News That Stays News

Mystery soup June 28, 2013

June 6, 2013

Lunch today was a lemony soup filled with carrots, zucchini, and a special ingredient: thin triangular pieces of some sort of animal. They all had one smooth side and one dark yellow fuzzy-looking side. This, I was told by the cook (who speaks about as much English as I do Spanish) was mondogo. As this meant exactly nothing to me, I nodded and told myself it was protein.

The soup on the whole was delicious. The animal bits tasted like the broth: they were chewy, slippery bits of lemon-flavored protein. As I ate, I tried to guess what it was. Despite their appearance, the deep yellow sides weren’t fuzzy, just squishy. Somehow, I became convinced that they might be the floppy ears of something—maybe cows or pigs. I ate another bit.

Then the only other gringo researcher here at the moment arrived at the table.

“I know I’m going to regret this,” I said, holding up a forkful of the mystery meat. “But what is this, exactly?”

“Oh, they call that mondogo. It’s tripe,” she said. And just in case that wasn’t clear enough, “Stomach pieces.” I put the mondogo down and went after a carrot instead.

Finally, I told myself I should have at least one more bite now that I knew what it was. I cut a piece, started chewing, gagged halfway through, and quickly swallowed it. I have no idea why knowing it was tripe instead of thinking that it might be cow’s ears made such a big difference. But it did, even though it still tasted delicious.

How I learned to stop worrying and love the mosquitoes June 26, 2013

June 5, 2013

What bothers me most about mosquitoes is their status as potential disease carriers. If they can give me dengue or malaria, then I need to keep being bitten to an absolute minimum, not just below the critical point at which I can’t work because I’m too busy swatting mosquitoes, scratching their bites, or trying to keep them out of my eyes, ears, nose, and mouth.

However, I had dinner with a lovely person who teaches the Organization for Tropical Studies Public Health course. She informed me that Palo Verde is free of both dengue and malaria. Apparently, there are about 30 species of mosquitoes here, and they are so successful that the mosquito that carries dengue can’t survive here. I don’t know if malaria is absent for the same reason, since it’s carried by another mosquito genus, but I suspect that’s probably the case. Who knew I’d be grateful Palo Verde has so many mosquitoes?

My entourage June 26, 2013

June 5, 2013

When I went out looking for caterpillars this morning, by the time I made it to the trailhead, I had my own personal swarm of mosquitoes. I have to admit I couldn’t keep track of when mosquitoes came and went, but other than the occasional mosquito-filled damp hollow I stumbled into, it seemed like they pretty much followed me—the only large mammal in sight—around.

By the time I made it out of the forest and down to the road, I had mosquito bites in some new and interesting places (lips, palms, scalp), and I was pretty sure my last words would be “I should have bought the 98% DEET*!” I expected the road to be even worse, since it’s closer to the wetland, but it wasn’t. This was because my mosquito swarm got its own entourage—one of very hungry green dragonflies. There were usually at least five zooming around and nabbing mosquitoes out of the air. After a while, I began to recognize exactly when a mosquito was caught. The constant low hum of dragonfly wingbeats would turn into a staccato clatter, accompanying the sight of a dragonfly stalling and dropping slightly in its flight. Then the dragonfly would leave the melee to find a perch and devour its prey.

* For those who are wondering: The reason (temporarily forgotten) that I didn’t get 98% DEET is because that’s the stuff that’s so strong it melts plastic.

Back at Palo Verde June 23, 2013

June 4, 2013

Palo Verde Biological Station

After another long day of travel (9:30: taxi ride to the bus terminal; 10:30: bus ride to Bagaces; 3:00 car ride to the field station; 4:00 arrive at the\station), I’m back at Palo Verde. The most obvious difference from last time is that the last half of the trip is accomplished under a steady rain. Unlike the dry season, when every afternoon seems to promise rain, the wet season actually follows through. This results in the second difference: everything is lush and green. If a tree looks dead, it probably is.

The third difference is the super-abundance of arthropods winging, crawling, and hopping about their business. I got the first hint of this back at the bus depot in San José, when I spotted a dark brown moth with discreet silver accents in broad daylight. The next was when I discovered a scorpion curled up on the shower curtain. (I decided we’d both be happier if I used the other shower.) The final hint (or straw) was when I woke up this morning and discovered that four or five cockroaches had cozied up to my shower loofah in an open plastic bag.

