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.

The first week of entire-class field trips done, I'm starting to feel very, very anxious. I get the sense that everyone here feels that way, but somehow for me it all seems much, much more daunting.
Here's the issue: At the end of our “work-week” (by Sunday, our day off) we have to hand in a project prospectus. This past week has been all about taking us to places where we can do our projects, essentially exposing us to different ideas/habitats/flora/fauna. Great, fantastic. I'm an entomologist, so I know my work will be terrestrial (about 60% of the people here, on the other hand, are focusing on marine projects). I know I'm interested in parasitic insects, beetles, and the Strepsiptera (a whole order of insects). But the timing restriction makes things difficult, in a way that may be specific to only the entomologists here: It takes more than a week to effectively collect. Most of the traps entomologists use are passive ones, like Malaise traps and pit fall traps. There are active traps like blacklighting and sweeping, but these are problematic. One, the Gump Station students aren't really allowed to go out and do night trips at this point. And two, when you're sweeping, you're limited to catching what you can see and what's close enough for you to catch. This leaves out a lot.
I set up a Malaise trap today- there's only one that I can use. I'll leave it up until Friday, a total of four days, which is relatively short for a Malaise trap (which is basically a big, open tent with a vertical wall that a bug flies into and instinctively crawls up, getting caught in an alcohol trap). So I'm expected to come up with a project by this Saturday even though I'll have done very limited collecting. Meaning I'll barely know what I'm studying about.
I don't like that I'm being forced to say something so soon. I need at least two weeks to visit places and set up traps. It would be the bulk of my work, in fact. I could easily spend six weeks collecting and then the last two weeks describing what I found and that would be my project. Most of the people here are answering specific questions or manipulating experiments. I'm interested in taxonomy, the description of new species and relations, this puts me at odds with most of the other students here.
Really, right now, I'm kind of guessworking and saying I'm doing a survey of the flying hymenoptera here, but I'm just as equally keeping my hopes of finding Strepsiptera. If I did, crapshoot chance that it is, I'd drop everything to describe them. But other than that, asking me for a prospectus right now is asking me to do a study on insects that may or may not even be available.
More fancy hike pictures continue tomorrow.

The next day, we rushed out of our dormitory to go on a four hour hike known as the Three Pines trail. A word on the dormitories- they don't feel institutionalized. Instead, they are an interesting combination of hostel and house. The building is in the polynesian style, although msuch larger than most of the familial houses on the island. It has two stories, with an additional “classroom”, which is more of a large, highly windowed room with tables and benches that we've been using as a dining room. The rooms have either two or three beds, each with a desk that is more like a table with a colorful floral print cloth on top. I'm on the first floor, my bed up against the windows. It's a great spot- the ground floor makes it cool, I'm just far away enough from the common areas to not hear talking at night, and (most importantly) I fall asleep to the water and the wind.

But any ways, the hike. The first part was mostly stop and go. We were officially looking at these archaeological sites called Marae, the remains of ceremonial alters and temples of the polynesians. Structurally, they are were more like raised courtyards bu

ilt of layers of coral (dragged up from the shore) or basalt rock. We would stop at a few of them, our arcaheology specialist would speak for a little, followed by our botanist expert on the importance of the plants around us. Mostly, I zoned out. I tried to pay attention, I really did, but I'm super inattentive when it comes to plants (bad for an entomologist, I know) or people. I had my new three foot long net with heavy duty sweep attachm

ent, and I just wanted to whack the hell out of everything around me. But that would have been loud. And dissruptive. So I only did it while we were walking and I could accidentally smack people off the path with it.

The second part of the hike was the actual uphill ascent. When we reached the top, the view was spectacular. Three Pine Point looks out onto both bays of Moorea. It's literally in the middle between the two, giving spectacular views of the surrounding valleys ahead of us and the mountainous ranges behind. We sat down there for a half hour or so, enjoying the view and eating our lunch. Huge dragonflies were darting around us, forming mating swarms on the top of the hill.

After the hike, we walked down the road to the Agriculture School of Moorea. School in French Polynesia is only mandatory through what we would consider 9^th grade. After that, a few academically minded students go on to high school, though for Mooreans this usually means taking the ferry to Tahiti or living with family elsewhere or (for a few, wealthy ones) going to boarding school in France. The only alternative to this usual path on Moorea is the Agriculture school. The school has several programs educating students of different levels from 15-22. We were escorted around the entire learning farm by the older students, who were practicing their English with us. This took the form of kind of awkward, but strangely informative, five minute presentations on various crops in English while their teacher corrected and graded them. I sympathized with the students- if I had to do what they did in French back home, I would have about laid down and died.

