I still find it weird to be back in the states, everytime i look at my pics i just want to go back! My week has been a blast, full of reunions and catching up with my friends from my Ceiba Program. Last weekend I drove up to Northern Illinios, just over the border with bretski and brenna, and met Joe and Cath, Molly and her sister, and some other ceiba kids from past semesters/summers, and we camped out, grilled out, made smores, and went on a hike the next morning/swam. Then mon and tues, moll was in town so bret [View Full Entry]

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So i am in the united states, writing this from the convenient and comfortable confines of my backyard, underneath my gazeebo to be exact. It has been four days since I've arrived in the states and the weirdness of being back is beginning to wear off. The final flight , per my typical nature , carried its own adventures, me , ab , and steve met two body guards from californina, who had justbeen on a detail in the GAlapagos protecting one of forbes 50 richest men in the world, and so we chatted, and they gave me their business card [View Full Entry]

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Its already May 10th. that seems so surreal. my final banquet was yesterday, and the whole time everything seemed to be moving so slowly. It wasnt teary or emotional like i thought it would be, a nice dinner at la choza, then we gave joe and catherine their thank you gift, a yearbook with group pics, and personal thank you letters and im pretty sure they really liked it. Then the suprise was a rooftop ride in this jeep truck thing all throughout the city of quito, and we got free canalazo(hot warm alcoholic beverage) it was freaking awesome! then after [View Full Entry]

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So guess who is scuba certified! the last wednesday we did our pool session, and then thursday and friday we did 2 open water dives. sooooo coool! i saw some green sea turtles , fish, coral, sea snake, eel and some other stuff. also the last night we went to monitor turtle nests, i woke up for my shift at like one, took my time cause i was like they're not gonna hatch, but to my suprise the first nest i looked at had a ton of tiny turtles pawing at the chicken wire fence!!!all i could do was like gasp [View Full Entry]

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So i am on my internship right now, almost two weeks in. it is far less than i expected and puerto lopez is far from being anything close to amazing. when i do work, we go out to monitor the beaches for turtle nests at night, and we go shark monitoring on weds and sats. we have started , very early stages of implementing environmental education into the schools, but besides that i have a TON of downtime, which means i sit in the hammock and read and listen to music. i have already read into the wild and freakonomics twice [View Full Entry]

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So saturday after we got back from the galap, went and visited the mexicali and we ended up getting free mexicali shirts so that was awesome. then sunday worked on our presentation all day, and kind of papers as well . again got dinner at molly´s and there was egg again , always with the eggs. monday our presentation was awesome, so much better than last time, and everyone did a really good job. then we tied up some odds and ends, got lunch, finished our papers, and were gonna meet up around 8 30 to eat at this place called [View Full Entry]

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Life in the galapagos island cannot be beat! I was there for 3 weeks and what a crazy three weeks they were! First of all, i was on an eight day boat cruise and we visited a ton of islands and i was on the boat without the professors, just our TA javier. hellooo party boat...no seriously, like all the noisy people who did and didnt party a lot were on our boat and most of the quieter kids who didnt really go out as much were on the other. interesting coincidence. especially when people who put down who they wanted [View Full Entry]

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So today was fun. first day back to class, had a lecture on marine biology,mostly overview of the ocean. found out i am on the "loud boat" which basicaly has the 8 people who are either really loud/opiniated or who party/go out a lot boat and the other boat has like all the quite people . its quite funny actually. anyways our boat is the Amigo, and joe and catherine are not on it, but javier our other ta is. should be a good time. the people on my boat are me, molly, josie, hannah, mj, ab. bret, meghan, and brenna. [View Full Entry]

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So i actually returned from my destinations to quito on friday but sat we went to otavalo and i've just been in quito ever since. So monday had class, gave my presentation then went and got shwarma and hookah, food and liquor items for the beach and then came home. then later josie and molly came over and we headed out to the mariscal. two mojitos later and after running into several people we knew, including two researchers from the tiputini, molly and i ended up back at the mexacali. we also made friends with a few people from the hostal [View Full Entry]

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So i made it safely back from the jungle where ive been for the past three weeks. because there is so much to include in this i may just resort to bullet points of things i saw and or did. but ill try to include the few journal entries i wrote down. to get there we had a long day of travel. first we caught a 40min plane flite from quito to coca, then a bus ride,then a two hour boat ride , then a 2 hour open air bus ride, then another boat ride to our final destination tiputini biodiversity [View Full Entry]

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