I Hope You Appreciate Because It Takes A Lot Of Effort To Transcribe This Bullshit

4/4/09 Sat
Today! I woke up cos I had to pee and I heard the weirdest sounds@ Chewbacca and an unidentified alien were doing their best to prevent me from leaving the tent. The role of Chewy was played by howler monkeys (!) and the alien turned out to be cicadas. Or katydids. I did eventually make it out of the tent to pee in the forest.
After showering in the flooded bathrooms (btw, double ply tp is sooo clutch). Chris taught me some knots while we set up a tarp.
Then we went on a bug walk with Pati. It was really fun. We caught bees and wasps and dragonflies. No tapirs though.
Lunch and soccer! Soccer was fun. During lunch, about 150 tiquitos moved into the camp next to us. So much for my shitting privacy. Tomorrow I have to wake up early to shit before they do, among other things.
On Frank’s walk we saw some antplants. Neato. He said tomorrow we could use our free time to wait at a waterhole to try and see tapirs! Sweet. I hope we are lucky enough to see them. Frank usually gives a heavy talk. Sometimes they make me sad. They make me feel uncomfortable about the state of the environment. But usually instills a little hope in me by the end. We can’t keep fucking up the environment and not notice what’s going on. Change has got to happen. It is happening. Will I heed the call? I’m such a dweeb.. Tomorrow = shit, howlers, tapirs!

4/5/09 Palm Sunday
Right now I’m sitting at a water hole with Ryan and Francis, Frank’s son. We’re waiting for tapirs. Que emocionado! Just now a troop of carablancas came by and an inquisitive young’un just gave us a look over. He couldn’t have been more than 4m away. This place is freakin sweet.
Today was incredibly eventful. Woke up. BAM two deer cross our (Randall and my) path. We were headed for the Chewbacca noises. BAM Howler monkeys. They were traveling together. A male with big white cherry calls, several females with infants, and a couple juvenile males. They have a way of pulling the branches of the next tree close to them in order to make progress in the canopy. Once in a while, an infant would try to climb on his own, but when he was tired or stuck, mommy would come and he’d hop right back on. On the walk back BAM, two agoutis.
Went on a walk with Fede to the Camosa. I guess this park used to be Hacienda Santa Rosa and a battle was fought here (for 15 mins) with Willaim Walker’s army. We went to a cool lookout point BAM volcanoes. Come back down the hill BAM carablancas. YES! I did it! I found them! They were just how I hoped they would be. They were eating figs and hopping around the Fabaceae (booyah) tree. They were very close to the ground and were playing and running and jumping and string and making faces and pooping (fig seeds!).
We got back and fucked around a bit. Climbed a big tree, played soccer, played goaltimate and the corral where the goal was in the middle of the corral instead of at one end. I had to play in my boots, so my feet are killing me.
On the way to the waterhole BAM spider monkey BAM agouti BAM carablancas. One more BAM to go. Gotta check that tapir!
Did I mention that about 150 Costa Rican highschoolers camped next to us last night. They were the reason I got up early to shit. But they stayed up all night because they were jacked up on energy drinks. They were apparently really loud, but I’m a heavy sleeper so I didn’t notice. They were so annoying, their teachers decided to cancel their field trip. Oh well. More shits for me.
This just in. No tapirs. Oh well. We got back and played a fun question game where I learned that some people pull down their underwear to piss. I find that weird because there’s a fly on every pair of boxers in the world. I thought using it would be natural. I guess not.
Tomorrow I’m in a group studying seed predation on Fabaceae. Yay? The other group is researching howlers… FUCK!
FEET HURT. TIRED. SLEEP.

4/7/09 Tues
Missed yesterday. Nothing much. Fabaceae suck and so do group projects. We had to collect lots of fruits and open them to count seed predation. Sometimes whole moths would be there in the seed. Dead.
Today was way better. We work up early and divided into groups. We made a 13 km hike to the ocean! Playa Naranjo. It was awesome! I talked to Jerry on the way there and that was really fun. It was really hot, but since the hike was douwnhill, we arrived at the beach in 2 hours flat. ZOMGZ! The beach was AMAZING.
First thing we did was jump in the ocean and body surf for two hours. The water was nice and the waves were PERFECT.
Lunch was fun, but weird toward the tend. Whatever. I didn’t’ want to get sunburned, so I opted to go for a walk down the beach with Roze instead of going for round 2 swimming immediately. I learn more about here every day. She’s a character. We looked at the surfers and Witch’s Rock, not too exciting. Then we just played around until sunset. Chris, Robert and I played birdman and that was fun. We also put Squid in a hole and made a sand squid around her. And there was a neat little driftwood fort which I almost fell asleep in.
We left after sunset. Where most people had already gone home or ridden back in the car, we had to walk 13km back in the dark. I got to talk with Fede, Dr. B, Kwai Nam, Roze, Kimmie, Chris, and Jerry. All interesting people.
It was a bitch getting home. Everything looks the same at night and we had to go uphill. Fuck. Too tired to write. Not too sunburned. Tomorrow is snorkeling..a;lksjda;sg

4/8/09 Weds
Bussed to Cuajiniquil today, the legendary fishing village. Got hella wet on a boat cos it was really windy. Snorkeled a bit and ate lunch on a tropical island. More wetness and then a short walk and then Frank bought us some booze for Lorren’s bday! Sweet. I got a little tipsy swoopin up the drinks that the lightweights left behind. Tomorrow is Monteverde! Yea! PS. More birdman and tipsy singing on the bus.

