Nacho

I’m afraid you will have to wait a little longer for a full-fledged post to come from this weary brain of mine. I am busy with work at the moment and taking all spare moments for reading, relaxing, and attending the festival, which is just outside my door.

Only 2 real things of note:

1. My Landlord’s name is Nacho.
   
2. Nacho and I have bonded. He stuck a rolled up poster through my back window screen as a gift. At first I thought he was using it to keep the screen propped open for the hose, but he told me this afternoon as he hooked up my gas that it is a gift! It is an old French print. You know, like the old stylized Absinthe posters with the black cats and so forth? Well, he was such a darling and gave me one of a monkey!! (I found this photo of it online.) Oh Nacho…

Wait, actually, I should also note that he was a boxer back in the days that he lived in NYC. This is just a tidbit to keep you intrigued. J I’ll tell you more about Nacho in the next full post. Fascinating man…

I should also note that the best Salsa band in the country is apparently playing at the festival this evening, and, lucky me, I get to hear and see the whole thing from right in my flat. This is because the festival is, I emphasize, RIGHT outside my door. Tada! Maybe I will record a little bit and post an audio clip with the photos tomorrow. I’m not sure I know how, but there ya go. Hmmm… I shall investigate.

Anyway, I’m off to go bake. I like to bake when I’m stressed, and now that it looks like I'm cookin with gas (forgive me!), apple pie is on the menu.

Best to all, and thank you for all your comments and feedback! Please keep it coming! Even emails are great.

Much love,

B

Dockside Digs and Monkeying Around

So, I moved.  Hmm… not as great as I’d hoped.

The new flat is located in a big white building on the main plaza of Punta across from the dock and right next to the Post Office. It isn’t on the second floor as I’d been told nor does it have a balcony, but rather it is first floor, with a fenced in outdoor entry area. It isn’t exactly the type of place you’d set up a chair and read outside. The front of the apartment area is kind of noisy as it sits beneath the landlord’s (and his extended family’s) apartment, and they like to sit outside on their balcony, drink beer and talk loudly in Spanish late into the evening, every evening. Across the street is also a bar that plays loud Salsa music until late every night Thursday to Sunday. Perhaps this will help me learn Spanish, though. Heh. 

The apartment itself is smaller, cheaper, and faaaar dirtier than the other place. Unlike the other house, which was pretty much in move-in condition aside from the atrocious plumbing situation, this place had been shut up for quite some time before I was to move-in. They only opened it up a few hours before I was to move-in, and the landlord didn’t get much of a chance to clean. You do the math.

As a result, I spent most of my Sunday and Monday nights scrubbing and cleaning things. I arrived at the flat with only a quarter bottle of bleach and a roll or two of paper towels, and I assure you, it went quickly. What with dusting every surface, bleaching the shower floor, toilet bowl, kitchen and bathroom sinks, laying down paper towel over any essentially uncleanable surface (inside cabinets, top of fridge, inside drawers, etc.), and so on, I was pretty knackered. I managed to make the place livable by evening and with a few more nights of cleaning, I think I should be OK. The place needs a broom, actual gas in the stove so I can cook, and new screens and outlets, but who am I kidding? It is Puerto Rico. It will do just fine. Nevertheless, I triple sheeted my mattress and pillow.  That is one place where unclean is unacceptable.

*Note: There are some happy things about the new place: a crazy mural on my living room wall, a shorter walk to the dock and the Panaderia, warm shower water, and no leaking ceilings. Also the landlord is very interesting: late 70s, extremely frail and still wearing sweaters and pants from the 50s, with a nostalgic passion for NYC rooted in memories of his own early years living on Fulton St. and in Little Italy. We bonded. He tried to set me up with his nephew, who lives in Brooklyn. No joke.*

On another unfortunate note, my right foot is swollen with fire ant bites. There are hidden mounds all over the place, and as I was moving out Sunday, I managed to step in one and get my right foot covered in bites. By this afternoon, the bites were pretty epic. I removed my sock and bam: big, juicy, blistery looking swollen bites all over my second and third right foot toes. I slathered them in hydrocortisone and Neosporin, but my toes still swelled up and look ridiculous.  I hope that by tomorrow the swelling will have gone down. I don’t know how fun it will be to hike around with weeping wounds on my foot. Ew.

