That makes the third time, now, that I've been to Mexico since arriving in Arizona (Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument). The first time was to play pool with Beth (my housemate) and her
friends and siblings, and the second was to get fish tacos and tamales. It's nice having the border so close - it makes it a lot easier to practice my Spanish. In the fish taco place, they were showing some movie dubbed in Spanish, about a nurse breaking some guy's legs with a hammer. I imagine it's easier to translate movies with lots of screaming.I've seen lots of lizards, two snakes, and some ibis and hawks, but no tarantulas or scorpions so far. The disappointment is overwhelming.
At work, I'm spending most of the first two weeks here training with Beth before she leaves, since some of this stuff has a pretty sharp learning curve. I've got a seven-month paid internship here for the National Park Service, studying border impacts and doing restoration work. So far we've been doing road surveys and transects using GIS (Geographic Information System) - basically, walking and driving around, and marking unapproved trails, trash, etc. on a little electronic device, then
uploading the information to a computer to make a map of all the stuff that's going on. As to what I'm going to be doing later on... I'm not really sure. I'll keep you posted.The weather here is hot and dry, but not miserably so (yet).
For Thanksgiving, some of my coworkers and I made an enormous feast, whose leftovers we've barely made a dent in since then. We've also been playing boggle and watching movies. My house is very comfortable, and comes fully equipped with a telephone, television, VCR, DVD player, and satellite dish. I went on a hike on Thursday to see an abandoned mine.
It looks like I'm going to have an interesting time here. I hope everything's going well for the rest of you.
Cheers!
Nathan
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