Pomegranates and Passersby: Oceans

Oh my goodness I’ve had a LOT of coffee today (for me) and I’m ready to just type about my life! I started my internship with Akha Ama Coffee today and it was AWESOME. I had a hot mocha with latte art in it, quite a few cups of drip coffee and a million sips of trial espresso while Pi Jenny, one of my bosses, was adjusting the grinder to make perfect espresso. Did you know the grinder often needs to be adjusted multiple times per day as the weather changes? Jenny drinks around 10 cups of espresso per day just tasting these different trial runs.

So… Oceans! My last excursion was to the south of Thailand to the coast- beaches, sunsets, sunburns, coral reefs and endless gorgeous rock cliffs and palm trees and shells! So many shells.

First we spent a week in a fishing village on the west coast of the tail of Thailand. Everyone who lives there is Muslim and subsides mostly off of seafood! YUM! Too bad we learned all about how fishing in the seas+climate change= no more fish in about 20 years. Unfortunately I am not inspired to fix this problem, I feel it is out of our control and I hope other people are inspired to deal with it. Some of my favorite moments here included visiting a mudflat (area where the tide has gone out and lots of sea life hangs out until it comes back in) where I saw a few starfish, armies of crabs, had hermit crabs walk over my feet, and live sand dollars.
Looking back over my journal I was also perpetually seasick, but luckily that doesn’t stand out much in retrospect: “For some odd reason here I am also chronically nauseous- I don’t really know why but I think it has something to do with feeling at the mercy of the waves, tide and universe. Today we snorkeled through the dugong grasses, and that set me up for a tipsy day. There is nothing quite like floating, limbs splayed, on a bobbing chop of water that is moving under you, listening to yourself breath loudly through your snorkel and staring at a whole nother world below you. At times I felt like a vacuum cleaner or something odd like that, chugging and propelling myself along the surface of the water using my super strong fins”.

I also really enjoyed snorkeling: “Snorkeling was actually a dream- even though I was feeling rocked and nauseous everything was way too real, it just pulled you right in! Colors I had never seen before and fish I only thought could be drawn in animation (Nemo is REAL!) and seas of coral. It was like being in a personal museum or aquarium forever. I had three favorite moments. The first was actually being in the middle of a school of blue/yellow/silver fish and one swam up to me and just stared me in the face. They were all around me and I felt like I was a part of them. The second was seeing three completely different schools of fish all close together and at the same time. The fish and formations were different, but they were still organized in very much the same way. Finally, there was one species of fish that would have individuals of 3-4 other fish follow it around, and it was so cool to see them all in a row”. Who knew fish could be so cool?

Next we traveled to a group of islands out in the ocean where we kayaked, camped and snorkeled for a whole nother week. This time held many of the same experiences, including sleeping outside every night and watching a hermit crab change shells! “Eli and Lily found a hermit crab that is too big for its shell. They went to find it a bigger shell while I babysat. We could tell that it had feelings because it was notably flustered and anxty about its shell, self conscious even, because it couldn’t shrink away when we picked it up. Then the most amazing thing happened: Erin presented it with a bigger shell she had found. It straddled it for a second, feeling it with its antennae and then actually crawled out of its old shell and backed into the bigger one, which looked a little bit too bit (with growing room). It adhered itself to the shell and started walking. It looked like the skinny kid on the football team clunking around in too big pads with its helmet falling off. Everyone laughed and cheered”.