Touché

1 July 2016

I am now paying penance for having complained about 5:30am wake up calls before, as the new site this week is further up the mountain & requires us to rise & shine at 4am! Fortunately, I’m not the only one who is not a morning person; frankly no one here but Mario is, so we worked out a new schedule of sorts. Mario & 2 others get up at 4am to get ready; Mario makes breakfast; we quickly eat then head out to set up camp & open the nets by 5am. (Good lord it’s a haul up that mountain! 30 minutes almost strait incline & I can barely talk through gasps of air when we arrive at camp). The 4^th person gets to sleep in; enter the previous day’s data & catalogue photographs in the morning; make & pack everyone’s lunch; then meet the rest of us at camp at noon for lunch & an afternoon of mist netting. At 4:30pm, one of the early risers (not Mario) heads back to the station to make dinner. The rest of us close up camp & head back down the mountain at 5:30pm for a 7pm dinner & then in bed around 8:30pm for the next day’s early morning. We are to rotate like this every day so that each person cooks something 2 days in a row, 1 day off & each person gets to sleep in every 3 days.

 

We’ll see how this goes. Getting up at 4am today wasn’t too bad, as I couldn’t sleep well in anticipation of such an early morning & the “pincha” rooster crowing at 3am didn’t help either – I’d be very happy for some fresh pollo right about now.

Our downtime in camp now includes several rounds of Rummikub & Spanish/English dictionary games. This time it was a practice in English pronunciation, as the “th-“ and “ph-“ sounds are somewhat hard to make in the Spanish language. Though, oddly, enough, they have no problem making the equivalent “f” sound in “fucking”. This is a favorite cussword of theirs when trying to swat away flies, as in “fucking moscas”. I find it interesting that they have no problem cussing in another language, but when they want to say “shit” in Spanish, which is “mierda”, they say “miercoles” (Wednesday). I guess it would be like when someone in English says “fudge” as a cussword. They were also intrigued by the letter “w”, as there are no Spanish-derived words that start with this letter; they’re all Anglicisms like “wow” & “whisky”. But likewise, my companions enjoyed teasing me that I can’t roll my R’s to save my life, so they decided to show off with some Spanish-language tongue twisters. I literally could not make out a single word they were saying. Not to be outdone, however, I had them in stitches when I gave them a taste of Suzy selling seashells & a woodchuck chucking wood.  

Weighing the birds

Tomorrow will be my turn to sleep in, enter data & make lunch. The menu: rice & beans with cabbage & carrot salad. Two out of 3 of those I have no problem with; however, I’ve never used a pressure cooker to cook beans before so I had Mario show me after dinner. I’m very nervous about the quality of my cooking skills (& my ability to understand all of his instructions in Spanish) &/or possibly blowing up the beans/myself. Veremos…