A day in the life. (Or: Once I Studied Dirt and Now I Have A Job)

(written Friday) 

I started my day yesterday, climbing out of a fire escape, clutching a muffin in the inaccurate grip of my mitten, an expansive view of the glowing edges of the world framing the silvery snow. I'd had a night out with Mr. Programming and Miss Piano and had stayed in their third floor apartment to avoid a late-night slog back to Trumansburg.

It was a beautiful morning. I am learning to coexist with winter.

I'm also becoming accustomed to my work life at Cornell. Although it is still a bit of excitement to see names which I had been typing into my thesis, (“Mohler et al in 2001 found that cover crops blah blah blah,”) and now I am passing these names in the hallways, as plaques by doorways! And in some cases, I am writing emails to these names, as I am now working on projects with them.


That day at Cornell I signed myself up for an InDesign class (because I knew nothing about it, save that cool people use the program and create beautiful graphic materials) and Professor Boss had told me I'd be creating a newsletter and formatting an extension publication. And learning is great, especially when the class is payed for, and I left all eager to DESIGN and MAKE things. 

I was also working on editing someone else's work, very different indeed than elbowing around words I myself had written. Even though I may not know exactly how to say what I'm trying to, the amorphous what I'm trying to say is at least contained in me. With someone else's writing, the amorphous what is something else entirely. The sleuth-like nature of this, the puzzle of it, of editing this quite rather drafty document about no-till soybeans. Here is a sentence. It is saying something. Where should it belong? What is it REALLY saying? Has it been said already? It’s like taking Lego's spread all around the room—all of them useful colorful informational legos—but they certainly comprise no building. And I’m trying to stack them and build something. It's actually really fun and I'm enjoying it.

I was also editing a case study describing a farm with 240 cows: and I had this amazing Farming Game de ja vu....being 12 years old and playing the Farming Game (Klassens! This game would entrance us for entire days), a board game where, as a farmer, you can buy little flat cattle stickers, plant little corn stickers, and move around the board through all 4 seasons. I thought about how in real life 240 cows are no small matter, but if typing about them or farming-gaming them they seem quite easy-going indeed.

Later that day was a Cheers With Your Peers event in the plant science building, some sort of initiative to get plant researchers out of their greenhouses or window-less offices and socialize with each other. I asked Mr. Coworker what this might be like. "Well I've never been," he said, "but it's probably where people stand around drinking beer in little groups, talking about their research, with people they already know." Oh good: I know nobody.

So I went.
I wasn't sure what to expect there, still being so starry eyed about the league of Cornell and all that. But it ended up being a rather home-spun affair, about 15 people, where you rifle through a cooler for a Saranac, then drop the suggested donation of 2$ into a coffee can with a hole chopped sophisticatedly into it's plastic lid. There was a bag of chips, too.
Amazingly--thanking the gods of social luck--I was not left sitting solo; my lead was a moustached plaid man I recognized From Somewhere and the recognition was mutual, but bewildering, so we played the Ven Diagram Game of how we might have overlapped in the past.

Turned out we'd chatted one day at the Geneva pub when I was playing server there this fall.

And then somehow I found myself conversing with....the chair of my department. Somehow in the shuffling around of coffee can and Saranacs and the opener, a conversation transpired. About Thailand, corn, and office space. So I met some peers!

Later that evening I went up to Grannie and Granddaddy's place, where I felt not unlike a minor celebrity: there was a nice piece of silver on the table and a miniature bottle of Champagne and wee cocktail shrimps. And lemon meringue pie for dessert.

I will preface the following by saying my Granddaddy was a dentist, not a lumber jack, and there are people still in this town whose tooth-work has not failed them even 30 years later.

With utmost specificity Granddaddy cut a slice of lemon meringue pie, inching a small knife painstakingly along the slice, then reaching for another tool--the spatula--and delicately extracting the slice from the round. A few hours later he directed it onto a plate and then reached for his forceps and plucked half a dozen crumbs from the pie pan and added them to the side of the slice. He took his drill and carefully bevelled the edges. "Hurry up!" said Grannie (while some speech has been a bit of a struggle for her recently, she had no trouble with this pronouncement) and the two of us laughed. Finally he surfaced from this delicate surgery and administered the plate to me. Then he dove back into his pie trance and another 4 months passed and a second piece came into existence.

Taking forever, doing nothing, very carefully. 

