Manu Field Trip

First off happy birthday to Mama Llama, who's all alone in Downingtown today!

This past weekend we took the students to a field station in Guapiles, Costa Rica. We stayed in the field station they used for a semester, which consists basically of cabins. Pictures are on their way, once I can find the time (and Internet) to edit and upload them.

We started the trip with a hike in Braulio Carrillo National Park, which was established in 1978 after the government put a highway through a rainforest. Environmental groups pitched a fit and got the park made. So now they have a national park with a big highway running right down the middle. There's actually a fair amount of "discussion" over what kind of effect this has on the flora and fauna. In ecology, when an ecosystem is broken into pieces (for instance, by agriculture or a highway) it's called fragmentation. Particularly in forests, having more "edges" can drastically change the characteristics of the area. Certain species like to be on the edge and others don't. For example, some birds think an edge means the end of the forest and won't cross it, even though there's another forest 100ft away. Some tree seedlings need shade to grow well and if their seeds land between fragments, they won't survive. This has big consequences for how animals move around and how their populations are regulated. Instead of having one large population with lots of genetic diversity (like a city), you end up with small populations that are very genetically similar (think towns up in the Appalachians...).

The day after Braulio Carrillo, we went to El Zota, an organic farm, for a tour. While there we helped them make up this soup of microorganisms for their compost pile. Microorganisms help decompose compost faster, and can be used in various other ways around the farm (enhancing fertilizers, cutting down on animal smells). El Zota focuses on cattle, both for dairy and meat production, but they also had pigs, goats, chickens, and an extensive garden. Everything is grown organically, and they maintain a portion of their farm as forest. We got a hike through the forest as well and ended up seeing strawberry poison dart frogs,, a spider monkey, and howler monkeys. I've officially seen all four species of monkeys found in Costa Rica! (Spider, Howler, Squirrel, and White-faced Capuchin in case you were wondering.)

The last day of the trip we visited the Dole Banana Plantation, and were given a tour by a very rehearsed, slippery guide. As another intern put it: "I liked the tour so much it made me suspicious." Some tidbits:
-they actually still use MULES!
-the bananas have to be covered to avoid damage, so all the trees look like they have blue plastic garbage bags hanging from them
-what we think of as a bunch is actually called a hand, and there can be dozens of hands (=over a hundred bananas) on one stalk
-there is no such thing as a banana tree, only banana plants
-banana plants frequently fall over, so all have to be secured by twine to keep them upright
-it's really hard to get bananas to reproduce, so all seedlings are generated in a lab.

Gallivanting

This weekend Nadav (new intern) and I took off for the capital, San Jose. I would like it to be known (coughcoughMom) that we walked throughout the city, couch surfed, and clubbed and came back in one piece, with all of our personal belongings.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with couch surfing, it's a website that connects travelers with locals who are interested in hosting them. Anyone can sign up for it, and people write reviews of their hosts/travelers to maintain a kind of oversight. Hosts aren't supposed to charge, but it's considered good couch surfing manners to help your host out by making dinner or giving them a bottle of wine or something. Treating your host like a hotel is also strongly discouraged- couch surfing is more about cultural exchange than finding a free night's sleep.

In this case we stayed with a 24 year old computer programmer that Nadav had stayed with last weekend. We met at the bus stop, took the bus to his apartment, cooked dinner together, and went out with our host and his friends to Vertigo, a night club in San Jose. He was super welcoming and even though we were a little last minute he fit us in with his friends and their plans. We talked a fair amount in the evening and he cheerfully corrected our Spanish. After the club we slept on his futon, then took the bus into downtown in the morning.

The rest of the day Nadav and I kind of wandered around San Jose and went to the Museo Nacional, which had a lot of Pre-Colombian artifacts. It was also in an old fortress, which was pretty cool. It was pretty chill, just eating when we wanted to eat and stopping where we wanted to stop. Even though we didn't have specific plans it was nice to get out of the center for a while and see the rest of Costa Rica. I think we're going to try to do something like that most weekends, the only problem is limited time. We have to work Saturdays for at least part of the day, and then occasionally we have to be on call for Sundays. But between all three interns and the SAM, I think at least some of us should be able to travel around most weekends. It got really boring hanging around Atenas every weekend during the summer session.

Tomorrow's a pretty big day for the center. Rainforest Alliance comes in the morning to assess the campus for certification. If we get the certification, I think we'll be the only Rainforest Alliance certified study abroad center, and we'll be living up to our "Center for Sustainable Development Studies" name. Later in the day, the students get here! I'm sure we'll be running around all day trying to accommodate everyone.

I'm curious what the semester students will be like. We got a little bit of a profile on them from their applications, so I know there's a lot of really active people in the group. It'll be nice to have them for a longer period of time, I feel like with the summer session I didn't get to know a lot of the students that well, especially if they weren't in Carlos's DR group.

I also realized today that I thought my ~3 months in Mexico lasted forever, but I've already been in Costa Rica 2 months and sometimes I feel like I just got here! Other times it feels like home, particularly when I'm coming back from a trip.