mraaaa not dead!

haha.  you all thought I was dead, didn't you?  noo.  I'm now in my fourth
day of the fall semester of the School for Field Studies Center for Marine
Resource Management which is in the Turks and Caicos Islands which are
about 100 miles north of the Dominican Republic.

it's hot and sunny and lots of blue blue water and bright sun and dogs and
ants and horses and things.  and you're thinking tropical paradise, right?
I'm living the resort life?  not really.  I finally juryrigged my
mosquito netting to my bed but that doesn't really deter the ants,
unfortunately. fortunately they don't seem to bite; they just crawl
everywhere.  I took my first saltwater bath yesterday, which was an
experience in the surge at high tide.  we get one freshwater shower (cold)
a week.  on saturday we have our first test- we need to know something
like sixty organisms to genus and species that we were introduced to last
night in a powerpoint presentation.  in two hours we go out to a mangrove
island called Moxibush to see them in life.  there are 25 of us, mostly
from the midwest, strangely enough, but pulling mostly from coastal
colleges.  we've got three main classes, (tropical marine ecology, marine
resource management, and economic policy and socioeconomic values),
directed research, and a little culture and history class for which we are
guinea pigs. today was our first 'real' day of class that wasn't disturbed
by various tours and survival things.

getting here was a cute trick.  I flew into miami and stayed overnight,
then met my classmates at the gate the next day.  the mark of an SFS
student?  flipflops, two giant carryons, a nalgene, and a hat.  we flew to
Providenciales, then we got our bags (eventually) and went to the
departures side to buy our tickets to fly to Cockburn Harbor in South
Caicos.  our luggage was weighed, we were weighed, some of us performed
some hurried repacking as they told us what carryons we could and could
not have (and we had to pack enough clothes for three days, a snorkel, a
mask, and minimal toiletries in the carryon), then we were divided into
two groups, one of which left right away.

and the rest of us sat.  and sat.  starving.

the plane came!  we gathered our stuff and grabbed our tickets and went to
wait by security...where we stood.  and stood.  still starving.

the plane left.  without us.

we went back to sit down, waited more, finally got onto the baby cessna
(everyone got a window seat!) and islandhopped to South Caicos, where we
left our bags and piled onto a daihatsu truck and drove to the center and
ate dinner.  our luggage (most of it) eventually arrived on various
flights and we settled in.

we've had a couple of lectures so far, but now that we've gotten the
getting to know the island things out of the way the pace is skyrocketing.
three hours of lecture in the morning and five or six hours of field
stuff later, plus dishes and cooking and hauling water and slapping
mosquitos and studying and beach volleyball.

the internet likes to disappear for days, and mail takes 2-3 weeks to
arrive, but I'd love to hear from you.