Then I remembered the glories of a cruise they took me on as a child and how there I learned about key lime pie for the first time and while I didn't realize it then I certainly do now: I had a beautiful and fortunate existence as a grandchild of theirs.

"Waxed or unwaxed?"

I had a beautiful ski this morning, in this snowy world of freshness.
Except I'd never before gone skiing with an un-pumped yoga ball in a
box or a bag of fine Ethiopian coffee.

You see, I was skiing to the bus stop and carrying my Windowless
Office Survival Kit on my back.

I went to bed last night planning a snowy trudge to the bus stop
(thanks to the logistics of my Snow Bike having been left at Cornell)
but then had the bizarre idea of skiing there instead. But this wasn't
without a few questioning considerations. What if the snow, even
though it seemed plentiful, wasn't thick enough? Would Mr Bus Driver
even let me on with them?

But it worked out quite well indeed, the country road I had to
navigate was mostly devoid of traffic and I enjoyed the roadside trees
draped in snow crocheted doilies. I was blessed to enjoy one of those
times of weightlessness and space before my workday started. Since
Googlemaps, unlike for driving, walking or biking, doesn't provide the
estimated time to ski a given distance, I completely overestimated my
time and arrived plenty early. I skied a loop around the park by the
bus stop.

"Waxed or unwaxed?" asked an older gentleman at the bus stop, and
another young bloke added: "I dig your style." The bus pulled up and I
carefully maneuvered my clacking ski poles and slippery skis--those
long and blundery items--into one arm so I could gracefully tap my bus
pass and enter the bus with my load.

The tips caught on the door and the ski poles slipped and I had to
rearrange quickly but I got on! "Those are a REAL hazard", Mr Bus
Driver said good-naturedly, "so just make sure you don't poke or
puncture anybody." I assured him I would keep them all well-behaved,
and was rejoicing that he let them on with a warning rather than
flatly disallowing them.

Buses are not really designed to accommodate the long unwieldiness of
skis, rather the squishy pliable lumps of human bodies, but I found a
back seat and got everyone threaded in and positioned by the window.

Now I just need to bring a Going Mug of hot chocolate to enjoy
afterward, and all will be quite excellent indeed.

Riding a bus

Since I arrived in the Trumansburg-Ithaca area my car has been parked (save for the first ill advised morning I drove to Ithaca which was not unlike clawing my way up a severely compacted colon).

I like my car that way. (It's ok, Daddy)

Here, there is enough public transportation that I can take the bus to get to work in the morning.  I ride my Snow Bike the 0.8 miles in a few minutes of spikey, awaking, unabashed cold to the bus stop. There I stamp around feeling numb and then rejoice (oh! how something so quotidian can cause such unbridled joy) as the bus curves its way into view.  My bike rides on the nose of the bus as a sort of mistaken bizarre emblem, and I settle on the inside and open my book.

While it takes longer to ride the bus than to drive there in my car, I think of it as intentional scheduled reading time, and for me it is free thanks to a Cornell-sponsored bus-pass.

This bus population seems different than that in other cities, where buses are mainly for those in economical straights; here there is eaves-dropping on conversations about fly-fishing, hiking, video games. There seems to be a veritable bus-riding group of friends taking over the whole back section. It's a rather comfortable feeling in there, the buzz and hum of conversation rather than the lonely silence I'm accustomed to on buses.

And on a bus you can turn to your seat-mate--both of you reading books, both of you with travel mugs of coffee--and ask him if he just might happen to know what a "dirigible" is. Because you're reading Bill Bryson (with his penchant for great words), and you don't have a smartphone, and so you and your seat-mate relish the strange sound of this word and he shares how only just last week the cartoon his children were watching used that word, dirigible. What a splendid coincidence.

The two of you chat in between page-turns. "So you're the die-hard" he comments, voicing what is probably the collective curiosity of the bus about who was the one responsible for that single frigid bike up front.

So now you have a bus friend. His name is Pete.

Much harder to do in a car.

Cornell!

Once upon a time....I looked at Cornell University as a hopeful soon-to-be undergrad (disenchanted by both the expense and the expanse however), applied as a graduate student (turned down; no funding), but now, finally, they are paying me to go there. So I do get to be a part of that ivy league community on the hill in the valley of wine and Moosewood! A Research Technician am I, in the sustainable cropping systems lab.

