Cayo Largo Part V: Underwater Critters

In Cayo Largo Part IV I described our trip to Iguana Island, which was the first part of our day excursion.  In this post I will describe the second part of that trip: snorkeling and wading in the shallows around virgin islands.

After visiting the Iguana Island, our boat set out for a shallow coral bed for some snorkeling.  Despite the shallowness of the water (I would guess it wasn't deeper than twenty feet anywhere nearby, although depths are notoriously difficult to judge in clear water), we were still a fair ways away from the coast of Cayo Largo.  It was amazing the difference this made; whereas the water directly off the coast, as described in Part II and Part III, was characterized by fine white sand and fish almost the same colour, here the sea was full of fauna in a myriad of colours.

The coral was predominantly yellow-green to yellow-brown, but there were occasional outcroppings of beautiful reds and purples.

A piece of purple coral (click to enlarge)

I should also mention that I found underwater photography to be quite challenging.  Light levels and clarity of the image are much more difficult to control and one is undergoing almost constant motion from the waves and currents.  Even more challenging is the fact that goggles prevent the use of the viewfinder for targeting the camera.  Although, as with most digital cameras, our underwater camera also has a screen which is used more often for aim anyway, the bright sunlight at the surface would generally make the screen unreadable, and thus a large number of our pictures were taken blindly.

Despite photographic difficulties, though, the material we had to work with helped make up for it.  There were (I think) four types of fish who swarmed around the boat to feed off the hull and any scraps which fell in the water (Manuel was making lunch and discarded unwanted bits off the side.  I don't know how healthy that is for the wildlife, but he and the captain seemed to think it was perfectly normal).  Two of the fish were black with blue highlights, and I am only identifying them as separate based on their distinct fin structures.  The other two fish were much lighter in colour.  One species had vertical black stripes and the other a horizontal yellow stripe down its side.  All four seemed perfectly happy to intermix, and you can see them in the two photos I took.  You can also see one of the dark fish species cleaning off the underside of the boat in a video I took, and another video of Sarah swimming amongst the fish schools (sorry for the shakiness of the camera).  If anyone can identify the species of the fish, please let me know (either in the comments or send me an email).
UPDATE: Thanks to studentjohn's comment, I now have an idea as to the identities of three of the four fish.  The big blue and black fellow in the first image appears to be some sort of triggerfish , while the vertically striped fish are sergeant majors (I actually feel kind of silly about not recognizing that), and the fish with a horizontal yellow stripe are yellowtail snappers.

Swarm of schooling fish (click to enlarge)

Another shot of the fish swarm (click to enlarge)

 Although these four fish seemed to be the predominate denizens of the area, there were still many other species of fish to be found.  I have also included a couple of my favourite pictures of these fish.  As with the others, if anyone can help identify the species, let me know.

A really happy looking fish (click to enlarge)

A small multi-coloured fish (click to enlarge)

After snorkeling we were given lunch which consisted of a delicious Cuban lobster dish with rice, buns, and fruit.  The final part of the excursion after lunch was a trip out to a small group of uninhabited virgin islands.  These were quite beautiful and scenic, with many conch and small fish in the shallows around them.  One of the passengers on our boat reported spotting a small crocodile, but Sarah and I were unable to find it.

A view on the beach of the islands (click to enlarge)

There was quite an expansive region of shallows between some of the islands in which the ocean was never much deeper than the knees.  Here we discovered several excellent starfish.  Even more excitingly, several rays were also zipping through the water.  The rays moved quite fast, and so were rather difficult to photograph.  It would seem that whenever I gave the camera to Sarah, the rays would swim tantalizingly close to my legs, only to skitter off to Sarah as soon as she had given the camera back to me.  After numerous failed tries, Sarah finally managed to get a couple photos.  As with the fish above, if anyone can identify the type of ray, please let me know.

Starfish in the shallows (click to enlarge)

The full sting ray swimming away.  Unfortunately the water was a little cloudy, most likely due to us churning up sand as we chased the rays (click to enlarge)

This was the best picture we managed to take of the ray's face (click to enlarge)

After we had our fill of sloshing about in the shallows, we got back on the boat and were taken back to the marina on Cayo Largo.  We were reunited with our shoes, and a bus took us back to our resort.  The next part deals with the many birds we spotted.

Cayo Largo, Part IV: Island Critters

In the middle of our vacation, Sarah and I went on a day-long boat excursion. In Cayo Largo Part III, I had promised to put up pictures and videos from the snorkeling we did while on the excursion, but I had forgotten that I first needed to put up a post about the first part of our excursion: Iguana Island. As always, click on the images for a larger size.

Our excursion started early in the morning. A bus picked us up at our resort and, after brief stops at a few other hotels to pick up some more people, drove everyone to the marina. We had arranged our excursion with the small catamaran option, meaning eight passengers and two crewmen. The captain was a short and lean man with wrinkled, leathery skin befitting a Cuban sea-captain. He sported mustache that was also quite fitting, and was very particular about the rule that no shoes were to be worn on the boat. I don't think the captain spoke a word of English, and aside from a few brief pantomimed conversations spent most of the trip stoically scanning the horizon oblivious to his small cargo of tourists.

Manuel, the first-mate, was young and jovial, and spent most of his time organizing our entertainment. Language was a bit of an issue - four of the other passengers were French-Canadian who had moderate Spanish (and Manuel appeared to be more comfortable with French than English), so they had no problem. However, the other two passengers were a Russian couple with no Spanish and only moderate English at best. I tried my best to help translate, but considering that I was already only getting about half of what Manuel said since his English explanations tended to be a bewildering blend of French, English, and Spanish, I really have to wonder how much managed to get passed along. In the end communication was not really all that vital since we mostly just had to keep our shoes off and watch the early morning sun track across the water.

After a brief trip, we arrived at our first destination of the day: Iguana Island. It is a small rocky island not far from Cayo Largo. As soon as we disembarked we were greeted by dozens of iguanas. Since it was still somewhat early in the morning most were content to simply bask in the sun, but there were a few who were curious about the ranks of tourists unloading on their island.

An iguana basking on the rocks.

One of the largest (and hungriest) iguanas we saw.

