Et tu, Google Maps?

I am what one might call directionally challenged (See a past blog post for more examples). And so, I don’t really know why I resisted getting Google Maps on my phone. I only got a smart phone in 2015 after I realized that my siblings were sending pictures to each other that could not load on my tiny texting-only phone. But I did not want to be constantly wired in to the internet and the idea of google maps felt like cheating. Ah the good old days. Before google maps a walk to a new place involved me studying a map on the computer furiously, even making a small drawing on a scrap of paper with the streets scrawled in so I would remember which turn to take. Any deviation from the path I had plotted on paper meant disaster.

This directional stupidity of mine has always been something I have had to wrangle with while traveling. It was a fatal flaw in Madagascar where the streets have no visible names and the buses have no stops. The first time I had to pick up a volunteer from the city Tulear by myself and bring them back to Ifaty we ended up in several towns over because I could not recognize which clump of bushes along the red dust road meant we were nearing the camp. Later I memorized a string of visual cues: the mangroves, the village with the ocean visible on the left, the old hotel with sun-faded blue gates, and I was able to call out to the driver to stop at the right time. Or close enough. Even when I had my cues mapped out, it still took an enormous amount of concentration to pay attention to notice them. I think Madagascar will always be the epitome of my misdirectionlessness. But even when traveling to other places I still needed the planning, or at least a map. I remember wandering in Puerto Natales in Chile with my nose stuck in the tiny map printed in a Lonely Planet guidebook unable to find my hostel. It’s annoying to be lost at its best and terrifying at its worst, but it makes getting to your destination that much sweeter. Like you’ve earned it. Maybe that’s why I resisted Google Maps at first. But, as you can imagine, I did not resist for long.

The thing is, Google Maps is so darn convenient. And it’s such a big part of how I operate now. Do I still get lost? Yes. Just a lot less frequently. And so, thanks to Google Maps when I arrived in Santiago, I arrived without having done any prior research about the layout of the city, and the most amazing thing about that was that not knowing didn’t bother me. That insouciance is what Google Maps has gifted me. But it comes at a price, and that price is a slice of common sense.

It was the Saturday after I had arrived in Santiago. The Fulbight orientation was over and I was going to leave Santiago for Concepción the next day. In my day to explore the city, I went to the Barrio Bellavista where I visited Pablo Neruda’s house, La Chascona. I felt buoyed by the great experience and continued on with my list of tourist stops to the Cerro San Cristobal. It’s a large city park (722 acres) on a hill and has a cable car (funicular) to go up to the top. My plan was to go up with the funicular to see the view of the city and walk the way down. When I asked the ticket vendor, she said walking down would take 45-50 minutes.

The first part of the plan went well. The funicular was a several minutes of fun and the view of Santiago was impressive, if hazy from the smog. After enjoying the view for a few minutes I decided to begin my walk back down to the starting point. The first challenge was to find the path to go down. After a lot of wandering and asking around, I did find it: a little dirt path with a signpost. Excellent! Everyone loves a good signpost. I thought to myself, the hard part is over. The path descended down in a series of switchbacks. The views of Santiago stayed impressive but there was very little tree cover. The first dent in my most excellent plan was that it was 3PM, sweltering hot, and I was not prepared. I had no hat, no snacks, and no sunblock. At least I had the presence of mind to refill my water bottle. Unfortunately, that’s where my presence of mind stopped.

View of Santiago from the path. I don’t know why I was carrying my prescription sunglasses from high school. Sure, they shielded my eyes, but I couldn’t see anything anyways.

The path was well-populated and at a cross-road where everyone else went right, I went left. Why you ask? The reason was the the sign pointed to a destination that Google Maps said was really close to the entrance of the park, which is where I wanted to end up. And so, as Google Maps makes me much smarter than everyone else (*sarcasm sign*) I followed the path to the left.

The lack of people on the path should have been my first clue something off. The half-mended holes that gaped into the path should have been another. As should have been trashed that was clearly left behind by construction workers. And, for some weird reason, I pushed on. My phone told me I was following a path that existed, so gosh darn it, I was! No matter that on Google Maps the path seemed to end abruptly in the solid green somewhere far to the right of where the entrance to the park was. But, that was obviously a bug in the application; all paths have to go somewhere. There was a signpost for goodness sakes! And then, when I passed some eerie abandoned houses, I just did not want to retrace my steps. I had picked a path and gosh darn it, I would see that path through! Then I came to the end of the solid line on my phone. The path did look it continued, but, according to my phone, I had overshot the entrance to the park by a lot and the path looked unwaveringly straight. Luckily, when I zoomed into the map on my phone there was a dashed zigzagged line that split off from the solid white one close to where I was. And lo and behold, there was a tiny furrow that split off from the path’s and disappeared off the mountain shoulder. Eureka! This would lead me out of the park!

