Turtle Watching!

This weekend was especially exciting, as we had our final two outings for the CCS program.

Friday night we went turtle watching at Matura, on the eastern coast of Trinidad. It is the second busiest beach in the world for leatherback sea turtles to nest. Leatherbacks are the largest species of sea turtles, and they were amazing to see!

First of all, it was just exciting to be at the beach at night. It reminded me of being at beaches at home at night, and camping trips on the beach on the peninsula. The temperature was perfect, not too warm or cool, with a strong sea breeze, and there were big waves and a bright moon, and you could see the silhouettes of the palm trees, and the sand was really soft.

We only got to see one sea turtle up close because the tide was strong enough that they were having trouble coming onto the beach. We saw a few that tried to get up the beach, but after being beaten back by the waves a few times went back out to sea to wait for a better tide. When you're turtle watching you have to be really careful because if you make too much noise or use bright lights the turtles won't come to the beach. You also can't get close to them until their nest is mostly made, or they will not lay their eggs.

The turtle we got to see was about 5 feet long and 4 feet wide, which I guess is pretty average sized. We got to watch her finish digging the hole, which was impressive. She used her back fins kind of as shovels, digging them deep into the sand and then turning them over to scoop sand out of the ground. Their nests end up being 2 1/2 to 3 feet deep. Then once they start laying eggs they (apparently) go into a sort of trance, so you can take pictures while they are laying. The turtle we saw had not been tagged (they tag all the turtles so they can track them. Leatherback sea turtles travel the globe, but I think mostly live in the North Atlantic because that's where their favorite jellyfish to eat live. So they travel up to Canada and then to Europe and Africa, and nest in around Trinidad, Venezuela, and Suriname) so we saw her get tagged, and then we got to see her lay her eggs, and take pictures, and feel her skin and shell.

Leatherbacks lay between 80 and 120 eggs at once, and they are perfectly round, and are slightly larger than golf balls. These turtles end up nesting about seven times, every 8 or 9 days, so they can end up laying between 800 and 1000 eggs in all. However, their survival rate is not very good, and only 1 out of all these is expected to survive to adulthood.

It was so amazing to see all the eggs, and to get to feel the shell and skin. Just the whole nesting process was amazing, and after seeing the difficulties some of the turtles were having just making it onto the beach made it seem even more incredible. This was definitely one of the highlights of this semester.

Food!

I thought I would do a post describing all the delicious food I have been eating this semester!

Bake and Shark: This is amazing! It’s home is Maracas Beach (it was featured on the Travel Channel I think), and when you go to the beach there are stands and stands selling bake and shark everywhere. It’s also a popular street food at Carnival, but it’s best at Maracas. Bake and Shark is a fried shark fillet (the shark) inside of a fried bread dough (the bake). It comes with various vegetables at most places, but the stand I usually get it from at Maracas lets you dress it up yourself. I always pile it high with pineapple, lettuce, tomato, cucumber, onion, ketchup, and garlic sauce. This makes it really messy, but it is so delicious!

Doubles: Doubles are another popular street food, but they are more common at breakfast. Doubles are a fried batter with curried channa (chickpeas) inside, which sometimes has a sweet mango sauce as well.

Pholourie: Pholourie is an Indian food. It’s fried cornmeal dough (are you seeing a trend here?), kind of shaped like donut holes, that you eat hot with a spicy sweet mango sauce.

Roti: Roti is an East Indian food. You can get several different kinds, but my favorite is just the channa (chickpeas) and potato with buss up shut. The channa and potatoes are curried, and you eat it with the buss up shut, which is ripped up pieces of the roti skin (I guess it’s kind of like a cornmeal tortilla? I don’t really know how to describe it). You eat the channa by tearing off a piece of the buss up shut and pinching pieces of the channa. It’s messy, but so good! And cheap.

Produce: There is so much cheap, fresh produce here, it’s amazing. The Tunapuna market has everything. I get fresh mangos, pineapple, and watermelon all the time, and you can even buy imported Washington apples! The fruit is so good and so ripe, and I’m definitely going to miss it when I’m home.

KFC: Fried chicken is big here. There are three major fried chicken chains here (KFC, Royal Castle Chicken, and Church’s Chicken), but KFC is definitely the biggest. The KFC on the Brian Lara Promenade in Port of Spain is the busiest and most profitable KFC in the world, and it is open 24 hours a day. KFC’s are everywhere, and I have even seen numerous ones with playgrounds, kind of like how McDonald’s has playgrounds at home. I have eaten at KFC more this semester (about 3 times) than I have in the last probably 5 years of my life. Like I said, Trinis like their fried chicken.

