The past week has been pretty intense. Here are the highlights:

• Monday: we went to San José for a lecture at the University of Costa Rica on genetically modified foods. Of course, its sparked a pretty heated discussion later that day, but still interesting to see everyone's take on GMOs. After the lecture, we also had to conduct surveys for our Economics class. It just created a lot of awkwardness for pretty much everyone. 

• The rest of the week we spent working on our Field Exercises for Tropical Ecology and Natural Resource Management (NRM). Benji, Matt and I worked together in Monteverde collecting data on the abundance of mining larvae and its relation to other herbivory damage on leaves. We had two days to analyze that data and write a scientific paper. It was a lot of work, but we thankfully finished on time.

• And just to make things worse, wednesday morning we had to collect data on the farm for our NRM field exercise. It was due by Friday night, and Lina and I spent all day Thursday trying to get it finished! We had to monitor the pests and diseases of the orange trees on our orange and mango farm on campus. All sorts of stuff afflict the trees here because the farm only made the transition to organic and sustainable management two years ago. All out data and the paper we wrote are going to be used to help the Integrated Pest Management system so chemical pesticides, herbicides and fungicides and synthetic fertilizers aren't used.

• Everyone was completely exhausted from the two field exercise this week and needed to get off campus friday night. We went out, but only to realize it was a bad idea because the next morning we were going to stay with a local tico family for the weekend! The homestay was awesome! My family had hosted kids before and lived right in the centro! A girl from my program was with my host mom's brother and his family, who lived right next door in an attached house. It is very common in Costa Rica for whole families to live on the same property and be super close! We had a really nice birthday party for Liz (the girl from my program) and they even taught us how to salsa!

Liz's birthday party with our host families!

It was a good week even though we were super busy! We have mid-term exams this week and plenty of time to study! This coming weekend we have both days off and most of us are going to travel somewhere close by! And after that we are going to Nicaragua for a week!