La mudanza y la segunda gira

The week after that had a theme: moving. I had e-mailed a place on craigslist about their living situation the Friday before the gira, and I had a promising e-mail waiting for me when I got home from the trip. I still wasn’t sure how I felt about it, but then I went to yoga. I’m telling you, the Mayan calendar was really speaking to me those first three weeks, as the session’s theme was listening to your inner voice and following your own path. It hasn’t been 100% finding-my-innermost-struggle-for-the-week accurate since, but still, wow.


The rest of the week was visiting the house to check it out (the woman and her husband who own the house used to be vegans, and I took that as a sign I would be with good people), figuring out how to tell my tica mom (if were as though she already knew! She didn’t skip a beat in telling me that everyone must make their own decisions and completely accepting it), worrying about my upcoming test and finally getting in touch with the person in charge of the environmental education project. Oh right, and packing.

My tica mom started to ask questions about the program, and the house, and tell me about how less and less students were coming to the other program for which she houses students…Just generally continuing her theme of being personal in an uncomfortable way. I was feeling super super guilty, but then on Friday the router for the Internet vanished (it was being ‘serviced’, though I don’t know why that couldn’t wait until I was gone…one theory is so that I didn’t take it with me). There was no warning, and I had to mention it for her to tell me. I mentioned it because I couldn’t get in touch with the people at my new house by phone and had no other method of communication. It turns out later that the woman wasn’t answering her phone because the number was a private number, and some guy with a private number has been bugging her…That was certainly a no-win extremely frustrating day. Especially because my tica mom was going out and wanted to help me leave (which I wanted, since I had all my bags), and there was nothing for me to do in the house without Internet, whereas I would have been studying for my upcoming test if I had had access.

Phew, confusing and stressful, glad that’s over.

I was really excited to meet with the director of the environmental program, but he keeps having scheduling things pop up, and we have still yet to have enough time to talk about how I would help. Maybe next week…

Part of why moving was so stressful was because I had a gira the day after I moved. I didn’t even buy food, just some yogurt and granola for dinner and breakfast, because there wasn’t space for me yet in the kitchen and I wouldn’t be home to eat the food…It was just bad timing overall, but yet good timing because it was when my contract ended with my tica mom and I was at my breaking point.

We went to Cerro de la Muerte, a place in Costa Rica that is at a high enough elevation to be COLD. I was completely and entirely unprepared throughout the whole trip, and came home slightly miserable and very frustrated. At the very least, I have some nice pictures, I spoke with most of the people in my class for the first time and I made a friend. I mean, I think I did, but it’s hard to tell with shy guys.

Our first stop was a park, and after asking twice I misunderstood that we would only be there for ten minutes. Apparently, it was ten minutes to GET where we would spend…was it two hours? I really don’t know, I was trying not to melt down. So, armed with only my hiking boots, my camera and my notebook, I wandered into a swap. Okay, so it was a paramo, but I still don’t know exactly what that means and it was flooded and swamp-like enough for the sad non-biologist part of me. Everyone else had rain boots, and at first it didn’t matter I only had hiking boots, but then we got lost, and then we had to wander through extremely flooded and muddy areas, and then it started to rain… I usually don’t care about getting wet and muddy, except that I hadn’t brought a lot of clothing as the professor told me not to. I specifically asked him in class for that very reason…*sigh*.

After that hike I was feeling extremely misled and scared about that night, when I knew I’d freeze to death in wet clothing either from not changing before the next activity or by changing and then only having wet sweatshirts. I didn’t really bring cold-weather clothing to Costa Rica (seriously, who’d have guessed?!) and it was lucky I decided to buy a fleece sweatshirt after visiting Karen’s (my tica friend’s) house in the mountains. Once we started the research, however, I got the chance to feel scared AND stupid, because everyone around me was able to memorize scientific names in an instant and jumped into the projects with absolute ease.

Me: What the heck’s a panterpe?

Them: It’s a scientific name for the most common hummingbird found here, it is characterized by the red patch on their throat. They are commonly called ‘fire-throated hummingbird’.