Although the massive numbers of iguanas were exciting enough, we quickly discovered that Iguana Island was also inhabited by another type of creature as well. There were several hutias ambling about on the island, seemingly perfectly at home with their reptilian compatriots. There are actually several species of hutia endemic to Cuba, so I am not sure which type were on the island.

A hutia hanging out in a shady patch.

A hutia and an iguana coexisting.

Finally, here is a short of video of one of the hutias walking about. The audio track was mostly just wind on the camera's microphone, so I cut it out entirely (so if you can't hear anything, don't worry; your speakers are probably still working just fine).

The next installment will finally get to the underwater critters from our snorkeling trip.

Cayo Largo, Part III: More Beach Critters

In Cayo Largo, Part II I ended with my first successful fish pictures off the tip of the Playa Sirena peninsula. I had also mentioned that there were some massive starfish, but the depth and bareness of the sand makes it difficult to appreciate their size. I took some much better starfish pictures which will appear in a later part. During our snorkeling about, though, Sarah did borrow the camera to grab a photo of me showing off my snorkel prowess (and I'm a critter too).

Snorkeling about (click for larger size).

The next day we took the train again, only this time we got off at Playa Paraiso. On the southern edge of Playa Paraiso is a whole series of quite extensive tide pools which we decided to investigate. The pools were surprisingly deep, although far too gooey to make snorkeling desirable. Large swathes of the pool edges were covered with snails, and Sarah's practiced critter eye managed to spot a couple of snail shells that were not exactly what they seemed.


As far as wild invertebrates go, hermit crabs are some of the safest and easiest to pick up and play with (provided you spot them). Their claws are largely ineffectual (at least with crabs of the size that we found), and they don't move very quickly. We did manage to spot what looked like a horseshoe crab, but it was a very fast invertebrate and disappeared long before I could get the camera ready.

The tide pools were also large enough to house a number of fish. Although the water was not nearly as clear as the open ocean, I still managed to grab my only underwater shots of the trumpetfish that we found all along the beaches (once we learned to look out for them).

Trumpetfish in the tide pools at Playa Paraiso (click for larger size).

The next day we had our last big beach adventure when we wandered south about three quarters of a kilometer down the beach from our resort looking for a stretch of coral. En-route we discovered a patch of rocks covered in swift scuttling crabs. We spent a few minutes trying to grab a video showing off how the crabs moved from crevice to crevice, but they never quite cooperated for getting a good video. I did manage to snag a decent photograph, though, of one crab that decided it was comfortable enough in its current crevice.

Crab hiding under the lip of a rock along Playa Blanca (click for larger size).

Once we got to the beach with the coral we broke out the snorkel gear and headed into the water. Although the depth didn't drop off with the same extreme slope of the tip of the Playa Sirena peninsula, it did get appreciably deep much faster than the beach in front of our resort and the main beach at Playa Sirena and Playa Paraiso. The coral was a small patch nestled at the base of a rocky shelf. Although it was far more exciting than anything we had previously encountered, there still wasn't a lot of colour or fish swarms about. I was very excited to spot my first 'tropical' fish: the banded butterflyfish (not that the other fish weren't tropical, but the butterflyfish had the stripes that always come to mind when thinking of tropical fish).

Banded Butterflyfish near small coral patch off Playa Blanca (click for larger size).

Our best snorkeling was yet to come, though, from our boat excursion the next day. That, however, means it doesn't count as beach anymore, and will thus be covered in the next installment.

Cayo Largo, Part II: Beach Critters

In Cayo Largo Part I I talked about many of the exciting critters that Sarah and I discovered on the resort grounds. Of course, going to a tropical ocean paradise means some ocean exploration is in order, and so we bought ourselves a pair of snorkel sets before we left. The beach in front of our resort, adequately described by the resort name of Playa Blanca, was a beautiful strip of dazzling white sand. While providing lovely scenery and an excellent place to relax or take a casual ocean dip, the pristine water and sand didn't leave much to see through the goggles.

The beach at the Playa Blanca resort (click for larger size).

Our first attempt to find some interesting snorkeling was a trip north along the beach towards a strip of rocks. We decided to go north because we figured the rocks might provide a better sea creature habitat than the plain sand. It turned out, however, that the life supported by the rocks was mainly an extremely slippery gooey green covering. Combined with a strong surf, we ended up getting knocked around and dunked a few times but never did find anything worth putting on the goggles and flippers. Our trip up and back down the beach also involved far more middle-aged man-parts than either of us would have liked, as we discovered that the stretch of beach just beyond the resort was the designated nude beach. I don't know why, but by and large all nude beaches I have seen seem to be nearly exclusively occupied by middle-aged (and older) men. Perhaps the breeze is nice, but I would worry about the possibility of a very painful sunburn.

After our disappointing opening-day trek up the beach, the same helpful couple who told us about the iguana pointed out a few possible places for us to explore: the eastern side of the peninsula that formed the south-western-most beach of Playa Sirena and a small coral reef at the next resort to the south of ours (we had clearly picked the wrong direction to travel on the beach).

Armed with new knowledge of where to go and the promise of seeing giant starfish, we set off the next morning to Playa Sirena. Looking at a map of Cayo Largo you can see in the southwest a pair of beaches called Playa Sirena and Playa Paraiso. These two beaches are common beaches for all visitors to the island - there are no resorts on the beaches, and 'trains' are provided to transport visitors from the resorts to the beaches. I put train in quotations because it is in fact a little car designed to look like a train engine that pulls a set of passenger cars. There were two main trains: one had cars that had rickety roofs while the second pulled a set of uncovered cars. Although the roofs were nice for keeping the hot sun off, they also creaked, squealed, and swayed disconcertingly like they were about to give up and collapse. By far the oddest thing about the trains, though, was that we took them four times in total (out and back once to each beach), and never once did we complete the trip on the train we initially boarded (often we would even have to transfer between the trains multiple times). One of our transfers had a clear and legitimate reason, as the brake line between the second and third car burst, which meant the last two cars no longer had brakes. However, the other three times seemed to be completely random - we would would be riding along when we would suddenly pull over, wait a few minutes in the blistering sun, and then the other train would pull up. Our driver would leap out and gesture wildly at us, and everyone would disembark and transfer trains. Still, the trains were a free service, so one shouldn't complain too much about operating mysteries.

