Bats and Greens and Coffee Beans

Last Friday/Saturday we visited a nearby nature reserve to learn about mammals.  Especially fascinating was the evening activity of netting and learning about bats (murciélagos).  One particularly interesting bat species has an incredibly detailed reproductive behavior.  Each male tries to attract a harem of females to its arboreal habitat and, once successful, tries to keep them around by hovering a few feet away facing them and singing a complex song.  Evolution sure has created some weirdly intricate biological patterns.

On Sunday, I cooked dinner for my family as planned: risotto wrapped in lettuce accompanied by rosemary olive oil bread and white wine from a box.  This made me nostalgic for the homestead, but luckily I had leftover bread to tide me over for the next few days.  As a side note, the Clos brand of boxed wine here is better and cheaper than the reasonably priced bottled wines (top score).

Here is a photograph of our growing lettuce plants (synthetically fertilized control bed for our experiment).  The signs are to dissuade prodding by greenhouse visitors.  We have been using the down time between data collection to prepare other beds for normal greenhouse produce and to create signage for all of Orlando's vegetables and herbs.  These signs will include origin, nutritional info and culinary/medicinal uses.  

I played piano at Vitosi (nearby drug store) again on Sunday.  This time I played for around an hour and a half, and after a while they even turned off the radio (which I took as a tacit complement).  A highlight of the day was overhearing two retirees quietly singing along while I played a jazzed version of the sesame street theme song.  

Tomorrow we will be investigating the methodologies/ideologies of two big coffee interests in the Monteverde region, which should be interesting/tasty.  Unfortunately, it means yet another jam-packed Saturday.  The program provides a lot of cool opportunities but I think all of us wish we had a little more unstructured play/exploration time.

There's a café nearby that has a book exchange program, which I have been taking advantage of.  I recently traded for Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, which I am stoked to start it (never read any Faulkner before).  

In other news, I am excited to be helping with another internship happening here at the Study Center: a SuperAdobe retaining wall.  I hope to implement the technique to build a dome-shaped outbuilding at the Homestead that can function as an improved Cabin Cat (Ohio winter is hard on outdoor felines).  I'll post pictures of the process when I have them, but for now I'll leave it at that.

Well, it's been a long week, so several of us are gonna check out a nearby tapas/cocktails place called Chimera.  (Mojito+fried yucca=sonrisas)  Hasta luego.

Haleh shoma chetoreh?

While here in Costa Rica, I have been steadily improving my Spanish.  I would estimate that I can now speak with the proficiency of a precocious 4 year old with some knowledge of specialized agricultural vocabulary.  I knew when I signed up that I would get the chance to learn the language of old España.  What I didn't know was that I would also get a chance to learn some Farsi phrases.  My friend Michelle's family are Persian Oklohomans (globalization=real, QED), and she's been teaching me various simple phrases, such as "How are you?" (Haleh shoma chetoreh?) and "Your father is a dog," (Pedar sag).  It's a fun language to speak, with lots of guttural "h" sounds.  In other worldly news, I met a British woman at the bar last night who arrived in Monteverde a week ago after a month working at a Honduran orphanage.  After several years working as a criminal lawyer in London, she grew disillusioned with her job, quit it and has been backpacking in Central America since.  It was inspiring to talk to someone brave enough to take the time and effort to take a serious re-evaluation break and search for a new path.

This is a picture of the hydroponic greenhouse where I am currently working/experimenting.  It's in a montane pine forest and from the top of the slope you can look out over the treetops to the Gulf of Nicoya.  In all honesty, the experiment has a kind of hurry up and wait feel to it, so we have lots of time to do other things around and for the greenhouse.  On the first day, we resaturated the volcanic rock substrate for the beds we are using for our experiment.  Then, we measured and counted the leaves on 260 lettuce seedlings before planting them.  Each one has a gridded identity (e.g. K4) so we can track progress in lettuce grown with synthetic fertilizer and lettuce grown with a 1:1 mix of synthetics and organic worm waste.  While we wait for them to grow, we are keeping busy by translating the garden's webpage into English, making informative signs for the 22 different plants Orlando is currently growing, and clearing the beds of the roots of already harvested lettuce.

One of the benefits of my internship at Hídroponicas de Monteverde is delicious fresh produce to bring home.  I have started a few mornings with a delicious lettuce leaf full of cherry tomatoes (yum).  I got some lettuce and rosemary to bring home today because I am cooking dinner for my host family on Sunday.  I am planning on making mushroom risotto to be eaten in lettuce wrap form (hooray for finger food) and rosemary olive oil bread (all the bread here is flat or Wonder-type sandwich fog, so my mouth is watering at the thought of a hefty loaf).

