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Published: January 19th 2013
Mi gatita!
This is my kitten. Her name is Minerva, after Prof McGonagall from Harry Potter. Her character can turn into a cat. She's so cute!!!Hola everybody! Sorry it's been so long! I guess I'll start where I left off...
Christmas eve:
I celebrated Christmas Eve at Los Quetzales where I met an awesome couple named Emily and John (59 and 62 years old respectively) who bought my supper for me. While we were eating, we invited another guy over to our table who was a biology professor, and was going to be starting a tropical ecology class the next weekend (and also had a sweet British accent). We laughed and had a great time, and by the end of the night Emily and John had pretty much adopted me and insisted that I bring my family to meet them when they came to Cerro Punta.
Christmas Day-Jan 29th:
I was at the beach with my family!!! We traveled around some of Western Panama and we did in fact visit Emily and John. If you want to know more about my adventures with my family, you can ask them. My mom wrote a journal of the trip, and I don't feel like we need another one written here. I will mention that they brought me a copy of my published
Amigos nuevos
These are my new friends, freezing their butts off while I stood wearing a jacket on the dock. From left to right we have Andrés, Simon, Alfonso, and Alejandro. paper! I'm officially published! YAY!
Jan 30:
My family dropped me off in David, where, after buying three containers of Vanilla Almond Milk, I got on the bus to go back to Finca Dracula. When I got back, I found a tarantula in my shower, I took a four hour nap full of terrifying dreams, and then woke up to a very windy and rainy night. I was a little bit worried that a tree would fall on my house, but fortunately it didn't.
Jan 31:
My day itself wasn't particularly exciting, but that night I went to Los Quetzales again for New Year's Eve. I met up with Carlos and went with him and his daughter (who speaks absolutely perfect English! I was so impressed!) to meed a family who lived across the street. I had a conversation in Spanish with the dad in that family about my research. Woo hoo for more Spanish Practice! After spending an hour with them and being fed tamales, we went back over to Los Quetzales where I drank some champagne with Carlos and then played ping-pong with his daughter. Eventually, we decided it was
Hot Springs
Testing out the incredibly buggy hot springs. It was the temperature of hot bath. time to eat and I sat with Carlos and three of his friends, who only spoke Spanish. One of them did speak a little bit of English, though. He looked at me and said "You are a very beautiful woman. Congratulations!" It took everything in me to politely say "gracias" and not just crack up laughing at the "congratulations" at the end. I stayed at Los Quetzales until midnight and then walked home by myself in the dark. As I passed the house of a family that I usually say hello to as I pass by, the man asked me if I wasn't scared to walk home in the dark. I said no, I had a flashlight, but the most exciting part of him asking that was that I understood the sentence really easily. I'll learn Spanish yet, you just watch... err, listen.
Jan 1st:
I went to Emily and John's house for New Year's Dinner. Cabbage, brisket, black-eye peas, and cornbread. Apparently, according to Louisiana tradition, cabbage = wealth, meat = luck, and beans = health. They had another couple over as well and I hung out there until after dark. Both couples are just
Al y Al
Alfonso and Alejandro with their plant haul from the first hike. fantastic, and I love meeting new people!
Jan 2nd:
Nothing particularly exciting happened this day. I Skyped my friend Kristen that night because she was home from New Zealand and actually had reliable internet. While I was Skyping her, Alfonso got to Finca Dracula. He's friends with Andrés, the owner of Finca Dracula and he is a 23-year-old PhD student at the University of Wisconsin. He's studying Dracula orchids, so he came to Panama to check out which ones were blooming and collect scent samples from them.
Jan 3-?:
Basically, I hung out with Alfonso for the next couple of days, and then Andrés and his mother got to Finca Dracula. Also, Liriola found another kitten, so I have adopted it and officially have a pet! Alfonso showed me how to take pictures and dissect the orchids and I started going through the collection and taking pictures of orchids. Then, one of these January days, Alejandro, a Columbian who is studying at U of Wisconsin and is a friend of Alfonso's showed up to study Monstera's. I find it amusing that between the two of them, they study Monsters and Vampires (draculas).
Culebra
The Fer-de-lance that I almost stepped on. YIKES! It's been nice having Andrés and his mom here, because María (the woman whose house I do my laundry at) cooks for them and I'm invited to every meal. I'm saving a lot of money on food right now! For the first couple of nights having my cat, she would keep me up all night trying to crawl on my face. She likes to sleep in the bed with me, but any time I move, she wakes up and it takes a half hour to get her to fall back asleep. After three days of being a zombie, I started shutting her in the downstairs bathroom at night. I feel kind of bad, but I need sleep!
Jan ?+1:
One of these days we took an 8 hour hike into the mountains behind Finca Dracula. I found a frog and managed to not die on the hike. We went up a mountain, then down it, then up it again and down the other side to get home. It was miserable going back up it. My legs were sore for four days afterwards.
Jan ?+2:
The day after the hike, a 19-year-old German kid, Simon, showed up at Finca Dracula. Alfonso had met him on the bus on his way from David to Cerro Punta and now he might end up working at Finca Dracula. We took another hike with him, albeit much shorter, and then went to a bar that night. The five of us, Simon, Andrés, Alfonso, Alejandro, and me were the only ones at the bar, so we didn't stay for very long.