Train car providing transportation to Playa Sirena and Playa Paraiso (click for larger size).

Once we arrived at Playa Sirena we spotted what I felt to be the most upsetting institution on Cayo Largo: swim with the dolphins. I recognize the thrill of interacting with dolphins (one of my favourite memories from my childhood was of swimming with dolphins in the ocean off of New Zealand), but the health of the dolphins needs to factor into any setup. These dolphins were held in a fairly small pen along a stretch of shore, and a significant portion of the pen looked like it was only about knee-deep.

Dolphins performing in their much too small looking pen (click for larger size).

Walking past the dolphins, however, we got to the undeveloped side of the Playa Sirena peninsula. The flora and fauna started off fairly gooey, from tiny underwater forests of algae to small pulsating lumps of jelly on the sand, with the most colourful collection clustered on the rotting stumps of an ancient dock that jutted from the ankle-deep water.

Assorted underwater growth on an old dock pylon (click for larger size).

Although gooey tropical marine life is certainly more exciting than the algae we find in Canada, the conch that Sarah pulled out of the water shortly thereafter was far more exciting. It was also the feistiest conch I've ever seen, wildly flailing about with its foot.


Not long after we put the conch back in the water we reached the tip of the peninsula. We spotted a number of other people in the water snorkeling, so figured there must be something to see. The shore on this part of the peninsula was quite different from the main beaches since the depth dropped quite quickly after only a brief stretch of shallow water, which was fairly convenient for snorkeling. Although the sea floor wasn't covered with bright coral, sporadic vegetation shared the sand with some impressively large starfish and an immense conch. A number of different fish were also swimming about, although they were all a translucent milky white colour that made them quite difficult to pick out. However, when I ended up in the middle of a small school I finally had a chance to catch a few pictures of fish.

White fish off the coast of the Playa Sirena peninsula. If anyone can identify the species, it would be much appreciated (click for larger size).

Continue reading: Part III: More Beach Critters

Cayo Largo, Part I: The Resort Ground Critters

About a month ago, Sarah and I went on a trip to Cayo Largo, a beautiful little resort island off the coast of Cuba. Part of what makes Cayo Largo such an interesting place to visit is that there are no permanent residents of the island; everyone who works on the island only spends a few weeks rotation at a time. Most of the island remains undeveloped and wild, particularly the northern half. While such a situation sparked a number of resort reviews that gave only mediocre results due to guest boredom, it meant that Cayo Largo was a perfect destination for us. We weren't going to hang out in Latin night clubs, we were going to relax and explore beautiful tropical flora and fauna. The resort that Sarah and I stayed at was called Hotel Playa Blanca, and from what we saw it was definitely one of the nicest on the island. Oddly enough, another common complaint in both reviews and even from some of the guests we talked to was that the food was nothing special, but we found it to actually be quite enjoyable. There was always a lovely selection of fresh fruit, and the cooked dishes usually had a fascinating assortment of root vegetables.

We arrived in the middle of the night at the tiny airport located on the island, and got shuffled off to various buses going to the different resorts. Despite it being the wee hours of the morning the heat was intense and the humidity oppressive. Our bus also had an adorable little boy who was clearly confused by all this traveling, and, after being told by his parents that he was in Cuba now, loudly announced that he didn't like Cuba because Cuba "had no food". According to his logic, he was hungry for a snack and, since his parents weren't able to give him one at the moment, this meant the whole country must be devoid of food. We spotted him happily playing around the resort a few days later, so I believe he eventually got his snack and learned that Cuba did, in fact, have food.

Our first day was spent mostly exploring the grounds around the hotel. Even just strolling along the path, however, we spotted a host of critter holes littering the grounds and a huge number of anoles basking on the rocks and vegetation. Although we took a number of photographs of the anoles, they were by far the most impressive when showing off their dewlaps. I managed to catch a pair mating, which led to an impressive display of the male's bright orange and yellow dewlap (either in an attempt to frighten me off, or as part of the mating ritual - apparently dewlaps are used for both). Towards the end of the week, Sarah managed to catch one also giving a dewlap display, so I have included that picture here as well.

An anole mating pair, with the male showing off his impressively coloured dewlap (click to see full-size)

Anole partially displaying his dewlap (click to see full-size)

After wandering around snapping pictures of the anoles, we discovered who was making all the holes: land crabs! Although most of the crabs spent their time underground during the day and barely ventured beyond the threshold of their burrows in the evening, we ran into one intrepid explorer scavenging one of the restaurant floors for food just before noon. After we started showing some interest in him, he put up his claws and got into a scuttling stand-off with Sarah (she got a few successful pokes on his back without getting pinched) before finally escaping in a bed of vegetation.

Scavenging crab looking for a fight (click to see full-size)

Scavenging crab got away (click to see full-size)

The resort also included a band of fairly scraggly cats running around (probably feral - they were pretty skittish when it came to people) which we gradually spotted over the course of the week. Probably the most exciting on-resort creature, however, was the resident iguana. Despite our wandering through most of the resort that first morning, we did not discover him until the second day after getting a tip from some return guests (a very nice couple who we ran into multiple times).

The iguana starting to escape, but deciding the effort to get off the path was just too much (click to see full-size)

The iguana lived underneath one of the resort villas, and here he was hanging out just outside his hole (click to see full-size)

Here is my favourite photograph of our iguana friend (click to see full-size)

We ended up visiting the iguana every day after we found him. Although I am not sure he appreciated our visits, he was just so interesting that Sarah insisted we go see if he was out having a bask. He never quite warmed up to us the way Sarah thought he should have, but he grudgingly seemed to put up with our gawking.

Sarah sneaking up on our iguana friend (click to see full-size)

Continue Reading: Part II: Beach Critters

Banff National Park

My vacation is steadily drawing to a close (I return to Toronto on Thursday, at which point it will be time to start trying to find a job, finish my outstanding report from my summer research, continue my summer research, and return to blogging proper with the promised columns on computability and complexity and Pawelzik's talk summary, among other things). Before things get back to normal, however, I wanted to take another opportunity to post some images from my time out here in western Canada. I probably won't get another chance to visit the area for at least a year, and I am going to miss the mountains. These three images are taken from my family's trip to Banff National Park, one of the most beautiful places in the world (of course, I am rather partial to the Canadian Rockies in general). As always, please click on the images to see them full-sized.