Creole food: Creole food is delicious, but it’s not as easy to find as most of the East Indian food. My favorite is pelau, which is rice and chicken, but there is also other food as well.

Sauces: Trinis love their sauces on everything. Pepper sauce is ridiculously spicy, and you can get it on anything! You learn quickly to just ask for no pepper, unless you have a strong tolerance for heat. French fries are slathered in ketchup, barbecue sauce, garlic sauce, mayo, you name it, and eaten with a fork usually because they are so covered you can’t actually pick up the fries. Pizza is liberally doused in ketchup, and when people go to Subway to get sandwiches they sometimes get large amounts of five or six sauces on their subs. I get weird looks at home for not really liking ketchup or mayo, but that is nothing compared to the looks I get when I don’t put sauce on my food here!

There’s other random food here, but this is the basics of what I have been eating!

Easter and a week with Mom

April 1
We went to Siparia (in South Trinidad) and went to a Holy Thursday Mass at a Catholic Church. There is some connection between the Catholic celebration of Holy Thursday and a Hindu celebration. There is a statue of a black Catholic saint, La Divina Pastora, and on Holy Thursday the Hindus gather to worship it. This is also a time when a lot of homeless people gather because they know that religious people will give them food and money. So we went to the service and then helped hand out vegetable soup to the people gathered there. There is also a big bazaar that springs up around this church, so we looked around for a while before heading back to Tunapuna.

April 2 Good Friday
After getting back around 1 am last night, we left at 3:45 am to go to the Mt. St. Benedict stations of the cross celebration for Good Friday. We ended up walking up the mountain to Mt. St. Benedict (which is a really long, steep walk – I usually take a taxi up to my class). The first part of the walk we were just walking behind a truck with speakers, and all the Catholics had candles and were just chanting the Hail Mary. Then, as we arrived at the start of Mt. St. Benedict (they own a lot of land, and it starts a ways down from the actual church) a skit following the events surrounding Jesus’ crucifixion was performed. It was all narrated by a woman playing Mary riding in the truck. It was definitely an interesting experience, especially since there was a guy portraying Judas hanging from a tree like he had hung himself, which is startling at 5 am. We ended up at the church by 6, and got to see the sunrise from the church, which was pretty. After getting back I ended up going back to sleep because I had only slept for 2 ½ hours the night before.

April 4 Easter
Easter is a long weekend here, so most people in our group ended up going to the beach a couple times. I ended up having to work on papers all weekend because I had two due the next week, but Kristen and I went to a church in the morning for the Easter service.

April 6
I was trying to completely finish my two papers by Tuesday, because my mom came to visit and I wanted to not have homework to do. She got into the airport at 10 pm, and then we had an interesting time trying to figure out where she was going to sleep. I was going to get a mattress, but the girl who had it wasn’t around that night, so we borrowed a floaty from Candice which ended up deflating during the night, unfortunately.

April 7
In the morning I made my mom edit my papers so I could print them out and get them turned in, and then I showed her around UWI. Then I went to St. Mary’s like usual in the afternoon. Our time there is winding down, and the library is looking about as good as we can make it. The children’s books were pretty much organized when we got there, and we’ve organized all the young adult books and the adult fiction books. It definitely looks a lot better now. After St. Mary’s I took my mom to Wings, where I made her try roti, and then we went to the mall to watch a movie (The Last Song), where I once again froze because the air conditioning is always so cold!

April 8
I had class in the morning, and turned in my last paper. After class we went to Port of Spain to try to see a museum exhibit with Max, but the museum was closed. I ended up walking around Port of Spain with my mom all afternoon so she could see the city. We took a taxi to the botanic gardens, and then walked back to city gate so we could see everything. I showed her the botanic gardens, the Savannah, NAPA, we stopped at a little museum, Woodford Square, I bought the art supplies I needed, walked by the waterfront, etc. It was a day filled with walking! But the good thing is that it is possible to see most of Port of Spain in one afternoon of walking. That night we had one of our last CCS lectures on the history of the U.S. in the Caribbean, which just ended up being U.S. history, and it didn’t really focus much on current interactions in the Caribbean, and it was ridiculously long.

