Welcome October!

This is crabby patty, Lauren found the dead crab on a beach walk to San Miguel one day

It is hard to believe that I have been here for seven weeks and it is already October! Time sure is flying quickly this year. Some days I start to miss home but overall I am just a little bit too busy to really get caught up in it.

Roughly, I have about ten more weeks left to go until we need to be out of the house here in Costa de Oro. I'm not sure I am going to be ready to leave this beach this year. One of the locals was asking if I was coming back next year, he seems to think I probably will. (Michelle what do you think?)

A huge stingray that we kept smelling on patrol. The barb was huge!

Friday, we went up to the office to celebrate Elias' birthday. We were given an odd assortment of vegetables and told to cook something, right away I felt like I ended up on some foodnetwork challange. Lauren, Steph, and I passed the test though and our meal was pretty all over the board. W had green beans and broccoli with salsa de soya, roasted potatoes and zucchini, and sweet plantains with a onion garlic lime sauce Lauren learned to make from a Cuban restaurant in LA. I warned you the meal was all over the place. Of course there was cake. Elias loves to make different cakes, in fact his favorite book is 1000 different cakes from all over the world. This birthday cake was a strawberry yogurt with cinnamon sugar apple slices, it was an interesting assortment of flavors.

Prepping the mural to make a mosaic of trash

We are also getting ready for San Francisco Day, which is coming up this weekend. There will be a festival in Coyote celebrating the saint in which it is named after (San Francisco de Coyote). Apparently, this year it will be a three day long festival and we are going to have a booth where we are completing the mural that we started last year that will be a mosaic made of beach trash that depicts the marine life that lives off the coast here. Due to some bigger storms and some strong currants we experienced a ton of trash on the beach, so with the help of a lot of our locals we collected a ton of trash that will be put to use on the project.

Lauren was hard at work

October 8th will put our first nest at forty days in the hatchery. The first few days are going to be import for us since we will be able to gather a rough estimate on how long our nests are taking to hatch this year. Last year, we had an extremely quick incubation time of thirty-seven days. We've been getting a bit more rain this year though, so I am expecting it to be more around forty to forty-five. But since we need to be out of the house by December 10th, we need to determine this date pretty quickly so that the hatchery will be taken down by the time we leave.

The other day we got in a new volunteer, her name in Teressa and she will be with us for about a month. She's from Dallas and decided to come to Costa Rica, quit her job and sold her house and immersed herself in the culture for a month by going to a language school in Montezuma. She studied abroad here while she was in college and was excited to come back and if she can find a good paying job she thinks she might stay for a while longer. Teressa was also part of the Peace Corps and has an extensive list of countries she has visited.

I did find the Beinvenidos sign for Costa de Oro, finally after weeks of searching!

For our beach trash study that we are working on we needed to walk down to sector 3, that is roughly a little less than 2 km from our house. We gathered two large trash bags full of trash, and we are only surveying a 20 m of the whole 100 m section. Upon looking at the whole sector, we did realize we got lucky in the sections we randomly selected to survey for the day since a mattress had washed up on shore, the only outrageous thing we had to get home was an umbrella.

October is going to be a busy month here in Costa de Oro. We have a few volunteers coming in that will be staying with us almost to the end of the project (hopefully) and a new research assistant. Unfortunately, I am going to be loosing Steph at the end of the month though. Our house will be busy with volunteers and assistants plus (fingers crossed) tons of baby turtles. I advised everyone to catch up on their sleep this week because next week we might not be sleeping to much during the night.

We got a lot going on for me to organize this month, plus towards the end of the month I need to get my butt up to Nicaragua for my visa run! I did not have to do a visa run last year since I was in the country for about 97 days, but this year I am here for an extra month so it's either visa run or a fine, and I would rather go visit Nicaragua than pay the Costa Rican government $100. Sounds like a vacation, but I have heard that it is not stop traveling plus I want to try and explore as much of what I can of Nicaragua while I'm there.

 

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