of the stupid American connotation we think it has. Not sure if it has that connotation in other countries, but according to Jose it's not some insult or anything. Anyway, I think just about everyone in there was gringos or other sorts of tourists. After the game we went to Los Arcos for drinks (much cheaper!), then the local "club". It's really just a bar with a dance floor with all the tables pushed to the sides. It was packed last night though, apparently for Valentine's Day.

Today was a lazy Sunday. I finished my section of the lab report, then essentially spent the rest of the day reading in the sun. The weather today is ridiculously awesome, bright and sunny and warm with enough of a breeze to not get too hot. This is the first time I've been inside since like 10 this morning. Apparently there's some plans in the making for Valentine's festivities, we'll see how it goes.

So yesterday and today were, in short, awesome and ridiculous.

Yesterday we had our first whale watching trip, where we had to do boat transects. We collected Vero's crab traps and then headed out into the bay to record the number and behavior of whales we saw on our line. Inside the bay I don't think we saw any, but in the mouth I think we counted 17. We also saw a couple breaching, which gray whales don't do very often. We tried to do three transects, one in the bay, one in the mouth and one outside of the bay. We had to end the outside transect because the waves were too high to see any whales over them. Then we turned around and slowed down in the mouth to do photo ID. That was outrageously cool, we had two different whales swim directly under the boat. They surfaced maybe 15-20 feet away and if we had jumped out of the boat we would have landed on them. I was taking pictures, but my camera's batteries died after four pictures, since I'd been taking some all along the boat ride. We stayed out on the water and just watched whales and took pictures for while until it we realized we were already late for a Spanish class.

Then today we went out to Isla Magdalena, one of the islands forming the bay, to look at rocky intertidal zones. But to get there we had to take a 30 min boat ride and an hour hike through the mountains. There's a small fishing co-op village on Isla Magdalena that we went through. The hike started out fairly gently uphill with clearly defined paths but up by the tops of the moutains we were going on narrow, very steep footpaths. At a few points you'd have a drop off and a path only wide enough for one foot at a time. I'm pretty scared of heights and this was just about the worst kind of situation, surrounded by rocky dropoffs hiking on gravelly paths. There were a couple of times I started trembling and I almost cried twice. Going down was awful, I was terrified I was going to fall and start sliding down rock. I took a bunch of pictures from the more stable areas, hopefully you'll be able to get a sense of how steep it was. We finally got to the end and the Pacific Ocean opened up before us, it was a beautiful view.

We got onto the beach and changed shoes to look in the tidepools. My group (Kay and Lindsey) went off to a different set of pools from everyone else, and of course I fell off the first rock I stepped on to. Go figure my only injury was in the tidepools. We had to do quadrats (PVC pipe squares) and record the types of animals and plants in each square. We didn't find much, just a bunch of snails and seagrass. The goal was to see lobsters for Vero, but I don't think anyone saw anything. We stuck around for another 20 minutes and headed back.

The trip back wasn't quite as bad as the trip out, because I knew what I was getting into and it's always easier to control your weight going up. Plus by that time I had told just about everyone that I was super scared of heights and Jenna walked in front of me and kept talking to me. It really helped to be able to follow someone closely and watch their footsteps, plus Jenna's done a good amount of hiking and it made me feel better to see someone who's more confident at it. I felt soo good once I knew we were out of the steep parts.

Once we got back we had dinner and then there was a showing of a documentary this women made in one of the local towns about ecotourism in the area. It's called Ballenas de Oro (Golden Whales), I don't know if it's available anywhere, but it gave a really good view of the issues surrounding fishing and tourism in Bahia Magdalena. The permits and requirements for whale watching are getting too pricy for most locals to afford, so a lot of tourism is foreign run so it doesn't bring as much money to the towns. And creating a marine protected area would mean that a lot of fishermen would either lose their jobs or a part of their income.

No internets...so from yesterday, 2/10

Today there was considerable less excitement than yesterday-no earthquakes, no research conundrums, etc. Just a site cleanup (staff and students, everyone assigned a chore) and a bunch of classes-Sustainable Development, Spanish and Coastal Ecology. With AJ we talked about environmental economics, which is how you put an economic value on the environment and ecosystems. We read a paper (Costanza's Value of the World Ecosystems for those scientifically inclined) that estimated the value of our ecosystem services (i.e. nutrient cycling, gas regulation) in dollars, and the value they found was more than the total global GDP. It may sound like a bunch of BS at first glance, but their methods are sound enough to make it the 2nd most cited paper for a period of 10 years. I think it's cool because they didn't even take into account the fact that we couldn't do some of these ecosystem services if we tried. AJ pointed out that if we changed our economy to reflect the environmental costs, our prices would be completely skewed. A product may be four times as much as it is now because the company built their factory on a wetland and we now have to work on processes the waste that that wetland filtered. I think it was the Iroquois who made decisions based on how it would affect people seven generations away. I found that really sobering.