This should have been my first clue that I had not chosen wisely…

Unfortunately it was obviously a mountain bike path which made me a bit a nervous about being run over by mountain bikes so I ran down as fast as I could. I made it to the end without being trampled or falling on my face. After catching my breath, I saw that the path had left me off on a paved road right in front of sign with an angry red crossed out stick figure pointing back to the path I had just descended. I checked my phone, and though there appeared to be zero roads where I was standing, there was only an itty bit of green that separated me from the civilization. Or so it seemed. Remember, the Cerro San Cristobal is a really big hill, and is quite steep. So what looked like a little strip of green on my phone was actually quite a steep woody obstacle course. As I had only just escaped the mountain bike path unflattened I did not want to return the way I came and risk further possible flattening. So, I chose the road that did not exist on my phone and was clearly under construction.

Unfortunately again, the road went up (the wrong way! I wanted to go down!) and so I trudged along with increasing panic. I also passed some pretty clear, “Construction! Do not enter signs!”. These signs were more stress-inducing than the fact that this road was taking me away from the edge of the park. What if I met someone and they scolded me?! The horror! And so, I followed this road that did not exist on Google Maps, which involved scrambling around a fence that read “do not enter” (thanks, I got the memo!), and then through red tape that said “Peligro!” (thanks, but a little too late for that!), and then through some rather scratchy brush (fuck this road, I’m getting out of here!). I finally ended up back on the first path that I had turned off of, a little bit before the mountain bike furrow. And so, with much relief and without any hesitation I retraced my steps.

Funny thing is that retracing my steps took around twelve minutes, but my detour cost me over an hour. On the way back, I saw several signposts that ought to have been clues that I was going the wrong way, or at least that my short cut would have been 3.5 km long if I had followed it all the way through. And so, I walked back to the crossroads and picked the path that I was supposed to take. I looked down, hoping that no one would notice my counter-directionality and my oddly disheveled state. The best part of this whole experience, is that the path that everyone else had taken dropped me right off at the entrance of the park where I wanted to end up.

I’m not sure if there really is a moral to the story. I guess the silver lining is, even though my overconfidence in Google Maps is what got me lost and scrambling through construction sites in an urban park (An urban park! I got lost in an urban park for over an hour! How???), Google Maps is also what kept me from panicking outright. Because, even though my blue dot was turned around in the monochromatic green part, I could still point to exactly where I was. And that’s oddly comforting.

Six year later…

After six years I’ve finally made it back to Chile! I’m here for the next nine months thanks to a US student Fulbright Award, which I still can’t believe I have received.

The story of how I made it back starts two and a half years ago in the summer of 2016. I had just started a new job as a salmon ecologist at the Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle. I had had not thought about the Fulbright program since the first semester of my senior year of college when I had briefly considered applying. But when I learned that a few weeks was only enough to produce an abysmal excuse of an application, I did not think about it beyond wishing I had thought to look into the process sooner. A few months later one of my friends did end up getting the award which only elicited jealousy on my part. If only I had known about the program sooner, I could have applied! It all worked out in the end, I was embarking on two years of on and off travel that started in Madagascar and ended in Chile.

And then, for some reason in the summer of 2016 I remembered the Fulbright. I’m not sure what sparked the memory, but what I do remember is looking at the Fulbright applicant requirements and being amazed that I could apply for the US student program and not be a currently enrolled as a student. And so I thought, why not? It was the beginning of July, and the deadline for applying through a university (in this case, the University of Washington) was at the beginning of September. The advantage of applying through a university is that you get an interview which bolsters your application with extra information about you and your research goals. I wanted to make that deadline. Which meant I had two months to come up with a project, find an affiliation, write up the material, secure recommendations, and take any necessary language tests. On top of that, I had several weeks of fieldwork interspersed throughout the summer. But, I had a goal, I felt motivated and focused, and I felt I could do it!

I also had two strokes of good luck, one was meeting Michelle, an advisor at the UW office of Fellowships and Awards. She was an excellent resource for approaching the application and helped me adapt my research statement to a more Fulbright-friendly format, which was quite different from a traditional scientific research proposal (without sections, no expected results, etc…). my second stroke of good luck was getting in touch with Prof. Leo Castro from the Universidad de Concepcion early on in my application process. Prof. Castro was enthusiastic about collaborating on a project and he provided valuable critique and support for my application throughout the summer.

