News That Stays News

Arrivals June 29, 2015

June 9, 2015

One field course arrived yesterday, along with my field assistant. Another course, run by the same organization, arrived today. I don’t know who came up with that scheduling idea, but the station is packed. We were originally going to be sleeping at the ranger station, but there turned out to be one room left for us.

I’m glad my assistant’s arrived, and not just because I’m overworked. It took us a while last year to get really comfortable with each other (two introverts with a language barrier does not an instant friendship make), but we did. Google Translate and laughing about animal antics can help quite a bit with camaraderie. And between the field seasons we used email to work on our language issues. I wrote in Spanish, she wrote in English, and we corrected each other. It definitely improved my Spanish, although more for discussing biology-student activities and logistics than any generally applicable social conversation. Her English is better too, but our combined field and lab notes are still a mixture of English and Spanish that would probably seem illogical to anyone else.