This was one of those jobs that did not exist, but I met the professor heading the lab this fall; he knew of my background and research interests in cover crops and weeds, and I told him I'd cited his papers all throughout my thesis. "So tell me what you like to do and what you don't like to do," he told me, "we'd like to create a position for you." 

And so I got a job I never applied for.

I say that is pretty great indeed.

I showed up to My First Day At Work yesterday, and was presented with a typed list: "Sandra Wayman's Responsibilities" all numbered out. I appreciated this straight-forward organization, and the items on the list will be challenging without being insurmountable, fun for an agricultural plant nerd like me, and capped neatly at 40 hours per week. None of this working 8pm on a Friday for me, thank you.

What is maybe most exciting is that I will be managing a project on perennial grains. Perennial grains are one of our greatest oppurtunities to really feed this hungry and burgeoning population: most of the world's diet is grain, and having to plow and plant each crop annually is hugely taxing on our agricultural resources. So working on a crop that only needs to be planted every 5 years or so will be tremendous for conserveration.


While this project is nifty and exciting, the building I am working in is not unfortunately: a towering fortress with no windows (save for two sets at hallway end). One could be in this tall tomb all day, not knowing whether it was sunny or snowing. Having finished a season of work in the field, where I was intimately entwined with whether (weather) it was sunny or snowing, I feel like part of my soul is being scorned not being able to see the sky. (call me sensitive; ok, fine: so I'm a plant)  But! In the little alcove by the rare and token windows are a collection of plants, not mild-mannered plants either, and a seat. This is my Plants & Sky Office and my coworkers will just have to look for me there working away on my laptop while I am filling my quota.

My coworkers are mostly graduate students, in plaid shirts and hardy jeans, nerdy (but not the Chemistry Nerdy, the Farmy Nerdy) and sincere plant people and I like them already.

While I wait for my dreamy apartment in Ithaca to become free, I am living with Aunt Singing and Uncle Bass in a nearby town, and their dogs Big Dog, Bigger Dog, and Engaging Cat (see Figure 1). I like this cat very much. Cat and I did yoga together last night, me in downward dog and Cat in flopping cat below. And there was purring. Then Cat leapt, in that effortless grace known only to Olympic competitors and cats, to my dresser and played Knock Things Over.

Aunt and Uncle are being exceptionally kind and letting me stay in their large, beautiful, and very warm house. Oh! If one must have winter, there is no better house in which to have it...  I also am enjoying the contrast of my aunt's kitchen cupboards with my mothers. Aunt gave me a tour of the kitchen, opening doors and featuring the contents, "here's some...stuff. And here's some more...stuff." The canned tomatoes by the plastic bags and its all fine because you don't have to spend time sorting, just as long as it is all visible when you open the doors. Her Tupperware cabinet was my favorite: an act of balanced entropy, the Medium Square resting inscrutably across a Tall Round and you lift it out, and there tips a Small Triangle to fill it's place. You close the door swiftly with a hand to block gravitational forces and go on with life.

My mother's cabinet is a completely different matter. The Tupperware are sets of Matrushka dolls in military rank formation, organized by size and structure: to get at Square Medium you must heft out the Square Smalls and Square Larges--the veritable entire battalian of squares--and then replace everybody. It is an Entropy Free Zone.  I love both woman and their cabinets.

Figure 1. Me and Engaging Cat, whose real name is Bubbles.

Rain forests and Raw pizzas: Mountain life in Puerto Rico

Written Saturday:


This evening I showered with a frog.

He sat there all moist, black bead eyes regarding me, his little pink-
tan body almost translucent and his little lungs plugging in and out
stretching his skin. His toes had little grippy balls at the end. We
enjoyed each others company for a while, then I toweled off and left.

You see, we're at the mountain house bed and breakfast now, staying in
a cabin on the property. I woke up and stepped out of the little
doored bedroom I was sharing, and into what was essentially the rain
forest. The rest of the cabin was so open-air that I could stand at
the kitchen sink brushing my teeth and be inundated by this great
clambering green thickness of forest. Vines, bananas, ferns, epiphytes
(plants growing on other plants), palms....  Any human complaint I
might have had was grasped in this green glory and I celebrated the
diversity of life. Imagine how motivated, inspired, creative we might
be if we could find this intimacy with stunning nature so frequently.

I saw two shooting stars tonight, padding out on the road between the
orange trees, craning my neck into the brilliant display above. So
bright, all these patterns and formations I usually cannot detect. And
the fire flies here! They don't blink! They stay lit steadily for some
time, until they need a breather or whatever, and then they'll turn
off at leisure.

