the first ending

well
we are in Granada now, on¨the touristy bit of the course, where we get to shop and wander around looking lost. granada seems cool, but to be honest it´s major culture shock to go from quiet, unpaved, peaceful ometepe island to a big bustling city. and i really miss my monos. tomorrow morning all of my friends from this course will be heading back down to san jose to all fly home. i will stay here for an extra day then go to managua to meet the students flying in for the next class.

and GUESS WHAT. there is a landermat here. we were all setting off on a mission with our bags of dirty laundry this morning, when the lady at the hostel front desk was like ¨leave it here and they will pick it up and then you pay when they bring it back later¨... WHAT? SERIOUSLY? AWESOME!!!! i´m pretty sure that it´s too good to be true though, probably it will come back with half my clothes missing. but still. laundry. real laundry. when our prof told us there was laundry here, i teared up a little. which sounds rediculous, but you gotta understand my state of mind at the time. it was just dawning on me that i´d be here for a whole nother month. which is fine. but i would really like three days at home in between. to see my family, have a bath, use my computer, not be sweaty, and REALLY WASH MY CLOTHES. so the fact that i can do at least do one of those things really got me emotional. who woulda thought that old Hygiene? would get so excited about laundry?

i can´t believe that the course is over! it was awesome!!!! stressful and obscenely drama-filled at times, but so awesome. i have made some really great friends here, and ometepe won´t be the same without them.

i should probly pick up where i left off though.

the volcano.

¨four hour hike up¨is the most rediculous false advertising in the world.
i believe that ¨12 hour death climb¨is more appropriate.
K and Laoora and i had a really great day though, despite the sheer pain and terror of it. Laoora and i were rediculously slow and made K (who was having no trouble keeping up with the guide and therefore insisted on singing inspirational songs to us the whole way up) carried our backpacks. He´s basically a superhero, we decided. the fact that he was friendly and patient the whole time despite our inability to not be rediculously slow only added to the superhero persona. we got up into the cloud forests though, and HOLY CRAP! K and i just looked at each other: DEGOBA! YODA! WHERE? it is amazing! you can´t see far because it´s totally cloudy and the trees grow as horizontal as they do up. and it´s awesome.

then on the way back down, our guide got really far ahead of us and when we caught up to him, he was just chillin on the side of the path holding two armadillos. seriously. it was so random. pretty cool though. i´ve never seen an armadillo before.

the last few days on the island were pretty stressful. lots of counting hours and hours and thousands and thousands of lines of data over and over and over again. and compiling it into chi-squared tests and graphs. finally at 11:30pm the night before my presentation, while hashing through the background theory of my topìc with my prof, both of us laughing to tears at the sheer rediculousness of it all (and the copious amounts of chewy coffee in our systems), wondering what the hell all my data meant, the penny dropped. and it just made sense. we looked at each other with that ¨the light bulb just turned on¨ look. it was pretty awesome.
so i finished off my powerpoint presentation, slept for an hour, rehearsed to Jess a couple of times, and then presented the next morning. and it went sooo well. i was really surprised actually. i was hoping for an inchoerent gongshow at best, but it actually went alright.
so it looks like i will, hopefully, be keeping up with my own study for the next month. if i could log another 60 hours that would be AWESOME but who knows what my TA responsabilities might include.... so far it involves picking people up at the airport and getting them to the hotel.... which, judging by my own arrival in san jose, will require me to be fluent in spanish. which i am not. so this should be interesting.

aaaaaanyways
there are things i should go and do. like sleep in that hammock. and read my book. and look up the lord of the rings map. K and i were trying to draw it for memory at breakfast but it didn´t go well, so we all played lotr hangman instead. aspiring primatologist are my kind of people. we have that shameless geeky cool thing down pat. evolution puns. star wars references. intimate knowledge of the lotr script. and of course, monkey impressions.

ok. i go now.
i´ll post again when i´m back on the island next week.ç
oh how i miss the island.