The town of Banff as seen from the lookout point on Sulphur Mountain. It was a wonderfully clear day for taking pictures. Banff is actually quite a fascinating town, being both the town with the highest elevation and the first (and largest) incorporated town existing within a Canadian national park. Its existence within the Banff National Park leads to obvious environmental concerns and subsequent policy decisions, including a restriction on the number of permanent residents allowed.

The famous (and absolutely amazing) initial view of Lake Louise that a visitor is greeted with. Fed by the Victoria glacier, Lake Louise takes on many of the brilliant hues that can be found throughout the waters in Banff National Park thanks to the glacial flour suspended in the water.

A Rocky Mountain Bighorn Sheep ewe, this lady was part of a small herd in Kootenay National Park (which we drove through on our way up to Banff) just outside of the town of Radium.

Royal Tyrrell Museum Pictures

In response to my last post, BeamStalk made a request for pictures from the Tyrrell Museum itself (and not just the badlands around it). Like many museums, it is hard for pictures to capture the experience of actually being there and looking at the exhibits, but I will attempt to oblige with a couple of the pictures that I did take. Please ignore my incredible dorkiness that mars what would otherwise be perfectly reasonable dinosaur museum pictures...

Badlands and Geek-towns

As I have mentioned, I am currently in my hometown of Creston, British Columbia, visiting my family. The last couple days, however, were spent traveling into Alberta to pick up my girlfriend, who is coming out for a week to visit my family as well, from Calgary. Despite the fact that it is a fairly extensive six hour drive from Creston to Calgary, many of my childhood memories center around some of the attractions in the area, and going there to pick up my girlfriend therefore provided a nice opportunity to show them off to her. It also gave me an opportunity to visit my good friend Cornucrapia (obviously not his real name, but since he maintains loose anonymity on the internet, I shall respect his wishes), who lives in Calgary.

First off, my mom and I drove to Calgary Saturday night (I don't drive in Toronto, so having someone else along to share in the driving was a big help). I spent the night on Cornucrapia's couch, and then we headed out to the airport the next morning to collect my girlfriend. Despite her jet-lag, we set off for Drumheller, Alberta, straight from the airport. If you have not heard of Drumheller (which, if you are not a western Canadian or die-hard dinosaur fan, is most likely), it is situated in the Alberta badlands and is home to the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology. If you have never been to a region of badlands terrain, they are quite fascinating and I recommend going. I have included a picture (which I recommend clicking on to see at full size), but even that fails to fully capture the entire vista which surrounds you.
For those who do not remember, I have mentioned before that I spent most of my early childhood obsessed with dinosaurs. Thus, the Tyrrell Museum was one of my favourite places to go, and, despite it being an additional two hours north of Calgary (and thus just shy of an eight hour drive from my hometown), between grandparents, parents, and family friends I had managed to finagle five visits to the place before the age of ten. Shortly thereafter, however, my family moved to Pennsylvania, and I have not had an opportunity to return prior to this past weekend. I was thus a little giddy about the trip. I think my expectations were therefore a little out of proportion (it wasn't quite the magical land of endless dinosaur displays that I had remembered), but it is still a fantastic museum devoted to paleontology, and the surrounding backdrop of the badlands makes it well worth a trip if you are ever in the Calgary area. In addition to the Tyrrell Museum, Drumheller also includes attractions like Reptile World, where you can see a wide variety of reptiles and amphibians on display, as well as get an opportunity to hold a friendly boa constrictor.

While Drumheller can perhaps be considered a geeky place to have been a childhood dream destination, it cannot hold a candle to the geekiness which was our detour on the drive back to Creston after spending Sunday night in Calgary. Unfortunately, Cornucrapia was unable to come on this exciting detour, as we dropped him off Sunday evening. However, my mom, girlfriend, and I all got to experience the extraordinary geekiness which is Vulcan, Alberta.
Rather than simply smile at the fact that their town shares a name with Spock's father's race, residents of Vulcan have gone above and beyond in capitalizing upon the name to create a wholly bizarre tourist experience. Driving across endless fields of Albertan prairie, what at first appears to be a typical prairie town pops into existence. Once the buildings emerge from behind the heat waves and coalesce into a focused image, however, one is able to spot the giant Enterprise statue standing in front of the likewise named Enterprise Family Restaurant, which itself sits in front of a space-bubble style building that serves as both the Vulcan and District Chamber of Commerce as well as the Vulcan Association for Science and Trek.
Inside the Vulcan Association for Science and Trek building, you are greeted by a friendly staff, an astonishing array of Star Trek themed merchandise, and a $10 per use virtual reality game (we opted not to try the game, though if any of my readers do try it, you will have to let me know if we were missing out or not). Perhaps more impressive than the virtual reality game and the merchandise, however, was the room full of Star Trek memorabilia gifted to the town by a Calgarian collector. With a wall of Star Trek action figures (all in their original packaging!), a large number of full-sized cardboard cutouts, a fairly extensive uniform wardrobe (which were free to try on and take pictures - you better believe we did that!), and so many other items it is hard to remember them all, it was overwhelming, impressive, and a little bit creepy all at the same time. If you are a huge Star Trek fan, a trip to Vulcan might be a fascinating vacation destination. While I don't think I am a big enough Star Trek fan to have made the trip if it had not been merely a small detour on our way back to Creston, I still find it charming that such a place exists.

Göttingen in Review

As my time in Göttingen draws to a close, I thought I would give a recap of some the highlights (both good and bad). Life is continually escalating up on the hectic scale, so I'm not sure what the schedule is going to be like around here. I have the most recent puzzle solutions to post sometime before the end of the week (so get any remaining solutions in!), and I might expound a bit to serve as some random stress relief, but other than that I should be getting stuff done in the real world.