I worked really hard on my application. The most difficult thing about the Fulbright application is the lack of space. The research statement has a two page limit and the personal statement has to be one page long. Added to that are several short statements about outreach and post-Fulbright plans which were about 250 words max, and that’s it. That’s all the space you have to impress the Fulbright committee with the brilliance of your ideas and the fervor of your soul. And with such a small space, every single word counts. As an overwriter, I spent hours massaging and shaving sentences of potentially superfluous words. I enlisted all of my nitpickiest friends to comb through for clarity, including my boyfriend who I usually don’t like to handle my scientific writing. I don’t know why, he’s really good at it! Maybe that’s the problem. But when the internal UW deadline came and went I had an application that I could be proud of. I had worked really hard all summer, dedicating weekend and post-work time that I usually reserved to creative projects to perfecting the Fulbright application. I really thought I had a shot. And then in January, I got an email that I did not make the first cut of applicants. I was devastated.

I think the most frustrating thing was not knowing where I had gone wrong. The Fulbright commission receives so many applications that they do not give feedback. I felt like trying again would be futile, because how could I learn from this application process if I did not know where my mistakes were. I had put so much time and effort into something and it was all for nothing. However, when July rolled around again, enough time had passed to fill up and pave over my devastation pit. I remembered that one of the first things Michelle had told me is that she’d seen applicants who were unsuccessful the first time they applied but reapplied successfully with almost exactly the same application. Why couldn’t that be me?

So I recontacted Leo, Michelle, and everyone else who was involved in my application and tried again. Luckily it was a lot easier this time as I already had a kickass project and all the application components. A mentor helped me improve my outreach ideas, but everything else down to the recommendation letters and the language evaluation was almost exactly the same. I didn’t have high hopes after submitting the application in October of 2017. Then in January 2018, I received an email that I had made I had passed the first cut and made it to the semifinalists. I did not really know what to make of it as I had already accepted a position as a PhD student in the Netherlands. The big move to Europe happened in February of 2018. I was so busy with adjusting to my new life that the email on April 3 congratulating me for being selected for the Fulbright award to go to Chile came as a complete surprise.

And so, fast forward almost a year after receiving the letter of congratulations, and here I am in Chile. I am so grateful for having received such an opportunity to be here and even more grateful for my loved ones’ support as I embark on this journey.

It took me two and a half years to return to this country that’s carved a special place in my heart six years ago, but I finally made it! And I’m excited to keep you updated on my journey.

Jellyfishing

One of the most fun things that I have done as a TA is gone jellyfishing. It is a
bit like the marine version of butterfly hunting. One has a bucket for the specimens,
and a plastic dipping jar attached to a long pole to catch them. Two weeks ago,
we had to collect medusas ( jellyfish) and ctenophores for lab.

A “biological” aside: Ctenephores and jellyfish, while they look alike, are very
distant relations. The umbrella shaped jellyfish is in the phylum Cnidaria, and
the ctenephore is in the phylum Ctenephora. Just as a refresher, “phylum” is
the second highest taxanomical level after “kingdom”. Our (humans) phylum is
chordata, which means that we have a backbone. So taxonomically speaking, we
are about as related to jelly fish as the ctenophores are! When looking at
these two organisms however, you can see where people would want to lump these
two phyla together. They are both are mainly a jelloid semi-transparent body
with tentacles that float around in the ocean. Yet, they are very different!
Ctenephores are physiologically more complex than medusa (another word for the
jellyfish form), and some researchers have just postulated that ctenophores are,
genomically, our oldest common relative! To think that we may be descended from
a jelly blob! Ctenephores and medusa have very different ways of getting
around. Medusa use jet propulsion “technology” to move in the water, they
contract their bell shape which pushes water out from under their body, pushing
them in the opposite direction. The ctenephore, on the other hand, moves its
globular body by beating eight rows of ctenes (guess where the phylum got its
name from?) which are rows of ciliated combs. These are both cool ways of moving, but very different.

So last Wednesday, armed with our jelly dippers, me and group of students headed
to the docks. The wind was light, the clouds were spotty, and we had a song in our
hearts, for a jellyfishing we were to go! The first challenge was to spot them. While the
medusa and ctenophores can move, they cannot move fast, a feature that we use
to our advantage while hunting. On the down side, they are practically transparent,
which makes jellyfishing an activity for sunny and calm days. It is practically
impossible to do when wind ruffles the surface of the water, breaking it up
into a fractal layer. An added difficulty is that refraction at the water’s
surface and our depth perception makes it hard to gauge where in the water
column the jellies are.