There is such pleasure in sitting back after a day's work in the
garden, watching the light dissipate, and hearing the critters and
chirping frogs begin their endless symphonic chorus of the dark. This
is quite loud. Almost like my ears are ringing or I have some sort of
strange headache.

The tenacious abundance of life! Sun and heat and water and here is
this indefatigable reminder that things yearn to grow and multiply and
exist. And in that they are beautiful.

Riding in the back of a little pick-up truck to load gravel to fix the
potholes in the road, zipping along the mountain side, under banana
trees and citrus. Mr. Owner, our driver, stops besides a mandarin tree
and we pluck a few off and the ride got that much tastier. Like the
tropical equivalent of my childhood joy, decidedly upstate NY, of hay
rides in someones trailer, munching on apples.

Epiphyte: noun. A plant that grows on another plant, epi = "on", phyte
= "plant". Usage: "That epiphyte in that tree is the epitome of
beautiful!"

Epibhyte: noun. When a fire ant bites you on top of a mosquito bite.
Usage: "My ankle now is actually a conglomeration of epibhytes." Also:
"My epibhytes kept me from sleeping well."



This is a bed and breakfast that caters to people with vegan,
vegetarian, raw, gluten free, food-free (heh) diets. The next guests
are raw ("as opposed to broiled or baked guests" quipped Lady Elise;
"I'm Raw" does indeed sound stranger than "I'm Vegetarian") and so
today Mrs Owner brought us down two Raw Gluten-Free Pizzas to try.

Now, everyone has freedom to choose their own eating styles (you can
tease me about my kale and popcorn anytime), but I am of the opinion
that to be defined as "pizza", a thing should include a few key
components. Like a crusty wheat crust. And tomatoes. And melty cheese.
And be hot.

This thing was round, and had tomatoes. But besides that, it was not
at all like a pizza. The crust was made of flax and rice; on top was
chayote (a white, crunchy, and tasteless number grown in the tropics)
and tomatoes and tiny olive pieces. To be considered technically
"raw", food must not reach above 114 degrees F, as at this temperature
some key enzymes are killed. So this pizza never saw the heat of an
oven; instead it rested demurely on the hood of the car in the sun.

And it was delicious. Surprisingly delicious, once I renamed it Flax
Tomato Round. I found myself eating fall-aparty slice after fall-
aparty slice. It didn't feel heavy or greasy or sodden, like regular
pizza might. It was salty and chewy in the right way, a little hint of
garlic and herbs.

And I felt light and airy and not overfull.

Airy indeed. I was soon experiencing wildly voluminous flatulence. I
imagine all that flax and fibre and garlic bobbing directionless
around my gut, blowing happy bubbles.

Foreign language laughter

Ah, the hilarities of practicing a foreign language.

I've never officially studied Spanish, but when I was in Costa Rica
and Puerto Rico about 5 years ago I picked up what I could: chatting
with locals, reading signs, flapping through my Spanish dictionary for
a new noun. I've been irreparably out of practice since then, but
still I'm astonished that once in context no small number of things
are coming back to me. Not that my sentence structure was ever any
better than that of a Neanderthal, but it was better than mute at least.

So I was out in the local grocery store with the girls, and they sent
me to get a bottle of rum from the liquor section. Unfortunately all
that strong stuff was locked in a glass case, so I set off to track
down a store representative. I found two men in tucked-in polo shirts
who were lingering chattily nearby, not seeming to be doing any
shopping type activities. That, with the polo shirts, seemed
sufficient indication. But they didn't have any official name tags or
anything.

"Con permiso", I started ("with permission"--I love this standard of
approaching people or asking for help, the equivalent of "excuse me"),
and then blanked on the correct conjugation of the verb "to work".

"Con permiso, trabajo aqui?" I said.

"Excuse me, do I work here?"

I laugh to think what it might like to have a looming white girl in
funny shorts approach you and ask if she happens to work in this
grocery store.

Nevertheless, they spoke English, and smilingly pointed me to someone
who could help. Turns out I didn't work there after all.

Photos stories: Puerto Rico

A pebble rolled in from the surf. Beach view near Isabella on the northwest coast.

