Day 1!

The view from condo 623 (aka: our team's condo!) :)

Last night around 11 pm, this is what I wrote: "I'm going to write more tomorrow because I'm doing this from my phone and the internet doesn't work on my bed and I'm too lazy to leave it (haha)...but! Today was awesome!! I saw whales! And collected data! And...well, I'll tell you more detail tomorrow because we have got freetime from noon to 7 pm :)"

This morning, around 8:12 am,  I realized that nothing posted!

When I took a walk down by the beach, this is what I saw!

I'll start with what I did yesterday. Woke up at around 4 am Maui time, which equates to 8 am CST. I was still trying to adjust to the time change. Tried to go to sleep, but ended up just showering at 7 am. I woke up to the sound of waves crashing against the shore, palm trees waving in the wind...bliss. The condo is super nice--the bathrooms are really spacious and there's pretty nice water pressure! And then I ate breakfast and went for a walk on the beach and called mom and dad! Then we had a meet-and-greet with Dr. Green and the team leaders! There are a bunch of students from Albright and about 10 interns--all girls, only 2 guys (burly football players that hit on everything that moves). Dr. Green gave us an overview of the program, history of her work: did you know that she's the one who got the government to protect humpback whales in Hawaii?! She did the research, was a plaintiff in the lawsuit, and was the leader, backed by several animal rights organizations! She's brilliant. Anyway, we were in class until around noon and then we broke for lunch and then my team went into the field for 4.5 hours! We drove up the coast on the highway to Lahaina and parked at some cliff where we set up foldable chairs and the theodolite! The theodolite is basically a really high powered telescope that surveyors use to mark longitude, latitude, figure out distance using trigonometry, etc. Anyway, there are 5 people in my team: 1 person operates the theodolite, 1 is the information recorder of whale pod behavior and the theodolite readings and time everything occurs (I'm using military time! Be proud of me!), and the other 3 are looking and calling out whale behaviors while looking through the binoculars! It's super awesome. We saw a whale breach (aka: jump out of the water) yesterday!! And then a momma and a calf were chilling right in front of the cliff and the calf was trying to slap its pectoral fin on the water, but the calf was so newly born that it was all floppy and SO CUTE! Anyway, in addition to monitoring the whale positions, we're also monitoring any boat activity and documenting how the whales react to the sounds and presence of the boats. They always go away from the boats. So, with the data points we're collecting, we're going to plot the pod movement on a map (learning how to do that tonight, actually) and (using trigonometry) we're going to figure out the distance from the shorelines the whales were!

The view from dinner at Monsoon India!

After we got done with that, we came back to the condo and the 5 of us went down to dinner at Monsoon India, the Indian restaurant that's kind of like Chapatis, but more expensive. I got mildly spicy tomato soup, a house salad, and cheese naan. So, basically grilled cheese and tomato soup, haha! Whatever. It was delicious! And then after that we went up to the roof to check it out and it's AWESOME! And then we went to class from 7-10 pm! We watched a movie about whales in Hawaii and then we talked about a few of the articles we read. Super interesting!!

Food situation: well, the night I arrived we stopped at the grocery store and I picked up a couple of frozen tortellini dishes, frozen strawberries, oatmeal, milk, orange juice, and carrots ($50 later...wowza! A box of cereal (generic brand) is $8.58!)...but then they told us that they wouldn't be able to take us shopping until tonight, after class! So, we've been eating oatmeal a lot and I'm going to have my second tortellini dish for dinner before class tonight. So, it'll be nice to get some more food!

Today's plan: well, I woke up around 7 am, showered, ate breakfast, and am now typing on my blog! We've got class/lecture at 10-noon, and then free time noon-7 pm! The other 3 teams are going to be doing their field training/what we did yesterday. I'll basically spend the afternoon reading articles and getting ahead on readings! I might even write some postcards off of the jetty by the beach! :)

Anyway, that's all for now! Here are some pictures, too! I'll post more later or tomorrow <3

PS: ALSO!!! We found a gecko in our condo last night! Geckos are cool because they can stick to like, ANYTHING using Van der waals forces (chemistry) and an adhesion-release system in their grippers! YAY for science!!