Something that's been hitting me hard here is just how much trash we put out, especially plastics. Puerto San Carlos has trash everywhere, and the vast majority of it is plastic. Plastics take forever to decompose on their own, and often release really noxious chemicals when they do. In the meantime, they threaten the health of our ecosystems. Even if you recycle, that only buys your plastic bottle maybe one more life before the next person throws it out. I think that's something that's going to stick with me-finding things that are reusable instead of disposable and conserving water and energy. In suburbia we take it for granted that water is readily available. What we don't realize is that it takes vast resources to then treat that water after you use it, and to pump it back to someone's house. Another interesting "green" fact-the easiest way to greatly decrease your carbon footprint is to stop eating meat, or at least cows. The resources that go into feeding, raising, killing and transporting cows is one of the greatest contributors to carbon footprint.

Tomorrow we're going out for our first whale watching, weather permitting. We're going to collect data on how many whales we see, where we see them and behavior (spy-hopping, breaching, diving, etc). We had to make up our slates beforehand because there's so much information we have to collect that there's no way we'd be able to do it on the fly without anything in front of us. I'm still a little concerned that we're going to skip something. We're also picking up some crab pots for one of Vero's studies, and I'm really glad we don't have to snorkel for it. I liked snorkeling, but I would not want to go snorkeling then spend the next 3 hours on the boat.

Tonight seven of us went into town for a salsa lesson that Brady set up. We convinced some of the guys to come, even though we didn't end up dancing in pairs. The dance instructor was really amusing, definitely stereotypical male dance teacher. Vero came with us, and she's good! She takes his regular dance class (you know, for mexicanas who already know how to dance) so he kept using her for demonstrating. We did basic steps of salsa, meringue, "country" and samba. The Mexican version of country is much more intense. It's technically still square dancing but probably twice as fast with lots more moving. And the samba was tough-white girl got no hip movement. I was beat by the end. Another good thing about Mexico-the lesson cost 20 pesos, the equivalent of $1.50. I've spent more on one beer than I did for an hour's worth of dance lesson.

Terremoto!

Just a quick update before I forget. I felt an earthquake last night! It was minor, similar to what you'd feel if you stood on a plane tarmac or next to a train. I was sitting in the computer lab and felt a rumble and a shake and at first thought it was a big boat or something, then realized there's no way I'd feel that. I went outside and there were a bunch of people congregating around the intern cabin and Gustavo came out and told everyone what it was. Apparently they're not that uncommon, since Baja is essentially on a fault line.

One of the bad things about San Carlos (besides the lack of internet that means I can't update when I want to!) is it's making me into a weather wuss. I don't think it's been any colder than 60, but every time it dips below maybe 65 we're all complaining about how cold it is. I guess it doesn't help that I only have two sweatshirts and one pair of close-toed shoes that aren't awful to wear in the sand (bad call there). And these buildings aren't exactly built to keep in heat, so there's a constant breeze.

I got up early this morning to do yoga that Brady leads. I don't think I've said much about Brady yet, but she's the Student Affairs Manager and is in charge of us students in general-our happiness, our safety, our schedules, etc. I don't know if its part of her job or not, but she's essentially in charge of community relations. She's been here for three years and knows a lot of the people in town and tries to get them involved in what we're doing. She's essentially like a camp counselor with some admin powers. Anyway, this was one of the only times I've done yoga and I remembered that I do in fact like it a lot. I felt really loose and calmly energized (versus bouncing off the walls energized) afterwards.

We had a bunch of classes, including Coastal Ecology with Eduardo. I really like Eduardo, he's probably in his late 30s and Mexican but he did his PhD in New Zealand so his English is awesome. We did spend a lot of time going over currents and weather patterns, which was less than exciting. We also had Principles of Resource Management with Vero (short for Veronica), who's a petite Mexican woman with a strong accent. In class we've been talking about the agencies that govern fisheries and how fisheries work. Lunch was sandwiches with really awesome bread and assorted toppings. Brady, the student affairs manager, said that the cooks never believe her when she tells them that we're happy with just sandwiches.

We also got an intro to the directed research topics. The three professors (plus Gustavo, center director) have a total of 7 research projects for 2-3 students to work on and specialize a bit. Vero's are mostly concerned with fishery management for different crustaceans (blue crab, lobster and something else), AJ has socioeconomic projects like how changing ___ will affect the people of San Carlos and vice versa, and Eduardo has the sea turtle and whale projects. I'm not really sure which I want to do. I already have a fair amount of traditional ecology field work so I kind of want to do something different with Vero or AJ. But on the other hand, Eduardo's stuff is so cool, and he seems like he'd be great to work with! And I do truly like ecology a lot. But then again, we'll all work on all the projects at some point so it's not like I wouldn't see any whales. I would also feel a little guilty doing the whales or sea turtles because I know there's a bunch of people who really really want to work with them and who came here just to do that. I could get into the less charismatic species and projects, like mangroves or the rock lobster. Gustavo said they try to get everyone in at least their 2nd choice, so I may just write down my top three and say "I don't have an order" and leave it to chance a bit.

