Day 4

Yesterday, I went diving! We met in the morning at the University, which reminded me that I haven't posted pictures of the University. As with the rest of the island, it is covered in the ubiquitous hydrangeas. It is small, but lovely.

 Below is Nicole on the left and Bec on the right, my dive buddies.

 The dive shop was pretty slammed with all of the people from the conference so we went in one of the whale watching boats.

Below is the prison--pretty nice place to be in jail, I would imagine.  A view of the ocean and everything.

This is our first dive spot, right in front of that giant rock.

I wanted to take a picture of myself to prove that I was actually diving too :) And then we started to see octopuses! Here was our first encounter...

  Below is a nudibranch!!! But, my camera decided to be poopy and unfocused... You can kind of tell that it's awesome though

 More octopus love. Our dive master was playing with it and the octopus kept reaching out his arms to follow his hand.

Can you spot the flounder?

 Camo-fish!

 Another camo-fish--red this time

 Unfocused sponges

 Fire worms!

 Sea cucumber

 I loved all of this sea leaf blue lined algae (I doubt that is the real name...)

 This last octopus was one I found at the end of the dive. I was very proud of myself.

 On our dive, there were people from the conference from Brazil who had collecting permits so they spent their dive collecting molluscs and in this case, crustaceans... Yay, hermit crab!

Here is an aplesia on a clam

 Nudibranch on a shell! In a tube... so not super focused

After that, we had another dive in the afternoon on a wreck.  It was about twice a deep as my camera is rated to go, so I decided not to risk it. There were more ctenophores than I have ever seen before! It was incredible, so beautiful.  It was some sort of swarm up close to the boat. Also, there were some actual stinging jellyfish that everyone managed to avoid, thankfully.

The wreck sank at the end of WWII and there was a lot of life that had grown on it and was aggregating around it.  We saw another octopus--so many! I was thrilled!

After, we grabbed a coffee and some beers. Here is Bec with one of the tiny cups of coffee they have here, so cute!

Alright, speaking of coffee, I need to head to the conference to get back to absorbing all of the science! Today is a cephalopod day--yay! Sorry the quality of my blogs is quickly diminishing... My brain is losing power.

Azores Day 3

Yesterday, I went to see a lot of other people's talks, mostly on amazing snails and slugs! It was extremely enlightening.  Unfortunately, I also had this weird sinking feeling as I watched other talks that mine was just awful... Also that I have so much to do when I get back to Hawaii.  The latter feeling was alright though, since it's motivational. I am feeling terribly inadequate about the work I've done thus far. Oh well, there's nothing I can do about it except work harder!

After the poster session, I went for another walk around the city to take more pictures of the street art.  Enjoy!

I also stumbled upon the art museum, but it was closed, I'm going to try to get back there today.

 This is the bell tower and apparently, you can walk up to the top there, but of course that was closed too...

Here is another giant whale painted on the road, but it was impossible to get a good angle on it. Angelo is posing with the sad white whale.

In the evening, we went to Madalena's Aunt's place. It was incredible!! Here is one of her dogs, Figo. He was adorable.

Look at this kitchen! She made a delicious meal and we also had local wine and cheese.  We were talking about how the Azores has locally made wine, cheese, and tea and I thought, what more do you need? I could live here forever eating cheese and drinking delicious wine :)

When we walked in the front door, there was this artwork in the foyer. I asked Madalena's Aunt, Dalia, about it and she said it is a local artist. The piece is called "Hug gently," or "Hug in the right way." I thought it was a stunning piece.

More pictures of this fantastic house... the garden, the pool, the exterior and Shiva.

The "gates of the city" at night

This was my breakfast yesterday :)  The lattes are delicious here. The tart is pastel de nata, a local custard tart. Delicious!

Today is our free day and I am off to go for a dive!