Once again, I’ve been pretty remiss in my blog updating. And I guess I really can’t say it’s because I’ve been too busy. We’d all know that was a lie. Although last week was about as hellish as a week down here could get, as far as classes are concerned. I had a 10 page paper due on Tuesday and I had to give a 20 minute power point presentation on said paper. My subject was sharks so it wasn’t too terribly difficult. Thursday, however, I had to give the same presentation in Spanish for my Conversation class. For some reason I found it a lot easier to do in English. I WONDER WHY. I’d have to say that both of them went pretty well though. Thursday night I had to go to the theatre for class. We looked in the paper and, knowing nothing about any of them, we picked a play that looked cute and funny. I’m sure it was. The cab driver took us to the wrong theater, however, so we ended up seeing “Casa Por Carcel en la High Class.” This play featured a skinny, short, 80 year old man and his hooker girlfriend. Costumes included a neon green speedo, a purple speedo, and a cornflakes box. EW. I didn’t understand a damn word either. Oh well, it was interesting. By interesting I mean disgusting. I’m getting nauseous thinking about it actually. Time to go scrub my brain.
This past weekend was pretty interesting. I can say that now because I didn’t get eaten by snakes. In fact, I didn’t even see one! Our ecology class went to the tropical wet forest to learn about, well, tropical wet forests. We stayed at this place that our teacher and his brother built in the middle of the jungle. They’re trying to turn it into a model for sustainable development or something. It was a pretty neat place (did I just use neat?). It’s totally solar powered. There are two cabins. Since I had to wait for the third car load to bring us up to the house (and because of this ended up unnecessarily walking about a mile straight uphill) I got stuck in the cabin out in the boonies, far away from everything. There were two bedrooms with 3 beds each in them. Yeah, didn’t get one of those. I got a mattress on the floor NEXT TO THE BUS DRIVER. That was nice. Anyway, pretty much all we did was tromp around in the jungle in our rubber boots bought specifically for that purpose. It was so muddy. And let me tell you what, the rain forest STINKS. The floor is covered with decomposing leaves and other materials. Pretty much nothing grows on the rain forest floor, interestingly enough. It makes it pretty easy to walk around. We walked for about 4 hours the first morning and swam in a waterfall. I do a lot of waterfall swimming down here. It was so necessary. The humidity was about 400%. I can honestly say that I have never, ever sweat that much in my life. There was nothing you could do to avoid it. It wasn’t that it was even that hot in the jungle, it was all shady and stuff. Sweat was literally dripping off of face. My shirt was absolutely soaked with it too. I didn’t feel bad about it because everyone else was experiencing the same thing.
Saturday afternoon we went out hiking again. Well, those of us that could hack it went out hiking again. It seems that there is a high population of city girls in my Ecology class, some of whom declared, and I quote “I hate nature” over and over again. Um……..What did they think an ecology class was all about, exactly? And how do you hate nature? Oh well, it gave us non-city girls something to make fun of. Anyway, Jorge (prof) told us that we were going to hike up to see where the water used at his plantation comes from. Cool. He also told it that it would be a nice, easy hike and as it was directly post lunch we were all pretty excited about that. LIAR. LIAR. LIAR. We hiked up and up and up and up through some killer mud to….drum roll please…a big cement box. It was over the spring that supplied the water for the Jorge’s plantation. That’s it. A 8’ X 4’ cement box. ARE YOU STROKIN’ ME? I called Jorge out on his “nice, easy hike”. He admitted he was lying. Sneaky devil.
The next morning we each got to name one of his gallenaste trees. Mine is Roovis Vetticus because I thought it needed a Greek conqueror type of name to survive in la selva. I took a picture of it but I didn’t have my digital camera so you guys will have to wait to oooh and aaaw over the little gaffer. He’s the cutest tree of the bunch, if I do say so myself. Jorge said that he’ll send us pictures if we email him and ask him too. They grow like 20 feet a year or something ridiculous like that. I’m glad I don’t grow 20 feet a year. We also got to hike to another waterfall and go swimming. Unfortunately then it was time to go back to the Hose. Ugh. This week shouldn’t be too bad though. I don’t have any crazy huge projects due, although I do have to write a paper. We get a week off for Semana Santa after that and then we come back for one more week. Then it’s good-bye undergraduate education! That’s so crazy. Damn, I need a job.
- posted by Jaime @ 8:57 AM