post Costa Rica

It's been a little over a week since returning from Costa Rica. It's a Sunday night which means I should go to bed early in anticipation of very busy Monday, but I can't sleep. What else makes logical sense but to update the blog?

My time in Costa Rica showed me that it was a beautiful country. From what I gathered, the people are as open and friendly as those in Senegal-- I just wish that I could speak Spanish and that I had the time to just hang out with the locals. The alternative which we did instead, however, was also very enjoyable: Mark, Jeff, Andrew, Brian, and myself spent our entire time in Monteverde hiking through the rain forest. I think we calculated the distance covered to be something around 10 miles over 24 hours. Much of it was over steep slopes which were trying on my very out of shape body; despite that, however, we had an incredible time. We, like in Montezuma, cooked together for our meals. One of the nights, Brian bought some steak, cilantro, corn tortillas, red peppers, onions, etc. from the Supermarchado and made the most delicious fajitas perhaps ever. The one time Mark and I ate out, it was at some pricey restaurant where we enjoyed what his sister acclaimed "the best mocha in the world" with our meals. Though I'm no mocha connoisseur, Im going to have to agree with her statement.

Coming back to school, I was immediately enveloped in writing papers, working at the grille, and starting the histological process for my neuroscience research course. Hands down the most interesting course I'm taking this semester, this class is taught by my advisor who does research in anxiety research of the prefrontal cortex. With her, we've set up experiments using behavioral tasks to test the anxiety effects of pharmacological drugs and lesions on a specific part of the brain (the prelimbic area of the PFC). So basically, after surgically removing a part of the rats brain using ibotenic acid (=lesioning), we ran our rats through a zero maze to observe their anxious behavior (=behavioral measure). Now that that phase is done, we have to make sure that our lesions actually got the specific part of the brain we're researching, requiring that we make brain slices of the rats brain. To do this, we spent last week performing perfusions on the rats, then once their hearts stopped, we extracted their brains. This week, we get to do the actual slicing and then eventually see the results of our lesion surgery.

My experience in the health clinic in Sebikotane in conjunction with the surgical procedures of this course have really increased my already pretty high tolerance of blood and the inner parts of the human body. Though I hope it never gets to this point, one could almost argue that I'm almost crossing the line to complete detachment. This tolerance for an extremely narrow scope of research juxtaposed by my desire to somehow study the international community/affairs reflects the crossroad that I am about to approach going into my senior year. Though a fairly trivial matter in the big scheme of things, it is something consuming my mind as of late. Do I go to grad school for public health? for something sociological based? or less likely, to do hard science-related research? Even more, do I take a year off to "find myself"? Two years? Do I want to remain in the United States?