It takes a bit of time, but once you start to discern their outlines in the water,
many of them seemed to pop out. It reminds me of what someone told me of
mushroom foraging, you need to adjust your gaze to your quarry. The next
challenge was catching them. Some students tried different methods with varying
success, one would dip quickly, making a splash and then bringing up the dipper
quickly. This did not seem to work so well. The act of disturbing the water
with the dipper sent up bubbles and created currents which sent the quarry away
and out of sight. My favorite method was to go for the ones near the surface
and use the act of breaking the surface tension as a vacuum that sucked the
unassuming jellies into the cup. A successful dip gave a very satisfying
feeling, and I think it’s surprising that we tarried at the docks for a while.
I also collected some for the lab practical, and caught far more than the one
medusa and one ctenephore that was necessary. It was too much fun! And when
carrying my stash back to the lab, I felt like I was channeling a 19^th
century naturalist, the kind of crazy collector who delights in finding a new
specimen to study. I sloshed the water in bucket and felt a thrill ar the anticipation
of discovery.

Critter Cam

#1 The Barnacle

When I thought of barnacles, I would think of those dried out husks of small shells
that hurt your butt when you try to sit on rocks on the beach. What a nuisance!
But barnacles, when you see them underwater, are actually really awesome and
mesmerizing critters. You can think of barnacles almost as upside down shrimp.
They have the fan-like legs that filter the water for particles in a regular
grabbing motion. It looks like a hand slowly closing or a three-year-old waving
bye-bye. When you see the video, you will understand what I mean.

There are four barnacles feeding, and a slime star, and a crab in this shot. Can you
spot them all?

#2 The Hermit Crab, and the Sponge

The first phylum than we covered in class were porifera, or sponges. Despite the
fact that they look dull (they don’t move and actually don’t look like they’re
alive at all), sponges are quite actually quite interesting and prolific
animals. Sponges get their name from the spongy texture of their skeletons.
Bath sponges are the skeletons of tropical species whose skeletons are made of
spongin, an elastic material that gives these bath sponges their absorbency and
are great for the bath. Sadly I ill not be able to slough away slough away my
skin with the skeletal remains of one of the sponges in our sea tables since
most of the species in the Pacific Northwest makes their skeletons out of
calcium carbonate (what shells are made of); not so good for the bath.

Sponges are loose collections of cells. While they have specialized cells, such as feeding
cells and reproductive cells, they have no organs, no nervous system, no
circulatory system. Sponges are in that weird gray area where you don’t know
whether to call one an individual or a colony. But don’t let the fact that it’s
“simple” fool you into smug superiority, being simple has its advantages. All
sponges can regenerate, if you break a piece of sponge off from a larger
individual, chances are both will grow into two fully functioning sponges. If
that’s not awesome enough, some sponges have the amazing property that if you
force it through a cheesecloth and turn it into sponge soup, the free floating
cells will spontaneously reassociate and reform the sponge. Now THAT is a cool
party trick. Even more incredibly, if you take two of these sponges and force
them through a cheesecloth into the same bowl, the cells will reform into the
two original separate individuals. WOW!! It is mind-boggling that these
simplest of creatures, that are not even proper creatures by our standards,
have a sense of self.

I already knew that hermit crabs were pretty darn cool before I got here. They
live in the abandoned shells of other gastropods. When a hermit crab gets too
big for its home, it has to scurry into danger to find a new and bigger one. We
have a hermit crab living in one of the sea tables, and instead of living in a
shell, this particular one lives in a sponge. “How did this happen?”, you may
ask. Well, a while ago the hermit crab chose a nice shell to dart into for
cover. It was a cozy shell, and the hermit crab decided to stay long-term. But
(dum dum duuuum!), it was a sponge-encrusted shell, and while many sponges are
happy living on the surface of shells, this particular type of sponge can
dissolve calcium carbonate, and it ended up eating away the hermit crab’s home.
You may think that the hermit crab was cheated of its hard won shell, but
actually both animals benefit from this situation. The sponge gets to see the
world (not that it really cares as it has no eyes or any other sensory organs),
and the hermit crab gets a home that will grow as it grows and that is
unpalatable to predators (Apparently sponges are not tasty, I could have
guessed that!). So in the end, everyone is happy!

Wrangling sea creatures

One of the main reasons why I picked the particular project I did for my Masters work is because I felt that I was deficient in my stats knowledge and could use a healthy dose of data analysis time. I see field work and data analysis as two sides of the scientific coin, the yin and the yang of sciency activity; the one side, exciting, fun, exhausting … the other side, serious, meticulous, ponderous. Note that my thinking is leaning towards the “nature” part of “natural” sciences, so this applies biologists and geologists, or any other scientist who get to go outside (Sorry all you physicists and chemists, but you chose to live in labs!).

