Gardens and Car Trips and Potlucks, Oh My

Giddy moment as I'm sitting here thinking about all things Panama... ONLY 2 WEEKS TO GO!!!!!!!!!!! Its so hard to believe that we have already completed 3 weeks of classes, with just 2 to go before leaving the country. As this trip countdown continues, the surrealism of the situation continues to blow me away. When I try to picture how my life will be in Panama, the more uncertain I become. My mind cannot seem to reconcile normal things such as homework, reading, papers, etc with everything Panama will have to offer. I keep trying to imagine reading a book and glancing out the window at the rainforest, or contemplating a history paper I have to write while watching the Shaman perform a healing ritual.... What will it be like to be a student, a researcher, a teacher, a traveler, an adventurer, an apprentice, and a tourist all in one? Soon enough, we'll all find out...

This past week has been filled to the brim with reading, 'riting, and 'rithmatic [not so much] (The 3R's of education anyone?). Sorry about that, I had a moment when I started to list reading and writing as large time commitments from the past week. As I was saying, last week caused me to experience how life must be for majors which require different types of homework than what I am used to. Being a Biology major, who is much more adapted to spending 10 hours in lab before writing a lab report than having a 10 hour reading marathon before drafting multiple analytical essays, I can definitely say I am gaining an appreciation for everyone who has spent their entire college careers doing these kinds of things. It is interesting to look back on it and see how different people have felt about the homework load. On one hand, most of the Bio majors seemed to share similiar sentiments as myself; a bit shell shocked by alot of work that reminds us more of our distant high school past than of our current college career (note to Joey and Ashlee: I used a semicolon and thought of you guys. Thanks for helping me define this mysterious, yet awesome, punctuation mark). On the other hand, the more reading intensive majors likely found last week to be normative and even quite easy (note: I did not verify this by actually asking). Either way I have really come to enjoy the mixture of majors in my classes, not only for the different perspectives that they bring to class conversations and activities, but also for the awesome individuals that compose them.

On Wednesday night, our Panama group had a potluck dinner. Overall, it was a pretty good night. I ended up making a fruit salad, and added my dish to the many other tasty foods lining Chad's kitchen counter. I think I must have tried a little bit of almost every dish, and I can confidentally say that I am proud of our group's cooking skills; It wasn't too bad for a bunch of stressed college students who had a paper due the next afternoon. The night involved lots of talking and story telling in addition to the good food. A few of Chad's particularily graphic tales of snake bites will forever have me looking at the Magruder snakes with a bit of a weary eye.

The highlight of my week was most definitely my group's trip (minus Traci, recent survivor of the MCAT) to the Botanical Gardens in Saint Louis. Joey, Ashlee, and I awoke bright eyed and bushy tailed at 4:30 am Friday morning and loaded into a car to make the 3 hour trip to Saint Louis. After spending these three hours rocking out to whatever Joey's ipod had to offer, some Glee (!!), we arrived at the Monsanto Building to meet with Mary Mcnamara, the woman I have been corresponding with over the past week. She greeted us with a friendly smile (a theme of the day) and handed us our research visitor passes. These passes were pretty awesome as they got us into basically any building we wanted for free. After treking across the Garden grounds, which were pretty beautiful considering the time of year, we made it to the Lehmann Building. Upon entering this building we were greeted by even more friendly people who seemed to be waiting for our arrival. Since Tom Croat, the Panamanian flora curator whom we were there to speak with, was busy interviewing applicants we spent some time with Mary Merello. Mary was a very nice and interesting woman who had recently spent some time in Panama collecting specimens. She started off by showing us how they store their pressed samples. The photo on the right gives an idea for the sheer magnitude of the number of specimens contained in this building. These shelves are organized by family, country, etc etc, with Panama samples having its own organizational marker, due to how much focus there has been in the country since the construction of the canal. These numerous red shelves were motorized to compress together, eliminating the aisle, for the easy/compact storage. The storage/organizational system employed here was very impressive, and the room full of dried plants gave off a nice aroma. Mary tried her best to give us some guidance for our project, since we are still trying to find out how to narrow our focus. She was able to give us some recommendations on useful books and let us borrow her copies for a few hours.

A bit later Tom was finally free to speak with us. As was made apparent by his calloused fingers and excited aura, Tom was a man who had spent his life following his passion for plants. He has spent over 5 collective years in Panama, and is the world's foremost Panamanian plant collector. It was amazing speaking with a man who clearly loved his work. From pulling multiple books off of the shelves to speaking animatedly about anything we could think of, Tom was more than willing to help us in any way possible. After speaking to Tom and Mary I definitely feel much better about our project having more of a direction.

After leaving the Lehmann Building, following a tasty lunch at a 'green' restaurant, we headed back over to the Monsanto Building to visit the Garden's library. This library was amazing! As nerdy as it sounds, I was quite enamored with this place. It was not particularily large, but it contained a massive amount of books stored in a similar 'aisle compression' fashion as the plant samples. The best part of this library was the Rare Book room. We lucked out in being in the library when we were. As soon as we settled down to start our search, a couple of staff members requested to see the Rare Book room, and the librarian offered to let us go in with them. We accepted without a second thought and entered the room. She took us around the two tables set up in the center of the room, opening each book on display to show us the ever changing print and illustrations. The first book we saw was in Latin from the 1400s and was about farming practices. As we went around the tables, we got to learn about how old fashioned printing and illustrating worked. Did you know that each illustration in a book was at one point hand painted and text was once the result of needing to carve a wooden text block for each page of the text!? We also found out that books were often ordered via subscription, a few pages at a time sent to the person who could choose to bind them all together if they wanted. I could probably ramble on and on about all the stuff that we found out... This room held me in awe the entire time we were in there. Basically, our Botanical Gardens experience was pretty wonderful all around. It probably goes without saying that I'm even more excited for our project, and ready to work on it ASAP.

Ah, I have definitely rambled on for much longer than I originally intended and I must get back to reading.... Until next time