Bird of the Day

This is a Blue Crowned Motmot. I took this picture earlier this afternoon, through the window. Aparrently he is a fan of bananas and just hanging out in trees. His tail is "raqueted" or something like that... i forget the term. but yeah. He's pretty. Sorry the picture is a little poor-quality. :)
More artsy pics; click on them to see them bigger, i think:

making kissy-chirpy noises

GECKO!!! I finally got a picture of one. There were two of them, but one skedaddled while I went inside to get my camera. They were making kissy-chirpy noises to each other, which I had been hearing all evening, but hadn't known the source. I'm sitting with my laptop on the back porch of the beach house right now, it's dark out but there are still people in the pool and sitting on other back porches at other beach houses here. There are still those two geckos on the wall, I can see them from here. I like geckos, and geckos that make noises are pretty awesome.

So, there you go, proof that there are animals here that I actually manage to snap pictures of before they disappear. :)

Loaderingering

I usually put up arty, photoshopped-up pictures onto my DeviantART website, but that is taking extraordinarily long to load these days, so I will just upload those pictures here, a few at a time... enjoy, and please leave comments!
This is Peter, my host sister's dog. He's pretty cute.
This is the dryer.

Again with the extreme heat

So, we're back at the beach house. It's hot. I think that Carnival started yesterday or today, there was a lot of traffic on the way here and lots of loud music playing and people wearing strange hats and spraying each other with hoses. I'll try to upload more pictures later today or something, I know blogs are boring when they're just writing. :P

mmm... liver.

Yeah, not so much. Liver tastes way too much like straightup cow.

It took forever to take the bus into the city this afternoon, so my host sister and I saw a different movie than we had intended. I was looking forward to seeing "El Curioso Caso de Benjamin Button" for the third time (no, really, I kind of love that movie) but we were late and instead went to see "Simplemente, No Te Quieres"... but then we had to leave before it ended (which I hate doing) to take a taxi to where my host mom works (the hospital, she is an obstetrician) and go home. Then we had dinner: Rice = delicious fantastic, liver = igh....

oh ticks, how i hate thee

I have the lifeless bodies of at least ten ticks on my nightstand, squished by my deadly tick-killing weapon: bottle of nail polish. it's one in the morning here. I think that my host sister's giant stuffed dog is the main nest, but she refuses to remove it from her room, even from her bed... ticks. everywhere. in my room, in my bed. WHY?????

UPDATE: I killed around 20 ticks last night, and I keep finding more, mostly on my host sister's bed. We found a bunch living inside of her blanket and giant stuffed dog, so we removed those items from the room... ugh. I hate ticks. What purpose do they serve, anyway? No one eats them in large quantities, they must be useless parasites. aaauuuugggghhhhh.This is a tick on my bed. This is not cool.

Where the wild things are

The above is a picture of what Soberania National Park looks like... this is one block from my house.
Did I mention that I went to a discotheque and learned to salsa dance? Heck yes.

Internet: I have it.

I'm currently connected to internet right here in Gamboa! I discovered it last night, and although it blips out sometimes and is a fairly weak signal, it's working alright. We shall see.
Anyway. Here are some examples of the birds I've been seeing around here; these aren't my pictures because when I see these birds they are moving way too fast/I don't have my camera with me:The above are 'lesser kiskadees'. They flit around in pairs of groups of three or four and sometimes just sit on the ground, zoned out. They're goofy.
This is a blue-gray tanager. They're all over the place, like sparrows but more colorful. :) I think I have one picture of one up on my Flickr account, but it's not a very good shot.
Obviously, this is not a bird. But they are all over the place: it's an agouti. They're cat-sized rodents and they're adorable. People don't seem to hate them or anything, I don't think they do much damage or anything. But they wander through the yard and sniff around until one of the dogs chases them away. They're extremely fast and even Bimbo, our big black lab, has never caught one. In Spanish they are called neques.
I don't know what kind of bird this is, but they fly over Panama Bay and other bodies of water all the time.
And, of course, I've been seeing and hearing these little mini-toucans.
I think we're going to go rollerblading now (even though it just poured down raining??) so I'll talk to you guys later. :)

ta-da!!!!

leafcutters at work, originally uploaded by [pickley]goodness.

this is the picture i wanted to upload! hurray for fast internet at friend's houses!

no me gusta hormigas en mi cama, gracias.

