Good Food, bad air, some crack, and ridiculous manicans

San Jose View from Hotel

notice the burger in the ladies hand on the left. that's Steve on the right taking pictures.



Today was the first day of class!! WOO! I haven't been this excited for school since . . . well actually when I got into UCSB, so not that long ago. Started out with some continental breakfast consisting of papaya, pineapple, melon, fruit smoothie juice, eggs, beans and rice . . . a nice change from the US. Most of today was introductory, where we met our fearless leader Frank, who carries the usual mad biologist look complete with cargo shirt, wild beard and wily hair. Explored the market area today on our mission to discover more about the fruit we were assigned to research. Along the way we noticed how all the manicans had huuuuge boobs and butts. They really like curveyness here, which makes more sense than the american flat butt bod. Kind of got into a sketchier neighborhood on the way back, where we walked past/over a girl who was tokin on some crack. While it's nice to explore the city and see what it's like, it'll be a big relief when we get out of a place where you have to worry about being held up at gun point for looking wealthy.

Intro to blog

This blog will be dedicated to mostly biology and travel, which happen to go hand in hand for me for the next 4 months.

I just got done with finals and moved out of Isla Vista, and for he next two and half months I will be in Costa Rica, followed by another two months in Indonesia. The Costa Rica program is run through the UC and is counting for the last four credits I will need before graduation. During our stay we get to go on extensive field trips to the Osa peninsula and all over the West coast of CR. The base station is up in Monterverde, right next to a cloud forest national preserve.

The program ends in June, when I'll return to IV to graduate just before leaving for Indonesia on June 16 - ish. There I'll be spending 8 weeks researching the effects of poor water quality on coral, and hopefully producing a publishable thesis by the end. In contrast to the terrestrial focus in Costa Rica, most of my time in Indo will be spent in the water scuba diving :).

Anyways these next four months should be down right incredible and I can't wait to get started. So hopefully I'll be able to gain internet access from time to time and update this thingy with some pictures and adventure stories.

We'll see how this goes :)