Tonight we are headed to a nearby Reserve in order to take a night hike and observe different types of mammals.  A focus of the night will be bats, or murciélagos, which we will be netting and studying up close.  Unfortunately, we will be missing the TexMex Fiesta at Bar Amigos, which includes (among other things) un toro mecánico and live music by a band that goes by the name of Los Alegres Veteranos (the happy veterans).  Qué lástima! (what a shame).

I have been researching common vegetables in the processes of creating signage for Orlando's greenhouse and have learned many novel pieces of trivia.  For example:

1) spinach originated in Persia
2) a famous British officer, Field Marshal Montgomery, coined an obscure euphemism for visiting prostitutes: "Well lads, we have two days leave.  Best take care if you plan to take favours in the beet fields."
3) Mint captures free testosterone in the bloodstream, so it is sometimes used to treat hirsutism in women

Well, as Tigger would say, TTFN.

He Vuelto a Monteverde

Que pasa, interweb?  It's been a while.  We returned last night from our two week trip along Costa Rica's Pacific Coast.  It was jam-packed, with each day scheduled from 7am til around 9pm.  That said, we did get a few nice breaks, especially to enjoy the small beach town of Playa Grande.  The trip was bookended by visits to hydropower plants.  We began our travels in the Northwest, where we visited Lake Arenal, a man-made reservoir, and learned about the dam system that created it.   We heard about many of the dam's ecological effects, including changing dynamics among fish populations and water diversion from the Atlantic to the Pacific slope.  Interestingly, Costa Rica is atypical in that 80% of its electricity is generated by hydropower (compare to roughly 15% in the U.S., which is still proportionally high in global terms).  ICE (the government controlled electricity and telecommunications company) is about to begin construction on a new dam that will double the nation's energy capacity.  It is called the Diquis project and is located in the Southwest.  We spent yesterday learning about it from ICE's perspective and then spent the afternoon talking with schoolchildren and community members in a the town of Ceibo, which will be entirely submerged when the dam is built.  It was a sobering afternoon, but practicing our Spanish with the kids helped us keep a hopeful attitude.  It's true, after all, that ICE is undertaking an incredible variety of projects designed to ease social and ecological costs incurred by the Diquis dam, but it is still clear that with repercussions on such a grand scale, it is near impossible for them to navigate the transition smoothly.

We also visited sites of high geothermal activity.  One was within a National Park and the other was nearby, but outside of the park's boundaries.  Consequently, this latter is now the site of a geothermal power plant.  It will be interesting to see what happens with the geothermal sector in CR, as only one plant currently exists, but areas with geothermal potential abound.

In the middle of the trip, we visited Palo Verde National Park, which includes lots of wetland habitat that is ideal for birding.  There are 850 avian species that call CR home for at least part of the year, and in just three hours with the help of three expert birders, small groups were able to spot over 50 of them!  It was undoubtedly nerdy, but just as undoubtedly fun, and I'm looking forward to learning a lot more about temperate species (I'm sad to say I could only identify around ten birds total prior to Bird Day).

We then spent three days on Isla Chira in the Gulf of Nicoya, which was a welcome break from the 3 restaurants a day, hotel-hopping spree of the first week.  We stayed in a homey, rustic lodge made up of cabins and a small semi-enclosed dining hall.  It was nice to be able to do some sink laundry and relax in the woods.  While on the island, we visited two similar local groups involved in fishing and clamming.  The artisanal (hook-and-line) fishing group has been really successful in establishing sustainable practices in their protected area of the Gulf, and have been hailed as a model for other communities trying to do the same.  The clamming group, on the other hand, met with initial success but had lots of problems with protecting their clamming grounds after a series of news media promos brought a lot of poachers to the area.  Sadly, much of this downturn has to do with the fact that the group is run by women, and the men poaching the clams do not respect their authority when they patrol.  The women have changed gears from clamming, or "piangua"-ing, to offering tours of the mangroves that provide clam habitat, incorporating clam digging into them as well.  It was a definite highlight of the trip.  We all suited up and squelched thro ugh the mud, jumping nimbly (or not-so-nimbly) along the tough but pliable gigantic root systems of the mangrove trees in search of clams.  Once back on the boat, we had delicious clam ceviche (similar to pico de gallo), easily the best dish I've had since arriving in the country.

On the subject of food on the island, we also ate beans prepared in this super cool solar cooker:

This post is getting pretty long, I suppose.  Breifly, then, other highlights included our bus breaking down on the second to last day and getting stranded outside of a tuna factory for a couple hours.  It was during this time that we ate at a soda (i.e. cafe) that gave many of us indigestion (three cheers for Tums).

Fortunately, zen average held and we were rewarded the following morning with an early morning breakfast cruise along a beautiful river.

We start internships tomorrow, so I'll be learning lots about hydroponic gardening, which I'm looking forward to.  Now I'm off to put some pages behind me in the mediocre Spanish novel that I have a quiz on in two days.