The talks were a little stilted, but dotted with samples of fresh fruit. A young man borrowed my sweep net (for insects), climbed on his friend's back, and knocked down a couple of ripe papayas. After the tour/lectures, both the agr. Students and us sat waiting for “le truck” (the rentable bus/actual bus system of Moorea) to pick us up. The truck was running late and we all sat around doing nothing until a couple of students broke out their musical isntruments. For 45 mintues, we sat playing music and singing, the instruments passed back and forth between each group. It was pretty amazing.

The next day we went on a hike that focused on looking at various locations along a single stream. The first stop was an estuary that drained into the ocean that had been recently cleared. It was hot, sticky, and looked somewhat carcinogenic with all the runoff that it contained. Farther up was a forested spot where I slipped on some rocks while trying to catch a bug in the middle of a GSI's lecture (hah). And then it ended at this spot:

That's a one hundred foot rock wall with a waterfall trickling down it, the head of the stream. We had lunch there, swam around the stream looking for snails and freshwater eels, and ended our hike there. Apparently there's a species of gobi that climbs that wall, with a special sucker thing on its belly.

So that's part two of the crazy week of doing things. This ends on Saturday with our final hike to the 3 Coconuts trail, which will take us into the higher elevations of the mountain. And that's where I'll find the cool bugs, I bet.

COCONUTS

I kid you not, I just cracked open a young coconut and drank its juice.

I sat on the waterfront outside the Gump station after wrangling a green coconut off its tree, trying to smack it open with a cleaver. At some point, I realized that the cleaver wasnt going to work. A conveinantly shaped rock was nearby and I started bashing that sucker like there was no tomorrow. It was a satisfying moment pouring the juice out, bringing it inside, and proving that I am, indeed, a badass.

I'm in Moorea.

The ride on the ferry was short and full of people from the class who crowded the upper decks. We probably were the only ones speaking English and jabbering along as we snapped hundreds of pictures of the same slightly-bigger-each-time island. The lab picked us up with their trucks, bringing us to the station. It's hard to explain the station- It's on a piece of land that would make many of the high-class resorts her jealous. The lab and dorms are on a clearing that goes into the ocean. It's surrounded by trees (a pomelo, many of the aforementioned coconuts, papaya, and hibiscus) and is literally on Cook's bay, with the other side rising ahead of us.

Various views from around the station.

After the necessary unpacking (throwing clothes into cabinents, dumping other supplies on my desk), I did the obvious thing and jumped into the water. I'm not the greatest snorkler, but the water was calm and I got to see some pretty awesome things. Like iridescant blue fish and a tiny white, pebble-textured eel. Good times. After an hour of that, I left the water, took a shower, patched together my net, and went bug hunting. Pickings were pretty slim, but this was only looking at the things close to the station where the natural vegetation has been pretty devestated by invasive plants and grasses. I did find a rather rambunctious cricket, a slender little mantis, and your standard click beetle. But mostly it felt good to just be swinging my oversized net and tromping around in the tropics.

Later in the evening we had a welcome orientation where the professors brought us beer (Hinano, the local brand, and the drinking age is 18 here) and we watched a presentation about station technicalities. We returned to the station for a meal that consisted of traditional fare, like Poisson Cru (raw fish) and sliced guava. I collapsed in bed shortly afterwards because I was part of the small contingent of people going to the market at six in the morning the next day to get food for our cooking nights. We're doing things co-op style here for dinners- groups of 3 cook for all 22 students. I woke up fairly easily and rambled through the market, looking at the rather dismal display of fruits and vegetables. It's weird- here everyone has their own miniature farm. Families all have their coconut, pineapple, guava, mango, breadfruit, and taro plots, so these local staples aren't sold in the markets. They are sold at these awesome looking roadside stands (people basically set up tables at the front of their driveways), but we didn't stop at these because of a pre-existing station account at the grocery store. Which only has crappy apples and exorbitantly expensive zucchinis. Discouraging as it was, we later found out that the station will be receiving regular bread, fruit/vegetable, and fish deliveries from the families of the station staff. HOORAH BREADFRUIT (which is really like saying “Hoorah potatos”, but damnit, it's still exotic).

A truckload of unloaded groceries later, the class rushed through breakfast and sandwich making before we began the day's activities. Basically, the class spent four hours touring around the entirety of Moorea, making various stops along the way, mostly as a way to compare the various habitats. This next week or so is supposed to be a time for constant class trips to help us get ideas for our projects. First we saw a portion of Cook's bay (where we are staying) and then Opunahu (the next bay over) which is much more pristine and untouched. And then the remains of a Marae, the ancient raised platforms that acted as temples to ancient Mooreans, followed by a mangrove patch. The day ended with snorkeling at the public Temae beach which is renown for its underwater sight-seeing.

