There are a few things to catch up on I guess...
This week was the first real week of classes. Tuesday I had my first class of essential plant nutrition. The professor is super nice and kept checking in with me to see if I was understanding the material. The biggest hang up we had was when he was trying to explain grafting...luckily a chalkboard came to the rescue. It feels a little strange to be the slow kid in class that requires extra attention. Hopefully the situation will improve...
Monday and Wednesday I had my first Intermediate 2 Portuguese classes. We've got a nice mix of internationals- Japan, China, Germany, Poland, Spain, and Scotland all in one class. Makes for interesting conversation, especially considering the topic of this course is influences on language. Our first assignment was to try to write in the languague of the internet (for example: R u going 2?) but in portuguese. quite difficult.
This Thursday was the cherry on top. I managed to get a spot in a Plant Geography/Forest Ecology class that takes field trips every thursday to different forest ecosystems around the state. We started at the beach taking about soil formation and movements of plants during ice ages and then went on to look at sand dunes farther and farther from the sea and how they get colonized by different species. Then we went slogging through a mangrove forest with water up to our thighs and mud that smells of rotten eggs and lots of cool crabs. Our bus broke down a few times and we had to push it to get it started everytime (think "Little Miss Sunshine"). It finally bit the dust in the mountain on the way back to curitiba and we got to spend some quality time together eating bananas and fried manioc stuffed with chicken (coxinhas) at a road side stop. Overall it was a grand adventure. You know you're in a good group when someone in your class has to bring home two branchs of a tree species because ones female and the other is male. what exactly he's planning on doing with the vegetation I'm not so sure.
Today I'm packing up to go to Piracicaba again. Prof. Stape, my advisor, is going to be in town and we are going to start working on my project sampling plan and what all I'm going to do with myself while I'm here. I'm really looking forward to getting started on my research.
Alright, that's it for now, i'm off to see some lecture that supposedly is really good, though I have no idea what it's going to be about. hopefully he has a chalkboard.
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