Now on to the fun stuff: it rained a lot this past weekend, and this is great. Why, you ask? Well, when it rains a lot, the lowland areas around the feeding corrals on Cayo fill with water and in large quantities. This means… PRIMATE POOL PARTY!!!!  Yup, you read that right. J As soon as it clears up and heats up, the baby monkeys use the giant rain water lakes as pools and the nearby palm trees and bushes as water slides and high jumps.

Imagine yourself standing by a huge pool of water. Adult monkeys are collecting around the edges bending and drinking water, wetting monkey chow to soften it, splashing bits of water around to clean the surface. Then suddenly, FLYING BABY MONKEY *SPLASH!* FLAILING BABY ARMS AND LEGS *SPLOOSH!* BABY MONKEY CANNONBALL *SPELUNK!* Then tons of scurrying and splashing as the babies and juveniles hurry back up to the top of their bush or palm tree and reset. This is literally how it goes… for hours. They are like little human children in that regard. They do belly flops, cannonballs (The actually grasp their feet and tuck in.), and launch themselves off higher and higher branches until they chicken out. I’ve even seen a few juveniles push another juvenile off his branch into the water. I had to stop myself from doing a voiceover. (“Marlon’s a scaredycat! Nyah nyah nyah nyah!!”) 

Anyway, you can imagine how enjoyable this is to watch. It more than makes up for the fact that days on Cayo after it has rained are not terribly fun. We are wet. Our shoes are muddy and gross. The monkeys are more difficult to follow because of the new, soaking obstacles, wet grass, and so forth, but primate pool time is uplifting and heartwarming. J

Ok. I’m off to go clean up a little more and then sleep.

Remember: leave comments! I need to know what you want to hear about and who is out there reading.

Much love,

B

Punta v. Palmas... Hmm...

I am moving today. J

I like the place I’m in now, but due to some confusion at the CPRC about booking us lodgings, the rentals got mixed up, so now I have to switch places for the rest of the summer. I will be moving from where I am now to just down the street above the Post Office and across from the dock. It should be a nice change, and I’ll be moving to a second-floor place with a balcony, which must be deemed an advantage. Only problem? It’s farther from the office (and Internet). Pooh. Ah well, I’ll post pictures as soon as it stops raining.

I have been really enjoying my first few days living by myself. I sort of underestimated the pleasure to be had in cooking for myself, doing what I want when I want, and organizing things the way I like. I think that by moving to this new place, I’ll be able to completely set things up the way I like, and it might just be the making of the summer. The only downside to single living that I can see so far is when there is a bug, you have to deal with it yourself. I learned that the hard way. Eep!

Speaking of the past few days, Friday was a lot of fun. I spent the morning on Cayo running subjects, which went alright. I started the day running Opposite Rope conditions, which involves presenting apples, which are tied to 3ft long ropes, to the monkeys. Unfortunately, this proves to be a test of your reflexes as well as their instincts because if you are not on top of your game, they steal away with your ropes and force you to chase them into thick brush to get them back. Sadly, I was rudely shown how off my game I was: two monkeys ganged up on me and approached both ropes at the same time, each stealing a rope and running off in opposite directions. This is not ideal. I ended up losing one of the ropes in the woods and couldn’t track it down, so mid-morning I had to switch conditions. Now I have to make another piece of rope. Ehn. Not a fan.

Anyway, I took a half-day Friday because Tara, Alli, and Sasha offered to split the costs of a rental car for two days with me (~$10/day/person) in order to take a trip out of Punta (always necessary). So around 12:30, I met up with the girls and waited for the rental car guy to pick us up. (It is like Enterprise Rent-a-Car, “We’ll pick you up!”)

Once in the car, we went to some clothing places. We all had things we forgot or needed. For example, I was ill informed about the time we spend on the island, so I came down with one pair of shorts and no nice clothes – not even a skirt or a dress. (For Doreen’s party, I had to borrow a dress from Sasha. Thank goodness we were the same size.)  We then headed to Walmart to pick up other necessities and rounded out the afternoon excursion with a trip to Ralph’s, the big Humacao supermarket. I stocked up on more fruit and veggies. (By the way, I made a new food discovery: the Newton Fruit Crisp 100 Calorie Bar thingies make a great dessert.) 