As you can imagine, after two years of intense field experience, I felt that my scientific chakra was unbalanced, and I chose to set things right with two years of stats and much computer love. Don’t get me wrong, I have been committed to this plan, and think that it was great move; after two years of ANOVAs and R programming, I have become a much better scientist. But sometimes after a long a day of sitting in my windowless office I miss fieldwork. And while I really enjoy coding in R (I’m not kidding, it’s so much fun!), there are times when I look at my R-generated graphs and wonder what critters this beautifully proportioned kick-ass graph is representing. Because I have no idea. Other than they are probably either fish or macrozooplankton (or, the bane of all acousticians, bubbles). But I could not tell you more than that.

It is not surprising that one of the most exciting parts of my TA job is that I get to handle sea creatures. A lot of sea creatures. And not only that, but I get to learn all about them. I really like this TA gig, I get to do all the learning but none of the actual work. It’s a win-win situation! I can’t help sometimes looking over my students as they’re sketching away furiously and feel a bit smug. They do all the microscope adjusting to find interesting physiological formations and I get to go around and ask to look at the cool things they spot. Then I can go forth and look at the critters some more. It is a good life.

But of course, I also have some tasks of my own. My main task is to make Megan’s life easier. Megan is the instructor for the invert class. She is a formidable lady, with an encyclopedic knowledge of invertebrates, and is one of the most approachable no-nonsense people I’ve met. She’s also the associate director at the labs, and has been studying the intertidal ecology of the island for 40 years. As I’m sure you can imagine, she’s the type of person you want to impress. So I was not going to let her down when a week ago, my first task was to clean the sea tables.

The sea tables are large trays that have sea water flowing in from an overhead tube, and are constantly draining into gutters built into the floor of the lab. Because dirt and other gross biological matter accumulates in these sea tables, we drain them regularly and clean them. To d this, Megan tells me, I must move all the critters from one table to the other. All of them? Even the gross looking ones? Sigh. I guess that’s what I get for choosing to permanently separate from my desktop computer for a quarter. No, I am a fearless scientist! I have done way grosser things than catching sessile, mucus covered, spineless (literally) creatures! My thoughts went swiftly to last summer when I helped a fellow grad student pick enmeshed half-dead twitching pikeminnow from a gill net, and my resolve was strengthened.

A (pretty darn clean) sea table

Once I got started, moving the first mushy nudibranch over, it got easier. Sure, my hands were numbs from the freezing water, and the scallops did not want to let go of the tray (neither did the chitons), and those pesky shrimp nimbly zipped away from my chilled fingers, but I did it! And it was fun! Since then I have gotten to know these critters a lot better, and today, I didn’t think twice
about sticking my hand in the tank to grab a huge and soft and wiggly polychaete worm for my more squeamish students. You would never know that it has barely been two weeks since I hav switched over from handling my keyboard to handling sea critters.

wriggly nereid polychaete worm! You learn to love them.

Spaghetti on the wall

Today was the first day of spring quarter. I have beenhere for five days already, which in some ways is a long time, and in others, is a very short time indeed. It is a long enough time for me to have formed a picture of Friday Harbor Labs’ layout, but not enough time to have added capillary layers to my knowledge of arterial connections. Unfortunately, I need to add those capillary layers to my FHL picture as quickly as possible. A teacher is supposed to help facilitate the student’s learning process, and in large part is assumed to have more knowledge than the student about the subject that is being taught. In many ways, I feel confident that I have knowledge to impart, and that I have the experience and motivation to make a good TA. In some blatant other ways, I am sorely lacking.

A few minutes of conversation with any researcher here is enough to realize that there is a lot about the San Juan ecosystem I don’t know, mainly, the critters and where the live and how they spend their days. It seems to me that, while everyone’s research is specific, everyone at FHL has a knowledge bank about “mundane” aspects of the ecosystem like, when plankton blooms usually occur, what critters like to hang out together, what critters eat each other, and, what the critters are called. Researchers tend to use scientific names, usually a genus with the species sometimes included. I have now caught on that “pisaster” is a type of seastar, but am hopelessly drowning types of algae. They mostly look brown and leafy to me.