Jan?+3:
Simon wanted to check out the hot springs near Volcan, so we took a trip to the hot springs and soaked for a while. We also got covered in bug bites. When we got back, we met the new intern at Finca Dracula. I don't know how to spell his name, but it's pronouced like Jee-ray, so I'm going to go with Giré. He speaks a decent amount of English, so I might try to use him as a resource to learn more Spanish!
Jan 15:
Alfonso, Alejandro, and I set off for Santa Fe, which is just north of Santiago. We traveled for 8 hours or something ridiculous like that until we finally got there and wandered around the little town for a while.
Jan 16:
We went out for our first hike. I had bought a new pair of rubber boots for the trip but ended up needing to turn around an hour into the hike because they were way too big for me and I couldn't walk right in them. Our guid, Ezekiel, called someone who I think was his son to walk up to meet me, and we started back down. On the way down, he was shooting at parrots with a slingshot and little balls of mud to catch them and cultivate them as pets. He's a really good shot! We stopped at a tree which he climbed up and got three smaller birds out of a trap. He dropped me off at Ezekiels house where I hung out with his 13-year-old daughter. It was a good way to practice my spanish. I had a pack of cards with me, so I taught her how to play some games and she taught me how to play a game. I also showed her how to shuffle the cards and make it look cool while you're doing it. I ended up leaving my cards with her because she didn't own any and wanted to practice the method of shuffling. When the guys got back we went back, I found out that they had found a new species of Monstera and Pleurothallis orchid. They had a good day! Then we went back to our hotel for supper and Alejandro and I walked up to the local Chino (corner store) and got another pair of boots for me to try again the next day.
Jan 17:
We set out for another hike in the Santa Fe National Park. There were some permit issues, so while we left at 7am, we didn't end up in the park until 10am. We all made it through the hike alive, but not without quite a few dangerous situations. My boots were still a little bit too big, so, maybe an hour and a half into the hike, Alfonso and Ezekiel set out ahead and Alejandro and I walked slower so that my ankles didn't fall apart. The two of us saw a Toucan and stopped a few times to take pictures or collect a plant. We weren't following a real trail, but simply looking for the marks that Ezekiel made with his machete. Eventually, we caught back up to them because we were making our own trail through deep jungle, which takes significantly longer than just walking a trail.
Unfortunately, when cutting your own trail, you end up with sharp sticks all over the place because of the cuts. At one point, I took a step and broke through some organic material and straight into a hole. My eye came down right on one of those sharp sticks sticking up out of the ground. In all honesty, I have no idea how I still have my eye right now. I closed my eye in time and the stick kind of went up in between my eyeball and my eye socket. I almost started crying just because it freaked me out so much that I almost lost an eye.
Not 50 meters after that and I was following closely behind Alfonso when he shouted "Culebra!" I looked down, and there, right where I was about to place my foot, was a snake. I ran like a little girl and almost knocked Alejandro down trying to get away from the snake, just in case it was following me. It wasn't. Again, I'm not sure how nobody got bitten. Alfons stepped ON THE SNAKE. He said he felt like he had stepped on someone's leg, looked down, and for some reason yelled "Culebra" instead of snake. He's from the US. English is his first langauge, but for some reason he yelled it in Spanish. I'm just glad it's one of the words I knew in Spanish and knew to look down before I put my foot down on it. After we calmed down, we took pictures of it while Ezekiel cut down a skinny tree and used it to smack the poor thing to death. Then he chopped its neck with his machete and we proceeded to eat lunch in that very spot with the dead snake. I should note that this particular snake was a Fer-de-lance, which is one of the two worst snakes you could possibly run into in Panama. It caused necrosis of the skin, as well as a host of other ailments. It would have required us basically running down the mountain and then to an area with phone service and then driving to a hospital an hour away. I'm glad no one got bitten.
Fortunately, the rest of the trip was without major dangerous events. Eventually, we turned around, collected all of the awesome plants that we had left along the way, and made it down to the stream where we looked for frogs. Alejandro spotted one little green frog which I grabbed.
When we got back to the hotel, we ate supper and then I tried to ID the frog. I called Erik Lindquist for the frog ID, and he gave me a name but then said that he thought it had been changed, so the ID is still up in the air. I also sent him the picture of the snake, and he confirmed for us that it was, indeed, a fer-de-lance.
Then we went to bed because we were all really really tired and had to get up early the next day to go home.
Sorry if these aren't as detailed as some blogs in the past, but it was a lot to squeeze into one blog!
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Grandma Linn
non-member comment
Interesting
I read your blog 3 times. It is very interesting. And--your eye and the snake are, well--I don't know what to say. I'm happy to hear it after the fact and that all of you are well! Minerva is adorable. She should be a help with the other critters at your house. "shiver shiver" As far as having friends and being with people, that has really changed, hasn't it? I am no longer concerned that you are sitting alone in your house all weekend. It is to get really cold here this week. We'll have to look at our pictures of Panama and put our minds there to get warm. We still talk about things from that trip. It was so wonderful. I printed 7 selected pictures and carry them with me. I've shown them often. Take care of yourself. Stay healthy and whole. I didn't like to think of you walking home late New Year's eve. I am so thankful that we could spend some time with you. We love you and are so proud of you. Grandma XXXOOO