April 9
We left at 4 am to catch our 6:30 ferry to Tobago. I was so tired just sitting in the ferry terminal waiting to board the ferry (you have to get there two hours early, which is really early when the ferry is at 6:30 am). The ferry is cool, it felt kind of like a big airplane that you can walk around in. There’s seats kind of like on airplanes, except with way more leg room and more aisle space, but there’s even a movie on the trip. Unfortunately I started feeling a little nauseous, so I slept the whole time. When we got to Scarborough we decided we wanted to walk around a little bit since I had never been there before. Well, there’s not actually anything to do in Scarborough, so we ate our breakfast in the botanic gardens and watched chickens and dogs run around before taking a taxi to Store Bay. At Store Bay we took a glass bottom boat ride out to Bucco Reef. I had done this trip in January, but it was definitely fun to get to see the reef again and go snorkeling. I found it odd that over ¾ of the people on our trip could not swim and did not even try to go snorkeling. They just sat in the boat and then got out in the Nylon Pool (which is only three feet deep, so you don’t need to be able to swim). The fish and the reef were amazing again, and it was fun to sit on top of the boat and watch the water and the windsurfers at Pigeon Point. There was a British family with twin girls who were about 4 years old, and they were so cute in their matching pink swimsuits and life jackets. They were entertaining to watch. After the boat ride we hung out at the beach before checking into the place we were staying. Because we had gotten up so early, both of us were asleep by 8pm, and I ended up getting 12 hours of sleep that night.

April 10
We went to this amazing pancake house for breakfast because my mom did not feel like having bake and saltfish for breakfast (but then again, neither did I!). I got the most amazing coconut pineapple pancakes, which were delicious. After breakfast we went swimming one last time before checking out and heading back to Scarborough to catch our afternoon ferry.

April 11
We took a group trip to Maracas, where the waves were the biggest I have ever seen them there! They are a lot of fun to play in, and it was mostly cloudy, which was good since I had gotten really sunburned at Bucco Reef on Friday. I made my mom try bake and shark and pholourie, which she liked.

April 12
We had an interesting adventure in our attempts to go to the Asa Wright Nature Center. After reserving our spots on a tour, the center told me to take a taxi to Arima and then hire a taxi to go to Asa Wright. Well, I had never been to Arima before, so when we reached the city we just got off the maxi and then started wandering around looking for the right taxi. One guy said he would take us for $150 TT each way, which sounded like way too high of a price. Then several people told us to go to one intersection, but it took us about a half hour to figure out which taxi stand to go to, since it wasn’t really a stand and the taxis didn’t come very often. Eventually we got a taxi though, and the guy offered to come pick us up too, which was good because Asa Wright is about 20 minutes up the mountain in the middle of nowhere. Asa Wright was cool, we saw so many hummingbirds and other random colorful birds everywhere. We got a tour where we saw some other birds in the forest, but most of the birds just come to the feeders that are around the veranda.

April 13
We got up really early to go to Port of Spain again to meet with a contact for my final project. This required a 20 minute taxi ride to a part of the city that is northwest of where I usually go. We ended up meeting with Mother Ramdoo, who is a Spiritual Baptist archbishop. She talked for about 2 hours on the Spiritual Baptists before we finally had to leave. We just barely got to my religion class on time, where there was a guest lecture on the aluminum smelters in south Trinidad.

April 14
We went to Wings once more before I took my mom to the airport for her to catch her flight home. Afterwards I went to St. Mary’s again. The other times we had been reading with the kids they started to lose focus after about 30 minutes of reading. However, during those trips they had not had school. This week they were back in school again, so they were just bouncing off the walls the whole time, and didn’t want to read, or be read to. They just wanted to walk around the library and pull books off shelves and do crazy things, which was a little frustrating and really draining.

April 15
The presentations for the costumes we made in my mas class was interesting. My costume had finally been finished, and it ended up being some weird cardboard creation that kind of resembled bamboo and was supposed to make some sort of statement about the rainforest and sustainability and conservation. I’m not sure if it actually conveyed that, but it is done! I’m not a big fan of art projects, they take a long time and end up being really stressful and requiring lots of random materials I don’t usually own, especially not here.

It’s been really cool here lately, we’ve even gotten some rain! It’s also been nice to have it be more cloudy, so the sun doesn’t wake me up before six every morning.

Sorry this has been so long, but I needed to get caught up!