Once we had delivered our things at home and cleaned up, we headed out for the evening. We made reservations at a little Asian restaurant in Palmas del Mar called Blue Hawaii. Palmas del Mar is a combination between a resort and a gated community. You pass through guarded gates to get in and all the buildings are white and uniform. However, the place is huge. It has its own shopping center, fitness center, street after street of condos, a giant lake with lit fountains in the middle, and a police force/security. It took us at least 10 minutes after driving through the gates to get to the restaurant on the other side of town. All of this makes it very difficult to know what to make of Palmas. I mean, it has its name presented like a city on the highway exit signs, but it isn’t really a city, is it? It is a strange place and certainly a very different place from Punta.

You get the same feeling passing into Palmas as you get when you enter a resort in any Caribbean locale, discomfort and relief.  Discomfort because you have just witnessed the true state of life there, and you feel as if you are lying to yourself and are over-privileged. But also relief because always feeling guilty about your good lot in life can be exhausting and because feigning ignorance and being pampered for a while is really not the worst thing in the world.  I don’t know about you, but this is how I feel, and this is certainly how I felt the other night. I have been living in Punta, which is far from third-world but also far from Upper East Side NYC, and after being somewhat marooned there, there was definitely a sense of relief that I was going some place where dressing up and ordering sushi and buying nice wine, cheese, and olive oil was not out of the realm of possibility. Call me spoiled, but it was nice. The uniformity of the place was notable and ridiculous, though, and I actually enjoyed arriving back in Punta later that night with the multicolored facades and varying architecture, no matter how grungy it can be.

We had a relaxing and easy time at dinner. The food was delicious, which was sort of a surprise, but Frommer’s did tell us it was the best Chinese in the region. That probably isn’t a hard title to achieve, but I should have trusted Frommer nonetheless. Good on ya mate. Later we went out and got ice cream, then drove back to Punta, and had Pink Martinis at Tara and Alli’s. Scratch that. I should not say Pink Martinis. I should say, alcoholic Capri Sun because the product is essentially the same. Apparently, some genius realized he could prepackage cocktails, such as pink martinis (a vodka cranberry, essentially), mojitos, and margaritas, in Capri Sun-type packages. These are then be frozen or refrigerated and pulled out and transported wherever. Genius. I wish they sold them in the states. It was so… college. Ha. They were actually pretty good, but by that time at night, I was tired from work. So after I finished mine, the girls escorted me home, and I called it a night.  All in all, a good day.

So, now I have related my recent events and need to go contact my new landlord somehow. I will keep you updated.

Much love,

B

P.S. – I finished The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and loved it. It is a short and quick book, interesting, and deceptively informative. I would suggest this to anyone, looking for a light summer read. I also read Straight Up and Dirty by Stephanie Klein, which is a relationship-focused memoir. I found it sarcastic and easy, but self-indulgent. A good beach choice, but no more. Now, I am reading Water for Elephants, a real book. Huzzah!

LAB LINK: Gorilla Economics

In case any of you are interested in the other work being done in the lab back at Harvard:

Professor Hauser just sent out a link to a piece that was just released (video and written) about the gorilla economics experiments that Katie and Brian have been doing in conjunction with the Franklin Park Zoo. (http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2009/06/08/franklin_park_gorillas_learn_economic_decision_making_in_study_of_roots_of_human_behavior/). 

Definitely check it out. 

Much love, 

B

My First Day Flying (Han) Solo....

Thursday was my first day flying solo. It was actually kind of exciting. I’m not sure it should have been, since it wasn’t very different from any other day on the island. Nevertheless, I was kind of into the idea of “flying solo” and what not, so I took to calling myself “Maverick” for the day. (Julia: I’m a maverick! *pew pew pew*) It was pretty uneventful, though, so I’m not sure I warranted the title. Sigh… I did find that I am actually more productive on my own than with a group, when it comes to IDing the monkeys. I think it has something to do with the fact that one person can more easily creep around a monkey than many. On the other hand, the extra hands are seriously helpful for manning the video camera.

Although I was flying solo, Brian shadowed me all morning as a sort of evaluation. He didn’t help or advise in any way. He just followed and noted. Then he gave me advice on baiting technique, tips for protecting the camera, and choosing subjects. By the lunch boat, however, he felt comfortable leaving me to the monkeys by myself and took off. It was his last Cayo visit for this trip. He leaves tomorrow evening from San Juan, and then I am really on my own.