4/10/09 Fri
It’s cold out. So I’ll make tis quick. After leaving SR, we stopped by Las Pumas, an animal reserve for abused, hurt, or confiscated (endangered) animals. Lots of jaguars and ocelots and even two capuchins. Frank said he could get us an internship there. SWEET. I won’t be around for too long after the program, so it wouldn’t really be a great idea right now. Maybe next year when I have time I’ll work there for an extended period of time.
Then it was a winding dirt road to MV. Cool though. We arrived and threw our shit out of the bus so we could throw it in a small truck and then we got to ride the back of the truck the 2km up to the EBM - Estación Biológica de Monteverde.
It’s really cool. It’s a dorm-like setup with kitchen staff much like on the field trip. And they do our laundry. Cool. My room is right next to the kitchen. Cool. I’m rooming with Miles, Gerry, and Calvin. Gerry and Calvin are really interesting and intelligent people.
There’s also a small library and a computer room/classroom. We have to share some stuff with CIEE kids, so we’ll see how that works out. I’ve been looking at previous independent research projects and they all seem really cool. I hope mine will be as cool.
Today we woke up, ate, and split up into groups. I went with Pati (& Miles…). We hiked up to the continental divide and to the local TV towers where the caretaker also makes and sells his own jewelry. More walking, failed trespassing, river crevasse shimmying, and several kilometers laterally and vertically, we stopped at the Instituto Monteverde. Looks awesome! Cabbed home.
Rock concert tomorrow!

4/12/09 Sun
It’s getting harder to write in this everyday. There’s just so much writing to be done. Journal, transcribing journal, postcards, hw. To be honest, I haven’t started the hw. Too tired!
Yesterday was eventful. Went to an organic coffee farm. I was blown away! It was a large plot of land, divided up into several smaller plots owned and lived on by a family. The interesting part of this style of farm management is that they let the coffee grow naturally, in the purest sense of the word, instead of growing it in super neat rows in the sun (not natural coffee habitat). There’s kind of a loose organization. There is still a semi-regular spacing btwn plants, but there are other things interspersed there. Even though it’s a coffee plantation, it’s not a monoculture.
There are no harmful chemicals used in the production of it. Additionally, the plantation acts as an extension of the forest in the sense that lots of forest trees and weeds grow there, lots of animal life too. Deer can be a problem. And thieving monkeys!
The farmer, Hilbert, who showed us around his farm made sugarcane juice for us! We even helped a bit. We put the sugarcane through a machine once to break the cane and a second time with a narrower gap to actually squeeze out the juice. Además, cortó caño azucar para nosotros a comer. O probar.
En nla noche, la ada de cerveza nos trajo equipo. Jugamos Acey Duecey and Drunk Driver antes de caminamos a la Bar Bromelia. It was a nice little bar with a ragtag band of old gringos and a young tico. They played lots of awesome cover songs from Muse, the Hives, etc. Erick bought some of us drinks and we bought our own (guaro y Imperial!). I birdmanned Robert from outside while he was on the dance floor. We met CIEE students there too. There was a guy called Taz who had a better beard than Chris, hehe. When we left, Squid gave me a hand walking up the longass hill. Blegh.
Today was EASTER. Woke up and went to Childrens Mass in town. It was quaint. The priest looked like a giant pigeon. There was tricking clapping. And a dog that wandered under all the pews. Did I mention it was a three walk to church. Oh yea. OG status.
Then we walked a long way to play soccer and Frisbee at the Quaker Friends School, or rather the Friends School, which happens to be run by Quakers. Yay.
Then Quaker cheese factory for a BATIDO DE GUANABANA! New fave fruit. Lots of writing and yea.

4/14/09 Tues
What a day. What two days. Um. Yesterday we went to Santa Elena to buy detergent and other things. I halfheartedly looked around to find the hardware store. I want a machete, but I wasn’t sure if yesterday was the best day to buy it. I’ll get one this weekend. Then I’m gonna hack some shit up.
It was also the first day of Spanish class at the Instituto. Tenemos que escuchar a una lectura sobre el Instituto y después hicimos un examen para dividirnos en grupos niveles para español. Que difícil! Entendí muchas de las conceptas del examen, pero sí hubieran hecho para una nota, yo había fracasado. Pues, se parecía que yo hice bien porque se me ponía en el nivel avanzado. Pura vida. Tuanis. Whatever!
Me encanta la clase de español! Hay sólo cinco otras personas más la maestra. Dura dos horas, pero es divertido. Es muy informal y es un gran oportunidad a practicar mi español con un hispanohablante enfrente de mis amigos, en vez de extraños. Creo que yo hablaba más en esas dos horas que yo he hablado en una trimestre en UCSB. Es completamente diferente.
Later on we had a lectura in the classroom at the Estación. It was given by the youngest looking doctoral candidate ever to grace the halls of Dartmouth University. She’s been doing research around the dammed areas of rivers in CR. She uses benthis macroinvertebrates as an indicator of environmental changes. Cool.
Today, I woke up and got right to work on our group project with Pati. It was kinda what I was working on with Mike Kuehn back at UCSB. We recorded birds (I got the bellbird! Rustyswing, BONK!) and analyzed their songs on a program called Raven that is essentially like the pro version of Syrinx (which happens to be the part of a bird that makes the vocalizations. Duh) It was a bitch getting close to where I thought a bellbird would be, but I got it done and it wqas a bitch again to analyze the data and make a powerpoint. But we (and Pati) came though and made a kickass presentation. Fuck yea.
Finished all the hw due for tomorrow. Just need to write a bunch of shit tomorrow night and get prepped for the weekend. OH! And pretty soon it will be bicycle day and then 4/20! Yea!