Scariest Moment (Intellectual): Being asked during my talk by the head of the research group why our method was unable to predict the phase response of a multi-source network.
Most Relieving Moment (Intellectual): Realising (after not too long a moment of deliberation) that the multiplicity of the zero eigenvalue in a multi-source network was greater than one (thus solving the conundrum of the aforementioned moment).
Stupidest Moment: Crashing a borrowed bike into a brick wall.
Smartest Moment: Understanding and then explaining the transient response of a reciprocally coupled network to my Ph.D. student collaborator (who spent most of the summer having to explain everything to me).
Scariest Moment (Physical): Not realising my landlady had forgotten to turn the oil off after she showed me how to use the heater in my room and subsequently lighting the oil a little while later. The accumulated oil began to boil (a state which turns a slow-burning liquid into an explosive vapour), resulting in an hour of terror as the heater rumbled and shook and I wondered if I was about to blow up my bedroom (thankfully, it did not blow up).
Most Satisfying Moment (Physical): Driving a well-placed shot through the narrow window in the opponents' goal during the Ph.D.-night soccer match and thereby winning back a small portion of honour for my country's (admittedly justifiably) much maligned soccer prowess.
Most Annoyed Moment: Discovering my landlady had disconnected the internet without any forewarning (this actually requires some explanation... she inexplicably decided she wanted to move a few weeks after I arrived (while I suppose it is a possibility, I am fairly sure this had nothing to do with me). So, I said it was fine if she had to start moving things out, but I would appreciate a warning if she had to move anything that I also used. The only thing that seemed to happen with was the dishwasher). My annoyance over the loss of the internet is closely followed by my annoyance over the disappearance of the washing machine the week before (also as part of my landlady's move, and also without any warning).
Most Indebted Moment: Being generously lent a bicycle for a month and a half simply so it "wouldn't have to just sit there" while its owner was off on a trip (Carsten, if for some reason you ever read this, I'm sorry for crashing your bike into a brick wall).
Most Stressful Moment: Realising I have only a day left to finish my final report, cram in some studying for my exams, pack, and tie up every other loose end I have left.
Most Stress-Mitigating Moment: Realising I have only a day left before I fly back to Canada and get to see my girlfriend again.

"Tea, Earl Grey, Hot."

One of the things that has always fascinated me is the idea of acquired tastes. As a child, whenever someone told me a food was an acquired taste, I wondered just how people ever got started eating it in the first place. For example, I found tea and coffee to be absolutely vile drinks (coffee more so than tea... in fact, I still dislike coffee greatly. Although some predicted that I would never make it through my undergraduate education without learning to drink coffee, it would seem I have proven them wrong). They are also fairly non-trivial to prepare, so one would wonder how and why someone would go through all the effort of preparing coffee grounds or crushed tea leaves, boiling water, and steeping a drink that, on first taste, prompted a scrunched face of disgust. Of course, not everyone seems to have my initial dislike for the drinks, so perhaps the few people who enjoy such bitter draughts convinced everyone else to give it a try.

Alcoholic drinks are another confusing item, as they too are quite non-trivial to prepare. While one might suppose that there was an ancient group of people with a particularly good crop of grapes one year. They juiced some of the excess fruits and stored them in casks, but were not able to consume the juice fast enough to prevent it from starting to go off. A few might have braved the possible stomach ache and consumed the spoiled juice, only to discover a pleasant buzzing which prompted further experimentation in reproduction. Of course, this sort of story might sound plausible, but it is the sort of "just-so" story which plagues fields like evolutionary psychology. With only the vaguest of evidence to support it (namely, wine exists now, so it was discovered at some point), the story could just as easily have been some ancient teenager stole his neighbour's jar of juice, buried it in a field for a few weeks, and then forced his little brother to drink it just to see what would happen.

The reason I have been ruminating on the subject of acquired tastes, though, is I always find it fascinating when traveling to discover the regional acquired tastes, both of the place one has traveled to and of one's home region. For example, vegemite is a vile spread for toast and bread in Australia. Australians, however, do not seem to share my abhorrence for its flavour (judging by the fact that it is still manufactured, sold, and consumed there). While I have yet to discover any popular German cuisines that turn my stomach, I have been informed by several of my European peers who have spent a fair bit of time studying in North America that root beer is a horrible drink, and they don't understand how North Americans can drink the stuff. Oddly, peanut butter is also one of those things which is often raised as a peculiar North American food, although the reactions to it tend to be more divided with some deciding it is unpleasant and others wishing it was more common here.

So, there was not a lot of point to this post. I do not have any answers for why certain flavours are popular in certain regions of the world, nor how people ever got to manufacturing and consuming some of our stranger and more acquired tastes. Idle conjecture can be fun, though.

Metamorphosis into a Weekend Warrior

This getting old business is no fun at all. As I enter my mid-twenties, I am already starting to discover things that are harder now than they used to be. One of the most blatant things is my inability to stay in relatively decent shape with a minimum of effort. Even just a few years ago I was able to play a pick-up game of basketball or soccer, run around for an hour chasing a ball, and wake up the next day with but minor twinges. This week I played a few games of four-on-four soccer Thursday evening and I'm still limping around like my hamstrings are on fire.

The soccer game itself was quite fun, however. At the beginning of every month, the Ph.D. students at the Institute have an evening get-together of some sort. This usually involves going to a nearby bar, but the fellow who organized it this month decided a barbecue and soccer tournament sounded like more fun. I was a little nervous about making an ass of myself, as I am well aware that Canadians as a rule are somewhat lacking in the soccer talent department. While I have played the occasional game with my Argentinian brother-in-law and his family, those games have served more as a demonstration of my Canadian-ness rather than as training for making me ready for soccer games on the world-stage. Luckily, however, this was not soccer on the world-stage, but was rather friendly soccer with a band of easy-going academics. Although I was certainly still no star, I succeeded in not embarrassing my country too badly. I even managed to score an average of one goal per game, which I was quite impressed with. Of course, we were playing games of four-on-four on a shortened field with no goalies, so the number of goals scored each game was high enough that 1/game was not exactly a record to write home about.

In my own typical fashion, I also somehow managed to discover some of the most vicious biting insects of the area that evening. I did not see it happen, so I still don't know what exactly bit me, but when I got home I discovered two relatively large swollen patches, one on my knee and the other on the inside of my upper arm. In the centre of each patch was a dark red dot where the skin had clearly been removed, making the bites not only itchy but also quite painful. Today and yesterday the bites have somehow spread out into mottled purpley-red blotches similar to the bite patches I got in Peru. I asked the Ph.D. student I am working with about them, and he seemed rather confused. He was not aware there were critters who left such bites in Göttingen, so it might just be some weird allergy I apparently have to insect bites outside of North America.