In order to bid Brian farewell, the researchers all went to Jaws restaurant for dinner. Jaws is an interesting establishment. From the outside it looks like a cross between a surf shop and an eatery, a tiki hut and a log cabin. Inside it looks like a run down dance hall with random, drugstore decorations hanging from the ceiling and out of place, chicken-themed needlepoint table runners on the generic, round white plastic tables. In the middle of the restaurant stands an old school juke-box filled entirely with Spanish music and an little known American 70s and 80s tunes. (When we arrived and were the only patrons in the place, they noticeably changed the music to anything with English lyrics = The Beegees.)

The restaurant owner is also an interesting character. He looks like he should have been running a “pasta and other” joint in Hoboken, not a burger and burrito joint in Punta. He is short, potbellied, wears a striped, faded v-neck polo showing off some chest hair and a thick gold chain around his neck and a gold Rolex knock-off. Slacks. Slicked, combed hair. A round scar in the middle of his forehead. Spoke perfect, almost Italian-accented English. I don’t know, I just kept looking at him as he graciously circled the table taking our orders and substitutions, wondering whether he’d known about casting calls for the Sopranos.

Anyway, the company was lively, and good conversations were had by all, I believe. It is interesting how work follows people everywhere, though. I was sitting in the middle of the long rectangular table we’d pieced together, and I kept my ear in all the discussions. I was surprised at how often the island comes up in conversation, how often the monkeys are discussed specifically by ID, and how often life trajectories and futures are pored over. It is understandable, I suppose. We all have this place in common. We spend the bulk of our time on the island with the monkeys. We have this shared ground (literally) and understanding and experience, so it doesn’t shock me so much that we all talk about it with one another. Similarly, when you spend so much time with one group of monkeys or doing focal studies of a handful of individuals all the time, you get to know the different personalities of the monkeys very well. 

Then again, I guess I thought that once people got off the island they’d want to leave the island and the work behind them. I think I am forgetting that for many of these people, the island and this work is their life. I am not there yet, and I don’t see myself getting there anytime soon. After all, most people here are looking to be academics. I am not. (This is a commonality that contributes to their discussions of futures and career trajectories. )I’m not the only one, though.  Nevertheless, I was able to contribute to the conversations, since we have our own set of experiment regulars to remark on.  (Next post, maybe I’ll give you all some monkey personality profiles?)

Anyway, it was enjoyable, despite the fact that it took FOREVER to get our food and the orders weren’t properly executed. Then again, I paid less than $6 for my entire meal, so I think I can handle it.

Ok, I’m going to break this post up a little, since I haven’t posted in a few days and I now have lots to tell and way more to come this weekend and next (FESTIVAL IN PUNTA!).

Much love, and I’ll write another post later today.

B

PHOTO INTERLUDE

The oft-used pre-aggression stance. This is a female. They do this often. All you have to do is step toward them, and they freak out and do this.

Allison, one of the research assistants on the UChicago team (above) and Sasha and Tara discussing the day's work in the lunch cage (below).

A red urchin under the sea grass in the intertidal...

Iguanas are everywhere on both islands.

There are iguana skeletons in tact all over the island, if you look around. They are invasive to the island, but unlike the monkeys, we don't like them. They eat the monkey chow, which is how they become so large, but often they are too stupid to figure out that they must walk out of the doorways in the corral fences in order to escape. As a result, you can often just sit and watch iguanas run head long into fences for hours. After a while, though, the unlucky ones will get stuck in the fence, and eventually, they die of dehydration and starvation (and sometimes monkey attacks).

Hermit crabs are everywhere, too. They range in size from smaller than your fingertip to bigger than your fist and are actually quite creepy. This is mainly because they swarm on dead things. You do the math.... Yeuch!

Remnants of the island's original home beneath the sea are visible everywhere in shells, huge chunks of bleached, calcified brain coral, and giant volcanic rocks. 

(Above) This is Sasha. I keep mentioning her, so here she is. She is awesome. :) I mean, everyone is pretty awesome, but she is definitely up there. Heh.

Sorry about the lazy post today, but there ya go...

Much love!

B

When I'm Not Working...

I have never done so much leisure reading in my life. This is by no means a bad thing, but I have been reading constantly to pass the time here, since it is too hot to really do anything else and since we do not have Internet in the flat.  So far I have read:

• ·      Watchmen by Alan Moore
  
• ·      Foreign Babes in Beijing by Rachel DeWoskin
  
• ·      Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
  
• ·      Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl
  
• ·      My Horizontal Life – Chelsea Handler
  

This is in two weeks time. That is insane. I kind of like it, though. I have become a mini book lender in the research community, and I really enjoy the fact that I now have a running list of books to order on Amazon.  Next order will probably be in a few weeks, tops.