For Spanish class they broke us into two levels, and whichever level isn't in class gets to have free time. Today all the Spanish I girls went to Brady's friend who's a seamstress to get clothing tailor-made. The rest of us will be going in a few weeks, I'm soo excited for that! The only clothing I've ever had made just for me were Halloween costumes when I was little. I think I want to get yoga pants and a dress, but I can't decide what I want the dress to be like yet.

In Spanish 2 we had a debate on the influence of mass communication, with my group saying it was bad. Unfortunately it's kind of hard to argue with "without books and journals we wouldn't have modern medicine." It started to get a little heated but when we left everyone was laughing and saying things like "I don't actually believe it's ok to destroy cultures." It's hard trying to come up with arguments for something that you may not believe, and furthermore arguments that you can actually figure out how to say. For example, Martin didn't think there's even a word for "Westernization" in Spanish.

Today was our first day off, so everyone slept in another couple of hours. Got up around 10 and got breakfast, which is fend for yourself on Sundays. A bunch of people went to a beach (since ours is polluted) but I stayed back to finish up some reading and a paper on environmental ethics. Jenna (one of my roommates), Dave, Lindsey and I went into town for lunch. I ended up getting bistec ranchero, which is kind of shredded beef with peppers and onions mixed in. Pretty much everything is served with beans and tortillas and usually rice. I still haven´t figured out the best way to eat things, I still do a kind of wrap. Lindsey got this thing that we couldn´t figure out what it was until we got back to the center and asked Jose, the kid from Mexico city. Apparently she ate pig fat lol. After lunch we walked around San Carlos a bit and stopped in the grocery store for assorted snack foods. I hadn´t really been around San Carlos during the day except for our tour. It´s nice to be able to see the uneven sidewalks and stray dogs in the light lol. When we got back the people from the beach were back and I finished up (for real this time) my readings. I had gotten confused and didn´t realize we had readings for the field exercise yesterday, so I had a backlog to finish. Since it was Sunday a group of students had to cook dinner, which was bbq chicken, pasta and stir fry veggies. We tried to find somewhere that streamed the Super Bowl, but failed.

Today was definitely the coolest day so far. Since it's Saturday we got to sleep in for another hour before breakfast. There were a lot of pastries and muffins, as well as the usual fruit and chocolate (hot chocolate Mexican style, with cinnamon and some other spices). After that we had RAP and assorted meetings, which were essentially the students getting together and going over any announcements or requests (ie can we organize dirty dishes better and can we please do something about that poor dog that's hanging around). The staff was having a meeting at the same time, and at the end Brady (Student Affairs Manager) and Gustavo (Center Director) listened to our points and brought up any they had for us.

Then we went out on our first field exercise. We loaded up the pangas with all our snorkeling gear and packed lunches and field equipment and had maybe a 15-20 min boat ride out to the bay where we were doing a scallop abundance sampling. We had squares made out of PVC that we had to throw behind us, then snorkel to see if there were any scallops within the quadrant. If there were, we had to collect any. Unfortunately no one saw scallops, although one of my group members Jose almost put his hand on a stingray. Then we got back in the boats and had another boat ride to collect octopi! Vero (Principles of Resource Management) has a study of octopus using artificial shelter (beer cans). So we had to go out and collect the cans and their stakes from three different sea floor types-rhodoliths, sand, and rocky. To do this you had to dive down (nothing over like 4 ft), plug the end of the can, grab the stake and bring the whole thing to the surface and put the can in a Ziploc full of water. The first and last locations we had to snorkel and had difficulty finding all of the cans. In one place I saw a big blue crab, a bunch of scallops and a really weird looking fish. But for the sand, the water was only about 2 feet deep so we just waded and found almost all of them. All of this took 4-5 hours, and we ate lunch on the boat. My snorkeling gear all worked fine-it was my first time, and with all new gear. It was a little harder to get to the bottom with my wetsuit on, but it was too cold to go without. I also stupidly forgot a towel, so I borrowed someone else's once we got in the boat.

Once we got back we had to process everything in the lab, which involved cutting open the cans and recording all the animals that were in the bag. Most of them had a ton of snails and I got to show off my amphipod prowess. My group had a couple of fish and crabs, but no octopi. I think there were maybe a total of 10 octopi caught, some with eggs in the can. We had to kill one of them because it was a new species and we had to keep a sample for identification in the future. Vero got really upset and was having problems because the octopus kept trying to crawl out of the jar of alcohol. I ended up grabbing it and doing it myself. A lot of people were kind of shaken up by it and couldn't watch, but I guess from putting so many frogs down I'm used to having to do the sad part. I also believe that "if you kill something, you have to watch it die," kind of as a token of respect to it, or so you don't forget what you're asking of it. We didn't have to put any others down, and they were very cool. One of the other kids got pictures and will be putting them up on the server. It was really weird to hold one, their suckers were definitely strong, but they didn't hurt. They could move in so many different ways and it was like having 8 legs gave them a different dimension of movement, or at least had many more ways of moving.

Tonight we're going into town to the restaurant Poncho (one of the pangueros)'s sister owns. Some of us are having dinner there, but since they're only doing shellfish tonight some people ate at the center and are only doing drinks once we're there. It's a good thing we're getting a ride though because I'm exhausted from snorkeling all day.