Anyway, I know this has been mostly trivial personal stuff, but it's the weekend. My legs are viciously sore, and I'm nervous about the talk I have to give on Tuesday. Writing about trivial personal stuff is somewhat relaxing.

A Germanic Gripe

There is nothing like a bout of cold, flu, or some other such illness to make one homesick (and, as luck would have it, I seem to have picked something up over the weekend). For the most part, I am enjoying my time here in Göttingen, but there are a couple things I miss desperately. Aside from the obvious ones of my girlfriend, family (even though my family was still thousands of kilometers away from Toronto, it didn't feel as far), and not living out of a suitcase, there is one thing that I am just baffled by here. Why don't windows here have screens? What started as a weird cultural quirk has, in my state of headache and general uncomfortableness, been amplified into a profound annoyance. Flies buzzing around the room are incredibly annoying, and that is no different here than it is in North America.

Anyway, full-blown revolution or at least massive civil unrest seems to be going on in Iran, so griping about my fly problem seems a little petulant.

Scientist Appreciation: Felix Klein

As some of you may have guessed by my post from earlier today, I have my suitcases and I am back in business. With so many famous scientists and mathematicians steeping Göttingen in history, I have decided it is time to ressurrect my Scientist Appreciation posts. Every time I find something named after a famous scientist or mathematician (and I have my camera with me), I will thus get a photograph and say a few things about the emminent fellow. Of course, I should therefore change the label perhaps to Mathematician Appreciation for fellows like Felix Klein, but I hope their memory will not be too tarnished if I place them under the label of 'Scientist' for the sake of reducing clutter on my sidebar (and for brand recognition...).

Felix Klein is actually someone who I mostly knew of thanks to my girlfriend. With her extensive interest in geometry and group theory, Felix Klein is a massively famous figure to her. A little bit of research on Wikipedia and he seems awfully impressive to me as well. Mathematically, he was exceptionally important in the founding of group theory and the relation of geometry to other areas of mathematics (I only have a vague understanding of the appropriate terms here, so to avoid wildly embarrassing my girlfriend and any other mathies who might be reading this, I will refrain from going into too much detail). What makes Felix Klein extra exceptional, though, is he was also exceedingly important as a facilitator of the scientific enterprise as a whole.

While serving as a young professor in Munich, he taught courses to Adolf Hurwitz, Carl Runge, and Max Planck (among others, but those three I have directly encountered in memorable ways within my own studies). After a brief stint in Leipzig, Klein moved to Göttingen where he worked to rebuild the city's prominence in the world of mathematics. To that end, he managed to fenagle Hilbert away from Königsberg, guide the mathematics journal Mathematische Annalen to become one of the best in the world, and begin allowing women to study in Göttingen. Perhaps even more widely impacting than his administrative and leadership roles in Göttingen itself, Klein also began to advocate for the adaption of calculus instruction in secondary schools, a practice gradually adopted in many countries even outside Germany.

So, whether you are a devoted mathematician or simply a dabbler like myself, you should take a moment to appreciate the endeavours of one Felix Klein. If you want more detail on the man, have a look at his Wikipedia article.

Technical Difficulties

So... I arrived in Germany early this morning, but my bags did not... In addition to the inconvenience of no change of clothes, my bags also had all my plug converters from the North American plug shape to the European. That means I now have to ration my laptop's batteries very carefully until my baggage arrives (that should be in 24-48 hours). Blogging has a somewhat lower priority than familial email communication, so until my bags arrive I'll have to take a hiatus. What a bloody pain...

Travel Woes Part II: Buffalo to Lima

In Part I of this series, I detailed how my girlfriend and I ended up sharing a ride with a perfect stranger named Jennifer from Toronto to Buffalo to try and catch a flight to JFK airport so we could catch our connecting flight on to Lima. With our flight out of Buffalo delayed, we ended up in a bar at the airport looking to eat something (none of us had eaten in many hours) and perhaps drown our disappointment with alcohol (not an actual plan, just a joked about plan).

After we ate (I had Buffalo wings, seeing as how we were in Buffalo), we wandered outside to see that our flight was still delayed. This meant that even if we made it to JFK, it looked like we would be arriving after our flight to Lima had already left. Worried and disgruntled, we asked if there were any American Airlines personnel in the building and were told that there were possibly still some outside of security if we wanted to wander down to baggage claim. With what appeared to be at least an hour delay, we decided we might as well attempt to do so. Then, to our horror, they announced that the flight leaving from our gate was cancelled. Moments of terrible contemplation about being stuck in Buffalo for a night passed before another announcement followed in which the Jet Blue employee clarified, saying it was not actually the flight to JFK that had been cancelled, but was in fact the flight to Boston that was supposed to have left from that gate several hours beforehand but had also been delayed, and the flight to JFK would be leaving shortly. In a roller coaster of emotion, we were suddenly elated that we might actually have a chance to get to JFK in time to catch our flight. Of course, even the best estimates for our arrival time into JFK only gave forty minutes to get our bags, find our terminal, check in, and then go through security and board the plane. Jennifer at least had things a little better in that she wasn't carrying gifts to family, so she was just carrying everything on.

The flight to JFK was rather uneventful. It was full of anxiety and mentally making contingency plans in case we didn't make our connecting flight. Jennifer was no longer travelling with us, as her seat was not near ours and we had acknowledged our goodbyes and good lucks before getting on the airplane. When we landed in JFK (airport number 3!), my girlfriend and I made our way as quickly as possible to baggage claim where we then had an agonizing wait for our luggage while the minutes ticked by. With a scant fifteen minutes before our flight from JFK was supposed to leave, we picked up our suitcase and headed for the terminal train. It is at this point in the rush I made an error. Our flight, while it had been booked through American Airlines, was actually being operated by LAN Chile, which meant that instead of leaving from terminal 8, it actually left from terminal 4. In a rush, I failed to notice this on our itinerary, and therefore guided my girlfriend and I to terminal 8. In my defence, we only had ten minutes at this point to check in, get through security, and board our plane before it was supposed to leave, so I really do not think we would have made it anyway. Especially since when we finally did make it to terminal 4, the only LAN lady we could find working told us check-in had closed an hour ago and we would have to go back to terminal 8 and talk to the American Airlines personnel about being rerouted. Despite being told that check-in had been closed for that long, however, we think Jennifer may have made it since we never ran into her again (hopefully she did... I wouldn't want that crazy rented car trip to have been for nothing).