Me: You…Ohhh, you’ve taken previous classes on them, then.

Them: What on earth are you talking about, that’s what the professor just said.

So, yes, apparently EVERY person in my class is a genius at automatically absorbing all information given to them verbally and remembering every detail. I’m the dumb gringa who is getting her clothing dried for her during the project (my professor asked one of the people at the lodge/restaurant for that favor, thank goodness) and asking too many questions. I got ‘invited’ to set up the hummingbird nets with the professor, which meant I didn’t have to do any thinking for a while, and was rewarded at the end by getting to hold a hummingbird as a pollen sample was taken. They are quite adorable little critters.

The professor’s wife and kids were there as well, and the kids were so excited to help out with the birds. Them being more experienced than I was only added on to the failure I felt (they were both around 10 years old), but I took solace in them being cut, budding biologists. We worked with four species of hummingbirds, and had half the people collecting them from the nets and taking pollen samples and the other half counting how many times they fed at the numerous hummingbird feeders hanging outside the restaurant. It was really neat to watch, as the whole wall was windows where the feeders were hanging. I eventually went to do real research, and took turns counting hummingbirds (and therefore finally learned their names by having to dictate them over and over), and then we had dinner.

The girls with whom I was sitting just…sat there. And sat there. I couldn’t figure out why they weren’t getting dinner, but they were waiting for dinner time…because it’s not right to eat more than three meals a day apart from their customary times. Once it was exactly 6:30, they finally let themselves eat. No WONDER my tica mom was so freaked out by my fluctuating eating schedule...

That night we could have done whatever we wanted, but we (the girls) ended up all getting in our PJs and reading aloud the study guide for the test. It was cute, we all slept in a cabina together, and most people were in the same room, mattresses all over the floor. I think the boys went to bed early, too, but they were staying right on top of the restaurant while we had to walk a ways to get to our cabina, so they probably stayed a little longer. Despite dry PJs and two thick blankets, I was too frozen to sleep. I’m sure the cold would have been nothing normally, but with only Costa Rica clothing it was pretty bad. The next day we continued from where we left off, and then there was the second hike of doom.

This time it wasn’t wet and miserable physically, it was just agonizing mentally. We were supposed to be doing ‘organism collections’ throughout the gira, and I was taking pictures of all sorts of species to later identify. Problem was, people already knew a bunch of the species, and were claiming them throughout the day before. I was unaware of this, and to make matters worse, I got transferred into a group (after being told I was with people I already knew) of two boys who hadn’t been claiming things. And I was the only one with a camera. So we had no species, whereas most people were already done, and the course assistant was being kind of a jerk about that while continually ignoring my questions about how to get species or if pictures I had already taken could work (like a bird I knew no one else had, as my camera had to do some major zooming to just barely see it in the trees). Sheesh, I don’t understand course work or its process here at ALL. By the end the other course assistant was helping us out (he was the nice one, although he was so quiet I figured he was a student the whole first day) as was the professor, so things weren’t the impending doom I had originally felt. Grr, that was frustrating and completely out of my control by force, which seems to be the overall theme of the trip.

Thankfully, I made friends with one of the boys in the group, and we went this past week and worked really hard on getting information for our collection, and going through the pictures to get ENOUGH species to write about. I realized he was out of the loop of the class in a sense when I found out he didn’t have the class-collaborated study guide, so when it came time to write out reports in partners, I made sure to ask him. That also took off some of the stress, because it’s old hat to write scientific reports for them whereas I was completely thrown off balance reading the directions…maybe by the end of the class I’ll know enough to have been able to semi-competently have taken the class. Heh.

Then we got to go home!

Except…then the bus pulled over to the side of the road for a mini trip, oh joy! Someone in the class said ‘nos engañaron’, they tricked us, as we trudged out of the bus into the cold and hint of rain. Partway through the professor’s lecture, it began to pour, and he let us all rush back into the bus early and head home. For me, home wasn’t home yet, but it was SO nice to get a good night’s sleep.