Entry!

There’s been a whole bunch of not writing in this blog, for which I apologize. Ironically, about two weeks ago I wrote a huge, ranty post about some things here I wasn’t happy about. The internet was acting up so blogger wasn’t saving any drafts and when I submitted it, the connection timed out and I had absolutely nothing to show for my 45 minutes of blowing off steam. But maybe that’s a good thing, it was pretty pathetic.

Any ways, I thought to re-activate my blog, I’d write this gigantic epic post of grandeur, but I don’t really have that in me right now. I’ll make an effort to update little bits and pieces along the way. I basically sit down to write this thing (in theory) during the spare moments of freedom before going to sleep. But lately, I’ve been occupying those spare moments with other pursuits. These “other pursuits” really belong to the category “Shit I do when not working/stressing/planning/freaking out on my project”. The night-time activities include these:

1) Reading from the decently sized dorm library. Most of these books are trashy romance novels and equally trashy (and pulpy) science fiction. I’ve found a few gems amongst them, but mostly it’s been a practice of picking up something and reading just a few chapters. Everything gets a little repetitive after the fifth rendition of downtrodden youth/rebellious girl/mid-life crisis man has to solve a mystery/master glorious magic/save a planet while gaining his/her childhood love/outgrowing it.

2) Playing my ukulele. I’m slowly starting to get better at it. Or at least, I’m starting to develop some modest level of muscle memory in my fingers. As most of you know, I have lessons every Monday with the guy who actually made the instruments. My poor, poor violin. I’ve barely touched it since my laptop broke. Oh well. If I’m getting better at one instrument, at least the sense of muscle memory and ear training will help with the other(s). It’s just a matter of an inconvenient amount of luggage. Luckily my uke fits in my backpack (and is built like a rock), the violin as my carry on, and the useless hunk of plastic that used to be my laptop can be chucked into checked luggage.

3) Recently, drawing tattoo designs for people on Something Awful. This is fun because it is a relatively small time commitment and it keeps my drawing skills challenged by asking me to draw things I would have never thought of, like a lobster in a box. I’m going to try to set up a paypal account for money, which admittedly I’ve never done before.

Those are the night time activities that I do in my spare time. I tend to putz around at night doing these, unless I have some sort of written assignment due or there’s a movie to watch or stargazing (on the dock!). I do most of my work during the early morning and afternoon, but even then I have daytime distractions. Oddly, these distractions sometimes give this place the air of a summer camp. What probably helps this notion is that there truly is not much to do here but physical or artistic activities. This isn’t really like an EAP program in any sense- I’m not stationed in Paris or Berlin with everything that a city could offer me. Or even in a small rural town. I’m on a station that’s on the water with the nearest commercial businesses a twenty minute walk away (not counting the juice factory five minutes away where one can sample rum). Any souvenir stores, other touristy stuff, is even farther away. These times are all estimates for walking, in which case you have to have a buddy. There are cars that you have to be 23 AND know how to drive manual to have access to. Two people out of 22 have this ability. That’s exactly the reason why there hasn’t been many “going out on the town” entries in this blog. There really aren’t any such events, unless the GSI’s and professors help out and plan it.

By no means am I bored. Like I said, this place is like summer camp not just in the sense of its remoteness but in how fun the shit we have to do can be. Like

1) Jumping off the dock! This has turned into a daily thing, rain or shine. We’ve started doing some crazy maneuvers (high fiving off, leap frogging, back flips, dives, etc). I was worried at first, the water is a little shallow and coral cuts and stings pretty nastily. Got over it after the first few jumps, really like it now. Today I overextended my foot and a little scraped on some coral. Now that I’ve actually (slightly) injured myself, I’m even less anxious about it.

2) Rowing lessons! In outrigger canoes, with the team that organizes through the Atiti’a center (the cultural community center that was built by the Gump station in coordination with the island). This is pretty recent, but awesome as all hell. (Pic). That’s an outrigger canoe, with me in the middle. We’re going to start doing this four days a week, training with the coach.

3) Dancing lessons. Tried this for two lessons and then quit. I thought it would be a nice alternative to other forms of exercise, but I’m just no good at it. Like literally, I can’t control my hips. Every one else seems to understand the movement of it but me and the teacher tried to explain it to me twice! I think my body is dyslexic. The other girls like it, a lot. But honestly, I find the separation of the sexes and the sort of submissive female stuff kind of nauseating/ridiculous. Sexy dancing is cool, especially ones with overtones of conflict (tango!) but I kind of can’t stop laughing when I see the male sex dance. It’s pretty epic and in a not-entirely-good way.

4) Ukulele lessons. Two hours for a group, one hour if it’s just me. We pay for these, but it comes out to something ridiculous- like 8 dollars a lesson. Really helps to sort of find a space where I force myself to practice. The teacher is generally good too, though the language barrier kind of blows sometimes. I’m learning to listen to notes though, which is something. And he’s showing me how to make Ukuleles (I’m going to his shop tomorrow to see how he puts the fret wire and tuners in), which is good considering I want to make one when I get back.

5) Tapa making. Talked about this before. It’s basically the art of harvesting and beating the inner bark of the breadfruit tree until it resembles something like cloth. Then you glue it together and dye/bleach it. Then you make art on it! This is all still in process, but hopefully a few of you will be receiving some Tapa art.

6) Wood carving. Picked up a hunk of junk wood and a set of carving chisels from the hardware store. Pretty self explanatory, that.