Road food! Trucks like these--or even a small tent with a picnic table--can be found on the sides of highways for snacks in this car-driven culture. We had "mofongo" here, which is a wad of green banana (and maybe some other tubers) mashed up around ground meat. Not the most attractive food, but certainly tasty.

The requisite tourist photo on the narrow brick streets of old San Juan. The houses are painted in festive colors like this, with ornate little balconies, and beguiling tropical plants. A pleasure to pad around indeed.

Haha, maybe the sign in the background indicates what happens if you have too many of these. This one was cucumber-infused.

"Breaded Fried Skirt Con Rice and Maduros"--gotta love the mix of Spanish and English. But skirt?

The botanic gardens of the University of San Juan were a sanctuary indeed. Here a heliconia flower bathes in the sun. I walked from bamboo to palms, holding a small cardboard cup of coffee, and blissed out on the glorious diversity of plant forms. Few people were on the grounds, and the place was thick with trees and trails, so one could meander so they felt lost...admiring the iguanas and listening to the birds. It was more church than church.

In the right conditions, some bamboo can grow up to 4 feet per day (according to my brochure)!

Driving the south-east part of the island was an experience wholly different from the rest of the land. Instead of lush thick forest or even thick cities, the area between Ponce and San Juan felt like the American southwest. Jutty hills and mountains formed a broad backdrop with no more ground cover than a few cacti and wizened yellow plants. The views were spectacular as we curved up and around and down along our smooth road.

The scene of my kayak trip last night. The clouds were absolutely captivating in this way, with the sun tinting only their edges, eventually fading the whole lot to a rosy purple.

Mi cama. Although no malaria here, one still doesn't want to sleep with the mosquitoes. I remember when my sister was little, she yearned for a princess style bed like this.

Pictures de Puerto Rico

Of course: I had to find a bike to rent in San Juan.

The view from our beach house. Sometimes I pretend we're on a cruise ship, forging off into the surf, like when my grandparents took me when I was a child.

The place where blogs are written.

Dry forest epiphyte.

The "trail head" (NOT) from which we emerged after picking through the pokey forest.

In the historic and charming town of San German...this church/museum was built in the late 1600's!

Anyone interested in a fixer-upper?

Our victorious road-side fruit-stand haul. Check out the size of that onion. Really?

Cacti and noisey noise

I just about cannot imagine anything more indulgent than this.

I've been living on the sea, in a beach house just about overhanging
the water. (west coast by Rincon) This place goes for $200 per night
but we are staying here for free. The owners of the bed and breakfast
farm in the mountains, where I spent a winter working and feeding
horses and harvesting bananas, own this place now. And there is not
much work to be done this week so we are hanging out.

Who is "we"? My biking buddy, Lady Elise, from my southeast Asia trip,
and her two friends. So we are 4 farm-working women, glorying in the
sun, loving the absence of winter. We seamlessly are preparing food
together: someone makes a smoothy, someone else a salad, and someone
else is washing the dishes. We've gone hiking, swimming, shopping
together, and much of it is done in companiable silence: no need for
chatter filler or unnecessary drama. We're like a little flock of
happy birds, just less frenzied. All of us unabashed lovers of fruits
and vegetables. After the few days alone in the capital city, I am so
happy to have companions, now a mix of alone and together time.

This morning, under the auspices of the moon still, we set off in the
early darkness for the dry forest of Guanica. This place is amazing,
for while the rest of the island gets plenty or a reasonable amount of
rain, this little rain-shadowed location has cacti. Cacti growing
right in the sand on the beach. Other small enduring low-growing
bushes, all prickly, ranged over the hillside. Epiphytes, like
vivacious up-does clung to other plants, while others drifted
gracefully towards the earth like many strands of beards.

Neither the guidebook nor any interpretive signs offered us anything
approaching a map, so we wandered on the marked trails we haphazardly
found, in quiet happy appreciation. Until by the middle of the day, we
found ourselves on a trail which was unceremoniously becoming more and
more insubstantial, until we found ourselves without any indication at
all of where to place our feet.  But we knew where the ocean was, we
could see it, and so we picked our way gingerly forth through the dry
mass. The forging was incredibly slow, given the pokiness of the
environment (cacti and all that). But I commented at least it wasn't
muddy. Not exactly the most forgiving forest to be ducking through,
but when we made it to the paved road I shouted indeed and there was
much rejoicing. I picked hairy sticky free-riders from my legs, and a
substantial star-fish like spine from my sneaker, and all was well.