So, tails between our legs, we once again traversed the JFK terminals to return to terminal 8. This may have been the lowest point in our relationship, as my girlfriend refused to talk to me for the duration of the train ride from terminal 4 to terminal 8. One small bit of luck was with us, though, for when we got to terminal 8 and found the American Airlines counter that we needed to go to for rerouting, we managed to beat an entire plane load of angry and disgruntled travellers by only a couple of minutes. This was especially auspicious since the desk agents were possibly the slowest airport agents I have ever seen (and this is, if you recall, after we spent nearly two hours in the check-in line in Toronto). We had to tell the agent who was dealing with us that we wanted to go to Lima, not Toronto, three times. He ended up rebooking us to fly through Miami the next morning from LaGuardia. Unfortunately, since there had been so many flight cancellations, we were told there was no way for the airline to give us a hotel to stay in. They at least supplied us with a waiver for an airport limo to take us to LaGuardia as well as a $20 dinner voucher and a $10 breakfast voucher.

Though it took the limo (I always find it misleading to call airport limousines 'limousines' since they are decidedly not. They are fancier than taxis, fair enough, but they are not limousine as I understand that term) a little over an hour to show up where it was supposed to, we finally made it to LaGuardia (airport 4!) shortly before midnight. Security services were closed, meaning we had to spend the night in the outer skirts of the airport which was already unfortunately full of other stranded people. Hunkering down in a cafe (which thankfully had an Au Bon Pain open all night so we could use our vouchers to buy orange juice and salads), we paid the unreasonably expensive fee to access the Boing Boing wireless network so I could send my parents an email warning them that we weren't going to be arriving when they thought we were. My girlfriend stated adamantly that we were not allowed to both be asleep at the same time, and that she refused to sleep in a fast food cafe in LaGuardia airport (which I thought was a logical ticket for me to go to sleep, despite her later claims to my having abandoned her through the night). Given my severe inability to go long periods without sleep (a weakness those that know me in real life can attest to), I set her up with my laptop for amusement and made a bed for myself on some exceedingly uncomfortable small plastic chairs. At about three in the morning my girlfriend woke me to point out that the laptop battery was dying and her iPod was also nearly out of batteries. An odd buzzing was also coming from the nearby column which had given both of us a headache (although that was also probably helped along by the harshly bright lights, exhaustion, and general tension), so we decided to search out a new place to spend the night. I scouted much of the airport, but the only relatively unoccupied place I could find was another cafe (this time with nothing open) on a lower level. We found our way there and I rebuilt my uncomfortable bed while my girlfriend plugged the laptop in and set about keeping herself awake.

After we checked in in the morning and went to the gate, my girlfriend couldn't stay awake any longer and her desperate desire not to fall asleep in LaGuardia airport failed her. She curled up and fell asleep for a brief hour or so before our flight. To our amazement, we boarded the plane and took off without further mishap, flying on a rather cramped and lacking in entertainment (there were no personal entertainment screens, and those screens which did exist were relatively useless since the audio wasn't working) airplane to Miami (airport 5!), where we briefly stayed before once again boarding an undelayed flight (now that we were past the snowy regions of the northlands) and flew to Lima (airport 6!), arriving 36 hours after we had set out (and, unfortunately, still in the same clothes and without having been unable to brush our teeth for large stretches of that trip, thanks to the idiotic airline policy of not allowing liquids or gels in carry-on luggage). Still, we did make it.

The Peruvian Water Supply

One interesting thing my family and I noticed while in Peru was the irrigation system used for the maintenance of the parks throughout Lima (though in many ways Lima is the dirtiest city I can remember being to, in the more affluent areas there are some very beautiful green spaces). By far the most common system of irrigation used is a flooding method in which a large trench (or, for a large park, multiple trenches) is dug, often with slightly shallower offshoots radiating away from it. Water is then poured into the trench until it fills to the brim, at which point the water seeps into the ground on either side and provides moisture for the soil. There are several problems with this method.

To start, the trenches look rather unpleasant and the ground next to the trenches is a sopping mud soup following a flooding. They also make any traversal of a park at night or in the late evening rather treacherous. However, beyond the aesthetic and somewhat overly safety conscious attitude I have developed from spending most of my life in North America (especially those four years in Pennsylvania where we couldn't have a swimming pool on our property without an unhealthy dose of insurance on the off chance someone trespassed and drowned), my main issue with the irrigation method is it seems ridiculously inefficient, especially when conducted in the heat of the day. One would think that in a desert city, the issue of water efficiency would matter. No one there seemed concerned, however, so I suppose they know something I don't.

Travel Woes Part I: Toronto to Buffalo

As but a single consumer, I don't have a whole lot of power. So when air travel goes very wrong and my girlfriend and I depart on a whirlwind tour of six airports in 36 hours in a desperate attempt to make our trip from Toronto, Canada, to Lima, Peru, there isn't a whole lot than can be done to get back at the companies that were so fantastically unhelpful in our tired and vulnerable state. Since it is at least a vaguely amusing narrative, however, I can at least relate the tale on my blog. Also, since I am still rather unimpressed with our carrier, I will not refrain from saying who it was that put us through this (of course, it was not entirely their fault, as weather factored into it. However, in dealing with the adverse travel conditions, they made a very poor showing of being helpful and accommodating).

