Cultural Adeventures, New Friends and a Great Opportunity

These phrases can pretty much sum up what has happened to me over the past week. I am currently sitting on base at the Taiwan National Museum of Marine Biology and Aquarium in a grad student dorm room that has been rented out to my fellow colleagues and I for the next week or so. The reason I am in such an amazing place, a field course on Cetaceans that I am taking for a credit at my university. To me field courses are the best thing a student can participate in since it allows for hand-on interaction in the area you are interested in and, like I always try and assure my mom, grades arent everything ;)
This journey started out last sunday when I took my first international flight over the north pole (waved to santa and everything) and flew 15 hours into Hong Kong airport. If you fly to Asia I strongly reccommend Cathay Pacific, great movie selection, decent food and nice big comfy chairs...as big as they can get on a plane! The scenery in Hong Kong is very similar to any tropical area, lush mountainous regions with many birds, bugs and water buffalo. I have not seen the city yet, but there is always time for that on the way back through. We stayed the first couple of nights in Pui-O vacation houses up the mountain. Thanks to the Hong Kong dolphin conservation society we had a place to stay and a boat to research on!
We went out with the main conservation/cetacean expert and his crew to learn the area where the humpback dolphin, sousa (also known as the Chinese White Dolphin to locals) resides. This population of dolphins has been studied by his crew for 10+ years, photo-id's, trasect surveying and observational data-keep were just some of the tasks we helped with. Finless porpoises have also been seen in the area but due to their shy nature and small, finless backs they are difficult to spot. We then boarded a plane to Taiwan landing in Kaohsiung, a large port on the SW side of the country. We drove two hours to get where I am now, the museum/aquarium/research center. It is a great learning facility and we even have unlimited passes to the aquarium which houses millions of fish, a whale shark and two adorable belugas. We leave tomorrow for a bus trip around the perimeter of Taiwan visiting fishing ports and taking more boat tours along the way. I will try and post more as we go but you never know when the internet will be available when you are on an excursion like this!
Till then zaijian (goodbye in Mandarin)!