7) Snorkeling. Yeah. I live twenty feet from the water. I’ve seen all sorts of fish and invertebrates (sea cucumbers as big as my arm!), sting rays, sharks, and dolphins.

This list will grow, I’m sure. I’ve got three more weeks here and I intend to get my share of fun activities. Things I can’t do any where else. I can’t believe how fast time flies here.

Thoughts on this design. It was made for me after I showed the artist some pictures of scarab beetles. It's halfway still a sketch, so I think issues like symmetry will be handled. Just black ink. About four inches by four inches. In put appreciated.


OH and it's just a sketch. That's why most of it is gray. I'm going to guess he started going over with black ink in some of the spots. I've already talked to him about watching near perfect symmetry.

hey a new post

Wow. So it’s been a while since my last upload and I do, indeed, have an explanation for that.
See, my laptop exploded.
Alright, not that dramatically. Remember that last post, the one where I was being all neurotic and emotional about what my project was going to be on? I had just written that post and then decided to go to the fancy lab here to see if they had any more Malaise traps. They did, and five minutes later, I returned to continue working on my project proposal. Except that my computer was grey screened. And stayed that way. And upon restart, I could hear the hard drive clicking and that ever-so-deadly flashing folder was up.
My hard drive had crashed.
Now, if this had happened in the states, I’d stomp off to the Fix-that-Mac store on center street and have them fix it fairly easily and cheaply. Yeah, I would have lost any data I didn’t have backed up, but there wasn’t much of that to begin with besides music and some recent photos.
But here that isn’t an option. There are no computer stores on Moorea and I couldn’t fix have anything delivered to me because of slow shipping times and ridiculous import fees. So I was without a laptop, and in a setting where you’re doing literature reviews almost constantly and it’s your only method of communication with the outside world, that is not a good thing. Actually, it was kind of devastating. Combined with the stress about my project, my building anxiety and homesickness, it was the proverbial last straw. I went into the bathroom and bawled for a good five minutes and then had to toughen up and cook dinner for twenty-two other people. After that, a ball of pent up frustration and freaking-out-ness, I attempted to call a good friend, just to have someone to rant at, but even the internet was awful on everyone else’s laptop. It was a shitty night.
The next day, we set up the P.C. in the library. I now have something to work on, but skyping is basically out of the question unless I can find a USB microphone at the closest crappy electronics store. It’s okay using the PC. It’s been pretty public in the library since this week has all of us working on our proposals, but it’ll calm down. I can’t carry the PC around with me and it can get a little isolated in here (almost conflicting with my desire for privacy, I know). Strangely enough, there’s a spare macbook here meant for use during the elementary school outreach program (which isn’t going on right now), but no one knows the administrator password. The GSI’s have sent messages out to the suspected people back in Berkeley, but the one most likely candidate hasn’t replied yet.
So a shitty couple of days. But then I got my project proposal together, something that the professor’s actually approved of. For you science nerds out there, I’ll be looking at how high vs. low elevation affects insect population structure (what are the predators/pollinators/parasitoids/herbivores in each site? Are they different? How?). My sites will be paired mostly native/mostly non-native places, so hopefully I’ll get some interesting results on that part too. Most students here don’t aim to publish in a real journal, but at this point, I feel I should. This blog will feature results as time progresses.

Alright, this entry is pretty long as is but I did tons of stuff after my computer exploded, so it’s photo essay time!

One crossing of the stream that runs through the Three Coconuts hiking pass. There's a really awesome set of pools and a tiny waterfall at the head of it. I spent a half hour or so just chilling my feet in it.

Completely random bamboo forest that grows in the middle of the Three Coconuts pass. It's kind of eerie hearing the noises that the trees make as the wind blows and they knock against each other.
View from the look-out near one of my field sites. Occasionally you find French tourist families eating lunch up here.

A malaise trap!

View from the Agriculture School, I think.

Mural at MariMari Kellum's place, in her awesome open-air under house living room/patio thing. MariMari's family has been in since the 1950's, when her grand-parents bought a huge chunk of land (both seaside and valley) as a wedding gift to her parents. What I saw of the house was absolutely fantastic, and hopefully I'll see more of it while I do work there.

More of her place, there's a friggin' built in koi pond.

She's also a retired archaeologist. Probably still an active consultant on local stuff, here's some of her collection.

And this, dear readers, is the Club Bali Hai. Or part of it. The Club was started as one of the ventures by the Bali Hai Boys. One of them, Muk, still comes out to happy hour every night at 5 (excepting the nights where they do Polynesian dances, which was why we were there).

More awesomeness of the Club Bali High


The actual bar portion, which was immensely disappointing. You could either get a Hinano beer or a "Mai Tai" which was really just crappy juice/rum drink from this carton called "Tahiti Drink" that you can get from the grocery store. However, the food was quite good. Guess it's more of a grill. Awesome sunk in bar though.
The view from our table.

Dance times! They dragged us all up and made us dance with them. There are embarrassing pictures of this somewhere, I'm sure.

So every year, they throw a Polynesian feast for us. A station staff member organizes her entire family into making this thing for us, and we help with some of the minor prep once the food comes to our house. That's a good portion of the starchy stuff there- steamed orange bananas, purple sweet potato, this awesome dense banana/coconut bread, several types of tapioca/fruit pudding. It was EPIC.


All the food! There were several different types of BBQ pork and chicken. That's a big bowl of breadfruit in the front. Station members brought their families, and it was a pretty great party.

Alright folks, there you go, pictures.