A familiar foreign country June 21, 2013

June 3, 2013

San José, Costa Rica

I’ve backtracked from when I left Costa Rica almost a year and a half ago—the same airport, the same five-minute drive, the same hotel. I don’t have the same hotel room, but those are basically interchangeable anyway. This arrival has a continuity that that trip didn’t: I’m remembering Spanish words that I picked up piecemeal, and I’m storing up bits of useful information that I was too clueless or tired to notice last time (the hotel has a better exchange rate than the airport currency exchange and there is no reason to buy colones at the airport). It’s as if even though I knew I would be coming back, I didn’t really believe it when I left.

I guess I started to believe six months ago, when I started thinking over where I’d need to go, how to get there, and what exactly I’d need to bring. And in odd moments—walking to the MetroLink station, or making dinner—I’d visualize Palo Verde and what kinds of gear I’d need, or run through my planned procedures to make sure I’d thought of every piece of field or lab equipment I’d need. These last months are the most time I’ve ever spent with my mind someplace I wasn’t, and this last month, it seems like half my mind has already been in Costa Rica.

Packing for Costa Rica June 17, 2013

I took two 70 liter backpacking packs and one normal backpack to Costa Rica and everything was stuffed.  These pictures are from two days before I left, so not everything was in there, but the vast majority was.

Before I packed the backpacking packs

The red and the green rectangles outline my diabetes supplies and my clothes, respectively.  Diabetes supplies are aggravatingly bulky.  Fortunately, they’re also relatively light and are (mostly) consumed over the course of a trip.  Everything else was field supplies of one sort or another and therefore completely non-negotiable, as were the diabetes supplies.

And after some pushing and shoving….

Packed!

A 10¢ Kaleidoscope Aimed at the Sun April 12, 2013

Leaving your home for the antipodes can be quite a shock.  It stirs any soul, and in the process dredges muck from even the deepest.  My friends have led and still lead very different lives, the details of which, along with much of which we spoke at length, I do not care to advertise or publish in any save blent and fragmented form: magpies that look like flying skunks and sound like electronic distortion, koalas nestled in the forks of trees and the friendly locals who point them out.  I learned to bite an apple and spit the pieces back out into [my own] sandwich, to give it the right consistency in a pinch.  I saw one of the osage oranges we played under as children, roped off as a hazard (falling fruit!)  I learned to juggle two balls in one hand, and was advised to pick up on the other right away, lest their skills diverge.  I saw a man hold his rage and improbable joy in check as he drove home in spite of a pretty vicious cut in his skull his partner had just left there through no fault of her own, and as ‘My Girl’ wafted from the radio.

My friends are goofy, and they are thoughtfully committed to some pretty serious choices they’ve made.  By and large, they seem to be at peace with the sheer untameability of fate, and the choices they will make when at times it turns against them.  We spoke of parents, and children.  Sitting on a wooden bench among the eucalyptus, on stone in a fake rainforest or on a wooden railing above a real one, and at times, staring into the distant sea, we considered the sacrifices one makes for the family one wants to belong to, and the blind leap one makes in trying to work for a community one never can belong to.

I greeted my friends with hugs, and parted with smile, with a handshake, with 三人行，必有我师 and with на здоровье.  I climbed halfway up a six hundred year old volcano through what looked for all the world like a field of charcoal-stained grape nuts and then summited vicariously, as the gulf sped away beneath me.  I waved goodbye to an age-old friend’s silver toyota, and walked away.

$10 Binoculars Aimed at the Ground April 12, 2013

Botox?  Tacky.  Nose jobs?  Vain.  Braces?  A basic necessity.

Imagine Being an Illegal Migrant Grape Picker April 12, 2013

It’s hard – it’s not just a moment’s sensations, it’s also an expectation of your past and future.  Maybe you can’t.  Try just to imagine the first day.  You’d have to find a place.  Maybe friends could take you, if they knew where you could pick without anyone minding about documents.  You’d turn up on some remote farm road on a cool sunny morning, when the grapes were dry enough to be picked easily.  Maybe your friends could help you find gloves and a pair of clippers.  If you’re lucky, the boss might have new clippers, figuring old ones would just jam up and slow you down.  You could fan out and start on your own row, but it would make sense to see how it’s done first, right?  You could pick across from one of your friends for a while.  Maybe he or she could help you figure out which ones were worth going for, or how to prune back the leaves if there were any in your way.  It could be pretty nice actually, since if you made your way across opposite sides of the same vine you’d have a lot of time to talk.  What would you talk about for hours, while your hands made little back-and-forth circuits, and your knees plunged alarmingly over and over?  Would you notice how your back started to hurt?  Would you learn to stand the right way, then, or keep at it?  And what about the sun, as it started to get higher?  What would it feel like later in the day, when the sore started to really settle in for a long homestay?

Now try to imagine the second day.