It is noisy here, at this beach house. One might expect the endless
crash of surf to be the dominant sound-track--and even that is so loud
we must raise our voices to be heard even in the living room. But over
the surf are a karaoke bar, a salsa club, and a disco-tech above us on
the hill. The grace-less sounds of their merry-making are indicators
of humans as capable of great celebration but also of irritating
disruption. Noise is fine if YOU are having the fun. It's also very
loud noise, as is the case for most noises in Puerto Rico.

This noise situation actually encompasses a truth of this island: an
enchanted greenly beautiful tropical ocean-surrounded nugget that is
also one of the most densely populated areas on earth. (Taiwan, for
instance, does top the island) Loud salsa music and crashing surf
illustrate this.

The girls handed me plush over-sized earplugs on my first night, and I
was sure I would need them because I could hear, in full detail, the
parties just up the hill. But, as an experiment, I tried going without
them. So the first night--astonishingly--I fell asleep amidst a salsa
dance, and the second night I drifted off to the bass-heavy
irreverence of reggaeton. (I'm rather proud of myself)

Navi-Land

Posing next to the chicken-footed camels and cookie-eating bears at the bizarre Navi-land. Feliz navidad mi amigos!

The most bizarre Christmas

I'd seen large lit signs for "Navi Land" on the edge of the old capital city, near the pier. At first this bemused me: some sort of activity center for those serving Navy duty and their families? But that didn't make sense... Then I realized this was Navidad Land, Christmas Land!, and I padded over in the dark, drawn by the glowing lights and blasting music.

So thus evening I experienced the most bizarre Christmas, Puerto Rico style.

The park was decked out in tents, miniature gingerbread houses, cut-outs of camels (the three wise men?), oversized candy canes stuck in flower planters, and Christmas lights on....palm trees. For someone conditioned for Christmas as fat snowflakes, hot chocolate, and tasteful hymns, this was hilarious and strange. Parents held plastic cups of beer while their children ate cotton candy and played in the decorative houses; a giant cruise ship slid by in the night. Permeated throughout all of this was blasting chincy Christmas barf music: the type with overly perky child choirs singing cloyingly of santa claus.

I walked around enjoying the surreal-ness of this (I was the only "tourist"--this was thoroughly a local draw) until I couldn't stomach it any longer. But too strange not to write about!

Puerto Rico

I am in Puerto Rico.

To eat mangoes and enjoy sun, marvel at tropical plants and dance to salsa from passing cars, and to have two fewer weeks of winter in central NY.

My dear father woke up at the offensive hour of 3:30am to whisk me to the airport this morning. And by lunchtime I found myself in the wildly different world of a tropical island. My parents may be wondering with lament what about my education has made me such an incorrigible traveler, but they still support and love me and for that I am exceedingly grateful.

I write this using the focused yet still inaccurate sticky tap of thumbs on wee screen. This is no smart phone, mind, but an iPod touch with a cracked screen and some hope of garnering wifi.

People may see me sitting here, by the bay with pink sunset clouds, thinking I am madly texting. But no, I am playing writer.

I wonder if i travel alone because it makes me write. I get all full of solo observances and need to put them into words.

I sit here in this park in the capital city, with the biggest pour of rum $3.50 ever bought someone, listening to the car alarms, the Spanish chatter, watching the groups of tourists--both white and local alike--meander about. Soon I shall go to one of the food trucks and eat something cheap, authentic, and fattening.

The plane landed to shouts and applause; that's how it is here. There are 4 million Puerto Ricans on the island and 4 million of them living elsewhere and there is palpable love of this island as home, problems and all.

I felt like an air-feeding plant upon leaving the air-conditioned falsehood of the airport: the air so gluey and wet I could survive by it alone lacking water from the soil. Then I set out to roam the capital (capitol?) city, the unaccustomed kiss of sun on my skin, the carribean breezes dismantling my hair. I just walked and barely did any thinking: it was mostly a meditation in observing this strange new world I was finding myself so suddenly in. Air travel makes these astonishing contrasts possible. Houses painted pleasing bright colors, tropical plants in unabashed jubilation. The men here sport pristinely buzzed haircuts and many tattoos, the Dont Mess With Me Women are also tattooed. People watching is always a favorite past time.

Unlike my previous experience in the tropics (Vietnam), here I can drink the water, feel no worry of malaria, and have a molecule of hope to understand at least a few words in the language. I can read some signs at least!