Hi, guys. I'm still alive, even though ants moved into my bed last night and I had to fight them off for almost an hour before I could go to sleep. I don't know what they were after, but several hundred met their doom. For a kid who used to start fights with kids who stepped on ants, I killed a lot of ants last night. They're the teeny tiny biting kind, and, what can I say, they were not welcome in my bed.
I just waited an hour for one single photograph to upload onto here to show you guys, but it hasn't gotten anywhere, so I'm afraid you will have to imagine a large green leaf being cut up by long-legged red leafcutter ants on the sidewalk when I went on a walk earlier today. Sigh.

apparently the coast is hot

It is so hot today. I just woke up about half an hour ago on the top bunk in a room in my host family's beach house we drove to yesterday. The ceiling fan above me looked a little like it was going to fly off its base it was moving so fast, and another fan was roaring on the floor, but I am still so hot... soooooo hot. I don't knowo what the temperature is, it is just "really freaking hot".

I lament my lack of bloggage the last several days. I just haven't had access to the computer... my host family uses it a lot, and it seems like every time I've gotten a hold of it recently, someone has asked to use it before my email has even gotten a chance to load.

Soooo yeah. I had more to say, but since it is so hot, my brain is sort of melting and I don't remember what all I was going to talk about except for tortillas, which I love. Here, tortillas fit in the palm of your hand and are about a quarter to half an inch thick. They come frozen, uncooked, in packages and when they are cooked they are delightfully crunchy on the outside and soft on the inside... and delicious.

Also, people here put mayonnaise on EVERYTHING. I tend to decline...

the casa

the casa, originally uploaded by [pickley]goodness.

this is where I live, by the way.
don't forget to read the post from today that is below this, too!
hasta luego, peeps.

I saw toucans!

mwahahaha. toucans. I saw them having a squawk-off in the trees down the street. They're the small kind... I don't know the actual name. But they were pretty cute. Tamila and I were watching her brother and his friend play soccer.
Earlier today Tamila and I took the bus into town to the Albrook Mall, the largest mall in Latin America or something like that. We shopped, then watched that new movie with Adam Sandler about bedtime stories, but dubbed in Spanish so I really only got the gist of the movie, and then we shopped some more. I am so hungry right now. They eat dinner late here.
I think I can feel my Spanish improving, a few words or phrases a day. Of course, I've only been here, like, three days, so my host sister still gives me funny looks when I try to say anything more than three words long.
I didn't take any pictures today, but if you haven't already you should go see what I uploaded to Flickr yesterday: http://www.flickr.com/photos/littlesister4/

I am officially "here"!

I am now an exchange student living with a real host family and everything! Wi-Fi does not work here in Gamboa, so my laptop has been demoted to photo storage and stuff like that. However, my wonderful host family has at least two laptops with internet so the only thing that will change is how easy it is for me to upload photographs; I will have to do some crazy transferring around between the 'tops. Also, laptop keyboards are a bit different here, as you might imagine, and I keep pressing buttons that I expect to be something different than what ends up on the page... it is taking me a while to write this...

I will upload pictures of the house and neighborhood and RAINFOREST that I am living in as soon as I am not lazy enough. Birds sing here all day, especially around four and five pm. Right now it is morning and I hear what must be ten different kinds of birds calling to each other. On a walk last night we saw some parrots (lorros) flying and squawking to each other. There are also ñekes or however you spell that all over the place; cat-sized rodents! They are adorable and my host family's dog Sarita loves to chase 'em. Sarita (Sara) is a black lab and so is Bimbo. Peter is a smaller brown and white spaniel of some sort. All friendly well-behaved dogs.

My favorite thing so far as far as animals, though, is the ants!!!! Ormigas, i think, in Spanish. The ants here CARRY THINGS and actually MAKE PATHS through the jungle.
Here, using the nice sidewalk is not really done, and the curb is for the ants. Seriously. Imagine seeing a thousand tiny pieces of leaves and flowers walking along the curb and then on closer inspection see the little red ants carrying 'em. It's crazy!

The house is a few blocks from the Panama Canal and the intersecting Chagres River, Chagres being an indigenous word for crocodile.

I'll come back with pictures later, I promise :)