Foz

Today was my day off (well, I've had two now because yesterday was really rainy). Last night was probably the worst storm I've heard in years with torrential downpours and lightning and really intense thunder all night long. Today was really rainy and overcast as well so I didn't venture to the falls but instead went to Foz de Iguazu, Brazil. It's right over the border and you don't need a visa (which is expensive for Americans) to go to the town. I went with another girl in another research group, Taylor, because she needed to get a TB vaccination over there since they don't give them in Argentina. Anyways, Foz is muuuch bigger than Puerto Iguazu (the town on this side of the falls), with tall buildings and a real city center, etc. They also have a wider variety of food on their supermercados there than her in Argentina, so a lot of people go over there to do some grocery shopping. It only took about 45 minutes to get there by bus. I got my passport stamped twice more on the Argentinean side! Good thing I got those extra pages. So Taylor and I ran some errands, walked the streets which had some pretty decent stores and restaurants. We ate a really good bakery. They have these potato dough balls with chicken inside them that are delicious. Then we found a really really nice shopping mall. It had a great food court with chinese food (!!) and Subway actually. They have a movie theater, (which hopefully will play New Moon in November, I don't care if it's dubbed in portugese or spanish, I'll still go see it) that plays some new movies (like Harry Potter) and some old. They also had a really nice bookstore where I bought a copy of Harry Potter in Portugese to go with my foreign language collection of them (I think this one makes 7 in other languages). And that was my foray into Brazil!

Now the rest of my team had to go out into the field to look for the monkeys, that we haven't been following for a couple days because of the weather ,while I relax. This week we start taking focals on the monkeys that we've been learning to identify. That's where two people each find a monkey and record what they do for ten minutes into a voice recorder. Then we compile the paired comparison data into a spreadsheet and sample 15 seconds of each minute to identify their behaviors, feeding/foraging/resting/etc, and the environment, light/canopy hight/distance/available fruits, from which then Annie can extrapolate some results. So that should be fun to do a bit more in the field instead of just following. I'm also going to try to take some pictures of the monkeys this week, and will post those.