I knew that it would be hard to get up to speed about invertebrates, the subject of the class I’m TAing, but I forgot that I would also have to cram my head with knowledge about Friday Harbor itself. A marine station like this requires total immersion, your full attention and participation. Because everyone has a stake in keeping Friday Harbor a well-oiled machine, they tend to be more mindful of other people and more willing to help each other. It is a similar situation as being at sea on a ship: everyone works together to keep the ship running smoothly. Besides being able to get along with other people around you and being as helpful as possible, you need to know enough about how the ship works in order to be useful crewmember. You can’t raise the mainsail if you don’t know where the main halyard is! I use the ship comparison because, having spent six weeks on a boat as a Sea Semester student, I see similarities between the two situations. I remember how hard it was the first days where it seemed like my brain was a garbage can overflowing with leftover scraps of information about boat parts and procedures. As one of the instructors said, learning during the first few days is like throwing spaghetti on a wall and seeing what sticks. As it turns out, some stubborn spaghetti strands need to be thrown against the wall repeatedly to stick at all. While FHL is nowhere near as complicated as a sailing research vessel, one key difference really ups the ante for me; during Sea Semester I was student, at FHL I am a teacher.

My biggest challenge these past few days has been in remembering where everything is. The FHL campus is not so big, but the buildings all the look the same to me. There is one main road and with some small tributaries, but a lot of buildings are not directly connected to the main road by anther road. On top of the general confusion, I have a terrible sense of direction. My sense of direction is to me like kryptonite is to Superman, like water to the Wicked Witch of the West, like sun to a snowman… you get the picture. I cannot remember routes without actively focusing all my attention on my surroundings, and this is rarely possible the first time I go somewhere, or even the second time. I usually operate by taking the same route everywhere, with no deviations. Unlike my father who loves trying out new ways to reach a destination, just for the fun of it, the idea of taking a different route throws me into a state of absolute bewilderment bordering on panic. Knowing this about myself, I have tried extra hard the past few days to pay attention to Katie as I trailed behind her around campus.

Katie is an excellent tour guide and very patient, but even under her care I remained vulnerable to my Weakness (with a capital W). For example, on Friday, after I had been at Friday Harbor for one full day, Katie and I prepped the lab for students. This mainly involved hauling dissection microscopes and compound microscopes from the stockroom to the lab. We drove to the stockroom from Lab 3 to load the car with heavy compound microscopes. As the microscopes got priority in the car over me, Katie suggested that I walk back to the lab while she drove back with the scopes. I walked around the stockroom past Lab 1, spotted Lab 2, but not Lab 3. I went back in front of the stockroom and revolved in a circle, just in time to see Katie coming back down as she turned her car around. It was funny and slightly embarrassing, and I diligently followed Katie’s car to Lab 3, which it turns out was between Lab 2 and 4 (as I suspected it should be!), but parallel to them, right behind the stockroom where the saga began.

It’s been five days, and I’m glad to say that some of the spaghetti has stuck. Indeed, I now can find my way around, and I can proudly say that I walked to the dining hall all by myself today. Progress! Even though I may be a bit behind on my knowledge of invertebrates, I can at least find the dining hall just as well as any student.

The inside of Lab 3, where I will be spending most of my time teaching.

A view of some FHL buildings from the docks. I couldn’t tell you with absolute certainty which ones 🙂

In preparation for my move to an island in the sun (maybe)

It has been almost two years since I touched this blog.This hiatus occurred for two reasons:

I have forgone my glamorous errant scientist lifestyle in favor of a grad-student project that has me chained to my desk. While it has been intellectually stimulating and has made me a better scientist, the only extensive traveling I have done has been by living vicariously through my sister Tamara (https://tamadventures.wordpress.com/), with a supplemental boost from google images search.
I’m lazy.

Despite the fact that I have not had much material to blog about (or have been too lazy to), I have had a great time in Seattle. Seattle is extremely likable and livable; it blends a weird mix of laid-back West Coast attitude and uptight Swedish stoicism. I love the green spaces and food snobbery. When I order a cup of coffee, I convincingly feign interest as the barista describes the different aromas of all their available single-origin blends. I complain about the weather because it seems to be a popular conversation topic.

I have fallen victim to recycling shame for failing to compost a napkin, and have succumbed to bicycle road rage when spandex-clad racers narrowly avoid crashing into me on the Burke-Gilman bike trail. I can answer with confidence when I am asked what neighborhood I live in and I have taken an interest in the names and positions of Seattle neighborhoods. All in all, I feel at home in Seattle.

