Update 5

Hello philippines!

First up, im still alive! Just that things have been pretty hectic lately, hence the silence.

I think I’m gonna need more than 1 post for everything I want to say. I have one-liners in my “notebook of random thoughts ” and probably 3 blog entries in my head, but they’ll all remain there for now. I’ll slowly work on these backlogs in the coming days (I wish!).

The thing that has kept me busy in the past days is our independent project. We’re in the second phase of the course now, where there are less lectures, and more time for our own projects.  The professors had this initial list of potential projects that we can choose from. I naturally gravitated towards research topics on plants, and to people who also like working on plants. I got the topic, which is on wood density measurements, but not all of the groupmates. Andes , Navendu and I kinda formed a group, but I ended up with Andes and Jiajia. This may not be exactly how I envisioned things to be, but on hindsight, I realize that it was actually a good call on Kari’s part to group me with the people I’m working with now. We’re a pretty solid team (yahoo!).  And the naturally irritating Navendu has this new goal of annoying me and driving me crazy by opposing everything I say, so Kari, I have you to thank for my sanity

So yeah, we had proposal presentations and that went quite well. I was a bit nervous about it because speaking in front of people always makes me nervous, and because my memories of project presentations are…traumatic. I dont think I’ve done proposal presentation before. We usually just go straight to final presentation. And the problem with this is that you have NO way on knowing if you’re doing the right thing so you could be doing it wrong all along so by the time you present your results and discussion, they kill you with their questions. haha.

But things went fine. There were some suggestions so we made minor revisions.  I wasnt very confident with our written proposal because I thought it was very simplistic, and my English was very elementary, etc (I think too much, I know).  But simple is good.  Here, they call it straight-forward And there were very few comments on those revisions (yey!), so we went ahead with fieldwork.  We started yesterday, and finished with one site by the end of the day, so I’m pretty confident that we can finish this, if all goes well. My groupmates are great. We worked in the pouring rain, and no one complained. Andes collected the wood cores, which is NOT an easy job. And Jiajia collected voucher specimens, which is also not easy. And I did all the writing, and taking GPS readings, and bossing around (not really. of course not!).

So…1 site, ~3 days, and 100 more cores to go, and we’ll be done with fieldwork! There’s still labwork, and plant ID to deal with, and data analysis (which we have yet to figure out), and report writing, and final presentation, and…the end. I think these next days will fly by so fast and before I know it, I’ll be sitting on a plane bound for home. I miss speaking in Bisaya and Tagalog, and eating century tuna, but I’m pretty sure i’ll miss the garden too, and the people.  But I’m not dwelling on that yet. For now, there’s barbecue night to look forward to. I’m hungry!!!!