So it turns out that our internet situation is way worse than I anticipated. We technically have internet at our camp, but it takes at least 20 minutes just to load gmail, and that´s if it decides to load at all. Our other option is an internet cafe in town, which is two hours away by bus. It sounds like we go into town on Fridays to get more fruits and vegetables, so that´s the only day that I´ll have any kind of reliable internet. I use ¨reliable¨ very loosely, because it´s horribly slow, depends on the availability of computers, and the computers may or may not work once you´re on them.
Other than that, so far it´s going well - we´ve started practicing each of the different jobs (nest searching, mist netting / banding, metabolic rate measurements) and I´m using Spanish again! We cook meals on a rotation - breakfast is on your own, but then we each take a day to cook lunch and dinner for everyone else. The meals have been surprisingly delicious! But without meat or dairy, I can see them getting a little repetitive in the coming months. There are two other fluent English speakers here - Meaghan is from New York and Jack is from England. That´s two accents to make fun of! We all get along really well and so far it´s been great hanging out with them. It´s way colder than I anticipated (been freezing my butt off every night), so I bought two blankets in town earlier today. Unfortunately we have cold water showers (more like ice water), but since it´s so cold and we don´t sweat very much, we tend to go a few days before braving the showers. I also wear so many layers that it kind of keeps the smell trapped... or so I hope. We did just found out that the tourists across the road have hot water, so we may be sneaking over to their showers when we can. If that doesn´t work, at least I have a travel sized bottle of Febreeze...
I´ve taken a ton of great pictures of birds, monkeys (stealing food from the tourist kitchen), a snake, and a coati. Don´t know if I´ll be able to upload any of them before I´m in Cusco again (with REAL internet), but the computer that I´m on now doesn´t have working USB ports, so I guess I´ll have to try next week. Oh, but we get a week off in either the first or second week of September, and we´ll have to go back to Cusco no matter where we decide to go after that, so I´ll definitely have better internet then. Now I need to figure out where to go for my time off! It sounds like Meaghan is interesting in going to Colca Canyon (TONS of condors there) with me the few days after we finish in December, so it might be nice to just hang out in Cusco with nice amenities and what not for that week (you know, since I´m sleeping in a tent on a hard wooden platform for four months without much variety in food). I´m thinking a nice hotel with a comfy bed and lots of meat and cheese. And pizza. And beer.
Well I don´t know how long it will take to upload this post, and I only have 40 minutes left on my internet, so I should probably wrap this up :-P My plan for communication is to draft emails at camp without internet and send them out when it´s working well enough there, but if not I´ll just send them out on Fridays. Same with blog updates. By the way, it´s really hard to know which email client will be easier to use on a given day, so if you want to communicate, just send email to both of my addresses (stephl301@comcast.net and stephanie.a.levins@gmail.com). Hoping to go into more detail in my next post, but today I´m just sitting here rambling in the internet "cafe". Ciao!
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