So far, no snakes...

Hola amigos! Hope all is well with everyone--I can´t write much because I´m ducking out of lunch really quick...but I thought I would say hello and assure you that I have not yet been bitten by a snake. In fact, the only snake that any of the 31 of us has seen was about 12 cm by 1cm and flattened on the streeet. WTF! I wanted to at least have a distant encounter with one. But other than that, Costa Rican wildlife is as good as everyone says it is... Once we got to Corcovado National Park, my first "homework assignment" was to spend a day catching Norops spp. lizards (my group caught 48) and then present our results about what proportion of males/females/juveniles had had to replace their tails. So yeah, tromping around the dense rainforest and camping on a Pacific black-sand beach was a pretty good first week of "classes." I´ll write a bunch more about everything we´ve done when we get to Monteverde in a few days. The most recent wildlife encounter: got attacked by spider monkeys hurling big hard fruits from the canopy 40m up. They litereally drove me out of the jungle...gaaah!
Hasta luego!

Acabamos de llegar...

¡Hola amigos! So here I am making a blog post...cool. Been here 2 days but it seems like a couple weeks. we all flew in on Sunday, got picked up at the San José airport by Kathy (a Costa Rican born Quaker from Monteverde) and Moncho (tall, long/dark-haired tico) and went to Hotel Balmoral in the center of San José. Tico drivers are insane--today there was an old woman in front of me crossing the street and she almost got owned--she had to kind of hop/jump to avoid the fender of a typical tico driver. So that's been fun so far--we've been doing a good deal of human frogger. Anyway--so we all got here and went out to dinner and began what has so far been a pretty ridiculous frenzy of meeting people (30 students from all over the place--mostly public universities). The director (Alan) is a middle-aged American with a longish ponytail who is very relaxed and down to earth and a pretty hardcore biologist/ecologist (as are all the program people)--he seems to have a pretty solid lifestyle--living in the cloud forest teaching people like me about the badass-ness of tropical nature. Alan then introduced his wife, Karen, the tropical diversity professor, who said while laughing, "I usually don't drink before meeting my students." Good show. Turns out she's really funny and wicked smart--told us a whole bunch of schtuff about the evolution of butterfly toxicity and coloration whil we were in a butterfly garden today. Then there's Pablo, bilingual Costa Rican who's real fun (soccer player and former b-pong champion) and Tegan, a Bates graduate who's been on the program before. They're the resident assistant type people who also help teach. Anyway--I kind of have to hurry but I'll try to tell you a little more. Today, we had our first "humans in the tropics" lecture which was pretty long--about urbanization and the green revolution and population growth and such. Then an urban planner came and talked about how there's a whole bunch of urban development plans but none have ever been implemented...so the Central Valley is hellah sprawled and the government is kind of inept at that. After lunch, we went out into the city to survey 3 ticos to find out their ecological footprints, which were all way better than any of ours. It was fun talking to them a little bit and using spanish and all that jazz. Um...so yeah--we've been exploring the city a little bit in pretty comfortable 75ish partly cloudy w/ a breeze weather. tough life. Observation: costa rican females (ticas) anywhere near our age tend to be attractive. ... Anyway--by tonight, many of us are itching (not yet literally) to actually get to the rainforest, having come for that rather than the urbanness. Tomorrow we head out on a 2+ week camping trip along the west coast of the country. Tomorrow night, we will spend the first of a few nights camping on the beach on the southern Osa peninsula and touring mangrove swamps and lowland wet rainforests. Word. Probably won't be able to post again until the end of february...just so ya know. By then, I will have seen too much to write about...but I'll do my best...keeping my fingers crossed for the elusive jaguar. Ciao.