I am currently a grad student at the University of Washington School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences. Hopefully, I will finish serving my sentence this summer and leave graduate school with a bona fide Master’s degree. Being paid to be a student is probably one of the best gigs I could imagine, despite the long hours and painful research moments. While I am absolutely loving grad student life, I miss fieldwork. I purposefully chose to come to a mathy program and work on project that would build my quantitative skills. And while this strategy has worked (I was a Teacher’s Assistant for a statistics class this quarter after all), the only fish I have seen in my entire time at the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences have been virtual fish pixels on my computer screen. To make up for this hole in my education, I applied to be a TA (Teacher’s Assistant) at Friday Harbor Labs this spring. I will be TAing a class called Marine Zoology, which focuses on marine invertebrates. While I am super excited about this prospect, I am nervous about the fact that over the past two years I have only taken classes about ecological models and have only seen real marine invertebrates in Malaysian prawn soups.

Either way, I am departing for Friday Harbor in a week. Here is what I know about Friday Harbor: it is a town on an island in the San Juan archipelago (someone recently asked me which island, and I didn’t know, but I looked it up. It’s called Orcas Island!*). It takes between 3 and 5 hours to get there from Seattle, depending on whether you are taking a car/ferry or bus/ferry combination. It is very close to Canada. The university has a laboratory there where scientists, mostly biologists (You will be a lonely quantitative ecologist at Friday Harbor, my advisor said to me), study the San Juan ecosystem. I know that during the quarter, I will be working with two professors, both biologists (one zoologist, one botanist), two other TAs, and seventeen undergraduate students. I know that I will need rubber boots. This is all I know.

I expect that the island will be beautiful, that I will work hard, have a great time, and have to fake an understanding of marine invertebrates. Hopefully, in the process, I will also learn a lot about marine invertebrates. And maybe about other things. I am very excited!! And a little nervous. But mostly very excited. I look forward to filling you in as I discover the answers to my burning questions like, will I be able to recognize an invertebrate when I see it? Will it be squishy? Are people as interested in the weather at Friday Harbor as they are in Seattle? Stay tuned for these thrilling updates, and more!

*Correction: It’s actually called San Juan Island. The internet lied to me. Thanks, Emily!

Chiloe

I left Patagonia on Saturday for Puerto Montt and a more familiar place. I was heading for Chiloe, the biggest island archipelago right opposite the Comau fjord where Huinay is. The fjord region and Chiloe have a lot of cultural ties such as food and legends, but I think it was pretty clear from the people at Huinay that Chilotes (people from Chiloe) are weird. But since I truly doubted that people from Huinay could be considered an authority on objectively deciding who is weird, I had to go see for myself. Chiloe definitely has a sense of apartness from the rest of Chile. It was in Chiloe where the last anti-secessionist strongholds were based, where Chilote mythology evolved, and where you can find the last examples of palafitos, the traditional fisherman’s dwelling that used to the norm in the fjord region. Chiloe is also home to unique wooden churches which have been collectively declared world heritage sites. After my nature filled program in Patagonia, I was really excited to get a more cultural feel for a unique place in Chile.

I think maybe because I was leaving the region of Patagonia, and most of the people that I had met had been traveling exclusively in Patagonia, I didn’t meet any travelers who had been to Chiloe yet. Up until now I had been picking which hostels to go to based on my research (especially through hostelworld) and other travellers’ recommendations. Unfortunately, I didn’t get any recommendation for Chiloe, and the hostel pickings online looked slim. So I headed to Castro, the capital of Chiloe, without any concrete plans; just a few (pricey) hostel backup options if I didn’t find anything. I was a little anxious because of my lack of preparation as I got off the bus in Castro at noon. I started leafing through my guidebook for a map of Castro when an older woman came up to me and asked, “Hospedaje?” I was a little startled because that’s the first time that happened, but I figured, the price was the cheapest I could expect to find and it would save me the trouble of actually looking so why not? She led me a couple of blocks away from the bus station (Castro is really small) to a hill overlooking the ocean and we stopped in from of the most adorable pink shingled house I’ve ever seen. Mirte and Hardi are an older couple whose 4 children are grown and out of the house, and they like to let the extra rooms to travelers, but don’t want just anyone staying so Mirte goes to the bus station to pick who she wants to offer a room to. So here I was in Castro staying at a beautiful home with a room to myself for the same price as a bunk bed in a cheap dorm at a hostel. Yay for being a solo female traveler and looking harmless!