I am currently reading a book called The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows. It sounds trite, I know, but in fact, it is turning out to be a nice little story and very engaging. Not terribly difficult, but interesting. It is told through a series of letters between the main characters and is about an authoress in 1946, post-WWII London, who is looking for a new story to start her post-war career. She stumbles upon it, when she receives a letter from a man on the island of Guernsey in the Channel. From there unravels the story of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, which came into being as a cover for an illicit roast pig dinner during Guernsey’s occupation by Nazi forces but evolved into both a protective and literary community. So far, so good. I’ll let you know how it turns out.

Today was Katie’s last day on the island. L She came out in the morning for photos and a last walk around, but didn’t run any subjects. Luckily in the 11^th hour subjects started responding to her methods properly, and I believe she took off with a suitable number of successful trials for her pilot. Unfortunately, when we attempted to go back to the mainland with her to see her off, the demand for seats on the lunch boat was so great that only those who had previously arranged for a seat could go. As a result, Brian and I had to give her brief hugs on the boat, disembark, and hunker down for another three hours in the lunch cage before we could head back. (This is standard, by the way. Technically, the lunch boat at 11:30 is only for CPRC staff. We, the researchers, can only get a seat if there is room. We are supposed to plan accordingly.) This was very upsetting, since our video camera battery had died, so we could no longer run trials.To kill time, I decided to take a long walk by myself around the shore of the islands. We spend so much time on the inland, since we go where the monkeys go, and I am always tempted by the clear water and pebbly intertidal. So around 12:30, I trudged off with my camera and began to trek around the pathless areas of the island.  I found some pretty cool stuff: jagged volcanic rock, black and raspberry red sea urchins, baby iguanas, rock slides, and even an eel.  It was very relaxing and fun to explore on my own. (It also helped that I learned how to use the macro function on my camera.)

When I finally got back, I had to rush through my usual routine of shower, lunch, data analysis, etc. I accidentally left my phone in Brian’s rental car yesterday, when he was nice enough to drive me to the supermarket so I could get some real produce.  He figured he was leaving on Friday, and that it would be nice to throw the undergrad a bone or carrot, as the case may be. And, I gotta tell ya, I had never been more excited to see a cucumber or a bag of baby carrots in my life. I must have looked deranged, since I was practically yipping and jumping for joy at the sight of the vegetables and fruits at Ralph’s Supermercado in Humacao. Consequently, I am claiming temporary insanity due to vegetable overload as the reason for my leaving the cell phone in the car. Alert the media.

Anyway, point is that Kelly, the grad student on the Yale team, has a rental car for her time down here, so she was nice enough to drive me back to the rental car place to pick up my phone. We nearly got lost on the way back and, thus, were compelled to explore a little of the southern side of Humacao and Palma del Mar, but all in all, pretty uneventful. When I got back, though, I was ushered into the Yale abode and got to hang out there for quite a while chatting about school and boyfriends and later old high school drama (with Adrienne, of course).  Very relaxing and a ton of fun. Their house is so much comfier and decorated than ours!!! Not fair.  (I will admit, I had a momentary lapse during which I may or may not have blurted out that the house was nice enough to make me want to go to Yale… I take it back, though. Don’t hurt me….)

Now that I’ve gotten to know the different people down here, many more things appear to be happening. Tara, Allison, and Sasha are renting a car this coming weekend and are planning to do some sightseeing, including going into Old San Juan, visiting the rainforest, going kayaking on a nearby bioluminescent bay, doing some hiking up to the fresh water swimming holes, and visiting some white sand beaches down the coast.  The Yale group also invited me along to into San Juan on Saturday evening for dinner, etc. There are also little get-togethers and movie excursions into Humacao popping up all over the place. I think this may have to do with the fact that more people make bigger excursions seem more worthwhile or worth the expense. Either way, I’m excited to get out and do things outside of Punta, and everyone is being extremely generous by inviting me to join in or tag along. Hooray for altruism!

Anyway, with luck by the next post, I’ll have more to share that is of interest both about the monkeys and me. As for now, though, I’m going to make myself a dinner with real vegetables and chicken and do some more reading. Remember let me know if you have questions. Also – recommendations for places and things to visit here in PR are most welcome.

Much love,

B