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.