Anyway, it all started upon arriving at Pearson International Airport in Toronto (airport number 1!) on our day of departure. There was a fairly long line for the check-in, but, like many a modern airport, there are also express check-in terminals which then allow one to go through the much faster luggage drop-off line. Unfortunately, though, we were flying American Airlines and, upon completion of all the necessary button pressing on the express check-in, a little screen pops up that says to wait there for an agent to come around and check your documents. Of course, there was no such agent around. I finally had to abandon my terminal and go track down an agent to follow me back. She refused to do so, saying she had something else to do, but that another agent was covering that area, finally pointing out some agent walking over from a back office where she must have been holed up for the last ten minutes or so. Why the airport or airline (I'm not actually sure who is responsible for this ridiculous setup) decided to make an automated check-in require a non-automated component I have no idea (kind of like requiring a teller to have to come over and check one's bank card at an ATM machine before one can actually utilize any ATM services). With my documents finally approved, all I got was a little printout saying "We're sorry, we were unable to process your request." Turns out our flight was canceled and we had to wait in the check-in line anyway to speak to an agent to reroute us.

Despite a line-up that wound its way through several switch-backs and then extended for over a dozen meters beyond the American Airlines check-in area, there were only two agents working the check-in counter (plus one who was occasionally present to check-in business class passengers who would sometimes elect to help out someone from the economy line). This meant we stood in line for over an hour and a half - so long, in fact, we would have missed our flight had it not been canceled anyway. After our epic bout of standing, we finally made it to the check-in desk where the agent gave a wryly exasperated smile and said, "I've been re-booking people going to Lima all day! You can wait two days and fly to Chicago, Miami, then Lima, or you can go to Buffalo and do that tomorrow." When we were a bit disconcerted at such a thought, he pointed behind him at a young blonde lady who had been standing in the line ahead of us and said, "She's trying to arrange a flight out of Buffalo tonight into JFK on Jet Blue. Talk to her and you might be able to do the same." With that he waved us aside and took the next people in line. I believe the idea was for us to decide what we wanted to do and be helped by this fellow without having to get back in line, but he buggered off to some meeting about the weather shortly after brushing us off. We now had no agent actually concerned with dealing with our predicament and a vague choice between spending $378 on Jet Blue tickets from Buffalo to JFK to hopefully make our non-canceled flight, waiting a day and still having to drive to Buffalo to be rerouted through Chicago and Miami, or waiting two days and being rerouted from Toronto.

I'm actually not quite sure how it happened, but the fatigue of standing in a line for nearly two hours combined with the pumping adrenaline over the urgency to make a decision before our options became further constricted so that my girlfriend and I somehow opted for the "insane plan" choice of buying Jet Blue tickets and trying to make our flight out of JFK. That meant we found ourselves rushing to rent a car with a random blonde lady named Jennifer who had happened to be standing ahead of us in line and was also trying to get to Lima. Her predicament was slightly more pressing than ours since she had a connecting flight out of Lima to Machu Picchu (well, more accurately, flight to Cuzco and then drive to Machu Picchu) where her fiance was waiting to meet her. Jennifer turned out to be a nice lady. She was almost thirty, had dual American-Canadian citizenship but was living in Toronto, and taught at a primary school. Though it was disconcerting both on her part and our part to get into a car with a strange party to drive to Buffalo, it was kind of nice to have the moral support (as well as the financial support of splitting the bill for the rental car). It did lead to a rather interesting situation at the border, though, when Jennifer made the mistake of letting slip the fact that we had only met each other for the first time at the airport. Looking back, though, the conversation with the border guard was probably the highlight of the entire 36 hours of travel that we endured (simply due to its ludicrous nature), and I will therefore endeavour to relate it word for word (it does lose a little bit of its charm without inclusion of a picture of the amazingly skeptical face the guard made, but I don't think he would have approved if I had pulled out my camera and taken a picture of him in the middle of his interrogation).

Characters in the following dialogue:
BG - Border Guard
J - Jennifer
M - Me (or Mozglubov)
GF - My Girlfriend

Car pulls up to the border crossing and we hand over our passports
BG: "Good evening. So you are all Canadian?"
J: "Yes."
BG: "Where are you headed?"
J: "Buffalo."
BG: "What for?"
J: "Um, to hopefully catch a plane."
BG: "Hopefully? A plane to where?"
At this point, Jennifer started floundering a bit, so I jumped in too
M: "JFK airport in New York."
BG: "And what are you doing in New York?"
M: "Hopefully catching a plane to Lima, Peru."
BG: "What? Peru? So you are not actually staying in the United States?"
J: "No, our flight from Toronto to JFK was cancelled, so we are trying to catch a flight from Buffalo to JFK."
BG: "And what are you going to Peru for?"
J: "I'm meeting my fiance there, and he's, uh-"
M: "Going to visit my family for Christmas. My sister lives there."
BG: "So your flight was cancelled and you decided to drive down to Buffalo to take another flight?"
J: "Yeah, we met in line and rented this car together."
At this point a look of utter disbelief falls on the border guard's face, and it didn't leave for quite some time.
BG: "Wait a minute, you met at the airport?" At this point he points at my girlfriend and I, "Do you two know each other?"
M: "She's my girlfriend."
GF: "We live together."
BG: "So you've never met these people before."
J: "No."
BG: "You're joking, right?"
J: "No."
BG: "How do you know they're not transporting drugs across the border? If they are, you'd get busted too!"
J: Looks at me and shrugs, "I don't know, you don't have drugs, do you?"
M: "No."
BG: "Ok, turn the car off and give me your keys."
J: "You're joking, right?"
BG: "No."

At this point the guard opened the trunk and searched through my girlfriend's bag and mine (he failed to spot Jennifer's bag in the backseat next to my girlfriend). After a bit of further dubious consternation over the contents of the boxes of smoked salmon I was taking to my sisters (for some reason smoked salmon boxes often have no distinguishing features other than some Native American artwork, making them suspicious looking boxes to an already alert border guard) the border guard finally decided that maybe we really were as crazy as we sounded and decided to let us go on our way. As we pulled back onto the highway, Jennifer asserted that if we ever somehow found ourselves doing something like this again, we had been friends for years.

After some more driving through fairly terrible weather, we finally arrived at Buffalo airport (airport number 2!). Apparently American Airlines only actually has employees at the Buffalo airport until 5:00, meaning there was no one there to help us in case our flight to JFK was canceled or delayed enough that we would miss our connecting flight to Lima (as it now appeared it would be). With our Jet Blue flight delayed an indeterminate amount of time and our prospects for actually making it to Lima diminishing, the three of us wandered into a bar.