The water was rougher than I was used to, but very clear and indeed full of life. I got plenty nervous when the corals started reaching higher towards us, all of them stuck with the biggest black sea urchins I've ever seen. It made me a little anxious, especially when swimming just a foot above them, or right inbetween two coral heads. Perhaps a little earlier than every one else, I turned back for shore. Hey, I'm not a water person.

But I was rewarded for my sucky water adventuring skills. Standing on the sand, you can see where the lagoon, the reef, and the deeper water beyond the reef met. And right at that boundary, on the deeper side, I saw a whale. It was humpback whale and it was doing that sidelong one-flipper-up waving thing on both sides before doing a sort of semi-breach. It was awesome, and I wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't wussed out of the full snorkeling hour. So there. Hah.

We returned back to the lab where we basically milled about til dinner doing Statistics homework and emailing, and generally being lazy. The days start early here and some people aren't quite used to that. Personally, for me, it's 930 at night right now and I'm plenty exhausted, so this post ends HERE.

On Tahiti!

((Just a quick word- these updates, at least right now, are about two days behind "real life". For instance, right now I'm on Moorea even though this entry about Tahiti is the most recent. The entry describing today's events will probably go up tomorrow night. Just thought you should know)).

Half our class took the same flight and arrived at Faa Airport, Tahiti at 6:00 in the evening. The airplane itself was this cute, french-ish hold back from the days when airlines weren't required to have large seats, but the flight was curiously empty. Our group moved and milled about or stretched out over entire rows, passed out through the entire eight hour flight.

We landed in the airport, stepped out onto the tarmac, and were greeted by the sound of the three-man Tahitian band. Then a 45 minute wait in passport control followed by what was literally a walk-through and nod-at-the-officials customs line. At the end of that line and during an evening rainstorm, we met our CourchSurfing host, Natalie.

She kissed each of us twice on the cheek and gave us leis that her mother had made for us before carting us off to her parents' house, a couple of minutes away. She was extremely pleasant and provided us with food (despite being overstuffed from airplane food and sitting around doing nothing for eight hours) and air mattresses that we promptly crashed onto.

Through those last moments of consciousness before sleep, it was still too difficult to fully appreciate that I was in Tahiti. Yes, I was somewhere different, somewhere that wasn't home, but I couldn't specify where. I could have been in another part of California for all I knew- albeit a slightly warmer, stickier part of California, but those exist too.

The view from Natalie's backyard

I think it was when the roosters woke me up at 5:00 in the morning that I truly appreciated my position. Those caws invaded my dreams and I cound't recognize them as roosters at first- there were so many of them shouting that they sounded like a herd of some other, much fouler creature. This all sounds terrible, but the early rise means that, two days later when I'm writing this entry, I'm still able to wake up at six in the morning fairly non-homicidal.

Natalie had made plans for us that day. She and her fellow group of school teachers had planned for a day spent on a giant outrigger canoe eating Tahitian food, drinking, snorkling, and sunbathing. But it rained. And unlike the half-hour thunderstorm I would have expected, it poured from six til ten in the morning, when her group finally decided to cancel the day.

It was far from a complete lost- the seven of us shrugged it off and broke out our instruments and started jamming along, the rest of us wrote our families and practiced French with her adorable parents who giggled at us constantly. Around noon, it stopped pouring and downgraded to drizzle and we decided to walk down to Papeete, the main city of Tahiti, and of all of French Polynesia as well. In our fancy REI footwear and rain jackets, we stood out pretty well. Cat-calling and waving was frequent, but not too annoying as I doubt that any of the guys would have the balls to do it if they had been on our side of the street and not in their cars or twenty yards away. Eventually, we reached Papeete, which was something of a downfall. We had been warned of this by our professors and various travel guides, but Papeete isn't much more than your standard port town- overcrowded, seedy, and not too interesting. Not to mention most of the places were closed.

After getting yelled at for stepping in a canoe in the aquatic park (it was on the sand!) and exploring a combination pearl museum/gallery (there were wax figures! From all over the world! Oooh. Aaah.) we headed the 4 km back to our host family. So we sat around, played with her dogs, chilled out, and contemplated our trip to Moorea the next day.

The following morning, we returned to the market, which was a gigantic crowd of people milling around stalls and generally being like people at a municipal market in any town. There was haggling, people shouting, saying hello, chatting with our host (who taught many of their children), and generally being friendly if a little bit frantically charged. I bought a gigantic pile of pork that had been bbq'd in a variety of ways, all of it eventually hacked under the same cleaver. There was coconut milks and baguettes and various strange fruits I had never seen nor tasted, and we gorged ourselves during breakfast. Our last foray from our host's house found all of us packed into her pickup truck with our luggage precariously packed in the back. Eventually, we boarded the ferry for Moorea.