Mirte gave me some advice on what I should go see and I headed out to explore Castro. It’s quite a small city, I think by any other standards I would consider it to be a large town, but it’s the biggest one on Chiloe. Castro’s iglesia stands out in easter egg colors of yellow and purple. Another characteristic of traditional Chilote architecture is that the houses are covered in wooden shingles and brightly painted. The whole effect is awesome. I spent a lot of time that first day walking around town admiring the pretty houses and different shingle shapes. I went to different view points to look at the palafitos, the old houses held up precariously by stilts on the water’s edge. Castro is one of the only towns in Chiloe where there still are palafitos, unfortunately because of earthquakes many of these structures do not exist anymore. And certainly a lot of them looked very rickety to me, like they stubbornly withstood the wrath of the elements and only needed one last breath of wind to collapse. Yet despite this rugged look many of them were brightly painted and I saw people on porches and faces in windows. It made me happy to know that people were still living in them.

I also ambled down to the dock and saw a lot of people wandering around eating something from plastic containers. I followed them and saw a stand by the small fishmarket where a couple of people were idling standing up and eating. I ventured over and saw that it was ceviche. Yes, I would definitely try some! I picked out the container of salmon that I wanted and a lady added cilantro, cebolla (onion) , and aji verde (green pepper) and I was free to season it with spices. After adding a healthy pile of merken, this crushed smoked chili that I’ve grown to love, I took my ceviche and went to sit by the water. It was delicious, and I went back several times over the following days.

Over the next three days I visited different towns using the micro-bus system. This system was very easy to use, and Castro being the hub of the island, almost all the buses went through its municipal bus station. I liked the casualness of the mini buses, the driver would have a cardboard sign on the window of where the bus is going, and you payed the driver when you get off the bus. The buses have a fixed route, and though I spotted a few bus shelters along the way the common mode of operation was to flag down the bus by the side of the road (I did this twice and felt very savvy) and then whenever you want to get off just tell the driver when you see your corner coming up and he’ll stop the bus. As I didn’t really know where I was going most of the time, I’d just ask the driver to drop me off at the church which was usually located nearest the tourist information booth anyways. The bus rides were a great way to see the islands, a good opportunity to people watch, and one of my favorite parts of visiting Chiloe.

I saw four out of the thirteen world heritage site churches of Chiloe in Castro, Dalcahue, Achao, and Chonchi. Like so many of the wooden structures around the outsides were brightly painted and/or covered in shingles. The interiors were also unique, and as someone who has seen a lot of spectacular stonework in European churches, I appreciated seeing the different style and the more homey effect it gave. My favorite one was the church in Achao, the oldest one in Chiloe. It was built in the early 1700s by Jesuits. It had recently been restored but the restorers had tried to stay as true to the original as possible. Though the floors were new the beamed had been hacked using the cruder tools that were historically used to preserve the chipped and pitted texture of the ancient floors.

I learned about Chilote culture by touring but also from my Chilote hosts. I enjoyed spending time in the evening with Mirte and Hardi and learning about their life on the island as well as meeting their family. I helped Hardi make apple jam from locally grown apples and Mirte showed me the ponchos and baby clothes she and her daughters had knit. We sat around in the evening drinking mate and Chilean wine with Erica and Ingris, a mother and daughter who had come from Vina del Mar to vacation, and Mirte told Ingris and I about Chilote myths. An example is el trauco, a small deformed man who who young girls should be wary of when wandering alone in the woods. If he meets one he becomes irresistible to her and she’ll wind up pregnant. Eek! Another is a female witch who can turn into a bird by vomiting her own entrails. The Chilotes also have a ghost ship and water spirit, la pincoya. These characters show a veriety in mythology that is not found on mainland Chile.

Chiloe is a very memorable location and is very different from Southern Patagonia. I will revise Huinay’s characterization of Chilotes as weird and would call them unique instead. Chiloe is an island and has its own sense of independence from the mainland and has it’s own rhythm and way of life. The Chilotes are aware of their differences and embrace them, but more than that, they are open to sharing these differences with others because they are proud of them. Like the run-down palafitos resisting the pull of the elements, Chilotes may seem to be clinging onto cultural truths from the past. Indeed, a lot of the palafitos I saw were broken and derilict, but a lot of them also were surrounded in building materials and looked like works in progress. I think that Chiloe is the same way, changing and evolving, but built on solid foundations. Everywhere I looked, whether it was to the renovated churches or the eclectic artisinal markets, I saw old traditions but they were presented with such self assurance that they didn’t feel clung to. Like the palafitos, the Chilotes aren’t trying to preserve their culture, but they are consciously living it. And that to me makes all the difference.

I stayed with Mirte and Hardi during my time in Chiloe. I made marmalade with Hardi one evening and spent the others drinking mate with them, their family, and the other people staying in their hospedaje. My favorite thing about the house was that it is covered in pink shingles, AWESOME!!

A palafito barrio in Castro.