panama is pritty

Days Traveling: around 148
Spanish Fluency: 40%
Overall Feeling: where has all the fun gone?

I'm on BCI (Barro Colorado Island), a biological research island in the middle of the Panama Canal, about 45 minutes north of Panama City if you take local transportation. Apparently I chose the low season to conduct research out here... there are only about 10 of us on the six square mile island and five of those people will be gone within the next six weeks. Surprisingly I’m already a month and a half into my six month commitment. In a nut shell I'm making leaf and wood collections for functional trait analysis in regards to light exposure along the canopy gradient. Half my day in the field, half of my day droning along in the lab, wanting to do something else, like go to the beach. I enjoy the scenery and I enjoy the vibe here, but something about being here hasn’t clicked yet. I feel like I'm waiting to start enjoying my project... and I'm slowly starting to realize that that day may not come. Not to say that I'm hating what I'm doing but there’s a certain blasé feeling I get out here in regards to the work. More time will tell I think but I know I will stick it out solely because living on a research station is amazing.

First night in Panama (August 9): After Evan and I endured a full day trip from Puerto Viejo, Costa Rica to Panama City, we arrived in Panama City at 2am and passed out in a pretty sweet hostel, Hospedaje Casco Viejo (http://www.hospedajecascoviejo.com/). We slept all day and woke up looking for something fun to do. After grabbing some dinner, some people in the hostel mentioned throwing down $15 for a booze bus that drove you around the city and offered you limitless amounts of alcohol. Seemed alright to me, so we joined the group from our hostel and found ourselves with 30 other backpackers lined up in a courtyard, walking onto a decked out club set inside a school bus, complete with bar, dancing poles, um I mean support poles for the bumpy 5 mile an hour ride, a DJ booth, and an unspeakable toilet. What started out slow turned out to be one of the most insane bus rides of my life. It included me dancing on top of the bus WHILE IT WAS ON THE HIGHWAY. The bus served us our fill of decent liquor and then ditched us on the side of the road in the middle of Panama City at 3 am. What were we to do? Find a bar that was open of course! I don’t remember much but I do remember coaching a crying girl in the bathroom that she could do better than Randolph, or whoever he was. We exchanged numbers and told each other we were best friends. I also became an unofficial sister of three raging Irish girls. When that bar closed we wandered over to the only bar that was open at 5am. A hooker bar complete with the prettiest women and she-men I’ve ever seen...but maybe that was the alcohol clouding my memory. Needless to say after a bathroom pit stop we were out of there and passed out on our beds by 6am and out of commission for the next 48 hours.

When I first arrived to BCI August 20, there were about 30-40 people on the island, mainly from Germany and the US. Entomologists, bat scientists, herpetologists, botanists, soil scientists, primatologists, animal behaviorists, the list goes on and on. Imagine the dinner conversations...I was welcomed my first night by Daniel, a Colombia field assistant (it was his birthday), who forced me to drink shots of rum as he poured them down my throat. I went to bed that night heavily buzzed and wondering if the rest of my time here would be just like that: a big party. Oh but as more and more people left for home to start school in the fall, the party atmosphere left with them. Hopefully as people swing into the groove of the work regimen, the fun will start again, even though there will only be a handful of us. But my first few weeks here were really fun. Hopefully this is just a short lull in the fun-ness.