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This semester I've taken an ocean chemistry module! Largely because its 50% course work... anyway.

This is the salinity machine we have here and basically we put in the water samples on the left and run them through 1,000,000 times it seems and eventually get the salinity reading for each of our samples, crazy exciting right?! I'm not joking when i say we spent two hours with this machine and didn't get entirely accurate readings. But the applications of this are very useful because salinity varies with depth and different organism can survive at different salinity levels, with fresh water being an influence on it.  So once you put the sample in a current is run through it which the machine uses to calculate the temperature which we can then calculate the salinity from. note the high tech way that we get the water out of the machine before we put it in a new sample (the orange tube and bin).

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Also the other day i found out one of my lecturers goes by a six months on six months off approach to research vs lecturing which is basically the dream. He spends six months a year studying albatross behavior and measuring their wing spans, which is up to three meters the largest of all birds, but if i didn't think Jon was cool already this has cemented it in my head forever.

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These are a few a few pictures from our exploration of the archives in the world museum liverpool! It was very interesting and a lot of the samples we found are from 50+ years ago, i think the whale fetus was from the 1920s. These samples are preserved in embalming fluid, we stumbled across a man who worked there called tony who let us look further into the archives (unfortunately i didn't take any pictures) and showed us things that people from the university had looked at over the years, for example thousands of squid beaks from the 50's that we're recovered from whale stomaches that year as the size and species of the squid can be determined from these. there were also hundreds of mice and bats. This was the first time i've got to look through archives and it was very interesting, hopefully ill be able to find some papers related to what we found there. Also i never knew museums were active participants in research which is interesting and makes the possibility of working/volunteering in one a lot more appealing. Also in the last picture theres a siamese piglet which was kinda freaky in real life.

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June 15th!  After staying the night on the beach me and Freya did morning survey super early, it was defiantly worth it. We found the first nest of the year! And i was the one who found the eggs in the camouflage!  Today was one of the best days I've ever had, waking up under the stars. doing an early morning survey, finding our first camouflage which then we found the first nest of the season in! The eggs are a lot more delicate than i was expecting and about the size of ping pong balls, i was so scared i'd put my finger through one of them. Because i found the nest i got to name it: Vin Baba Llama! So in 45 days (when sadly i'll no longer be on the project the Vin Baba Llama hatchlings will hatch! Can't wait to see the success rate for my nest.

We slept most of the day and kiosk went well in the evening. We've made friends with a few of the locals now and everything is so good!

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June 11th, 12th & 13th.

It seems like we're settling down into a bit of a routine now. Both mornings we went down to the beach for 6:00 and placed beach markers along the beach every 50 meters so that we can easily record where the nest are and see which locations are the most popular for the turtles to nest in. we've also been conducting day surveys of the beach recording whats on the beach, i.e sun beds, boats, structures. We had to measure the distance between the sun beds as the legal minimum distance is 2 meters  apart, this way the turtles would defiantly be able to get between them and potentially nest. There's still no sign of tracks unfortunately but we've had pretty bad weather the past few days, we're hoping that the new moon on the 15th will bring us some luck. 

The kiosk shift is my least favorite part, i still enjoy the work but i'm not amazing at talking to total strangers and although i'm picking up a lot about the turtles from Freya it's difficult to explain things when I've never actually seen a nest. Tara's very good at it and a lot of the people here speak German so she can reach a whole group of people that me and Freya can't. I'm just so tired all the time! I hope i get used to this soon.

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Happy (very late) world oceans day!

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June 10th

The camps in much higher spirits today! We received news from the rescue centre that Ana our turtle is on a drip and feeding which is a great sign. It turns out the flipper we thought might need removing had circulation so it doesn't need to be amputated! The best news though is that she does have eyes, they were just receded very far back into her skull. Morning survey was easier although the hill climb is still a killer. Unfortunately there was a huge rain storm today? Wasn't really expecting to see much rain given were in the Mediterranean. So we largely stayed inside and kept to ourselves, everyone needed a rest and a bit of alone time recuperate. Later on we opened the kiosk for the first time and went though all the prices of the things we sell and information we should know about the turtles. I realy don't feel like I know that much yet, I've never really bothered to study turtles since I'm most interested in squid, but they're actually fairly interesting. After kiosk we went for a celebration icecream at the cafe next door. Ah sweet sugary processed food how I have missed you so.

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June 9th

We're all completely shattered from the rescue and being up half the night building a "turtle ambulance" Freya's had to try get the turtle on the bus to Athens this morning and asked the two German guys for help as we'd been sent to do the morning survey alone. Fortunately no tracks today or I don't know what we would have done since she ended up traveling to Klamath with it to try to get it on a different bus. So tired I can barely think straight. We're not opening the kiosk today which is good. Ugh sleep.

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June 8th.

Happy birthday to me! We were up at 5:30 am (3:30 uk time) for morning survey which is a twenty minute walk from camp up a very big hill in the village here. The village seems pretty sleepy but I've not had the chance to explore yet. When we finally got to our beach we started to look for something to post for world ocean day. After about five minutes we found a large construction made of bamboo on the beach and took a.time lapse video of us deconstructing it (which ill post later) we carried on along the beach with no sign of tracks and stopped in the teverna for a birthday ice cream and a card they'd made me, even though I'd not mentioned it to them. The walk back to the village was so killer in the late morning Sun and we stopped at the Sunday market to buy fruit and veg for the week, the farmers were pretty aggressive sellers but freya handled them really well and pretty soon we were headed back to camp bags stuffed full of freshly picked fruit and veg. Later that afternoon freya had gone to play the trumpet in the local orchestra that she'd been dropped into and me and Tara were preparing tea in anticipation for our first kiosk shift when we received a panicked phone call from Freya. A turtle was caught in a next about 20km away from our camp. We rushed to prepare the bags discarding our tea. Changing into our swimwear and volunteer tops we agreed if either of us needed to go in the water Tara would as she's a much better swimmer than me. The coast guard arrived to pick us up with Freya and the basics of turtle rescue were quickly explained to us. We needed to take pictures of the location, where in the net she was caught and any injuries sustained. How to hold the turtle and what we needed to write down. I'm going to write about the turtle rescue once I have seen charger for my phone so I can put up some photos all I want to say is that it is one of the most exhausting things I've ever done.

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June 7th continued

I arrived at around 8:30pm and pitched my tent with the help of freya who is lovely about 5ft 3 and is taking two years out before uni. The campsites sweet enough hot showers and clean water. Tara had cooked us tea and it turns out the camp is vegetarian! Which saves a whole lot of hassle for me. They both seem very nice and tomorrow I'm going to go on my first morning survey with them! I'm so excited.

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Saturday 7th june

Ugh what a day! I woke up a bit worse for wear. Maybe going out in Athens the night before a day of traveling by coach wasn't a great idea... I missed my first coach and ended up leaving the hostel a bit later than you're supposed to stay. Christian waited for me to get a taxi (he was flying to Rome at 3pm that day) I think the only thing I've not liked so far is that I want to get to know the people I've met more than one day will allow, given that I'll probably never meet them again. The coach was murder I spent two hours in the Athens KTEL bus station waiting for one and I've never felt so nervous, not knowing a lick of Greek is difficult and next time I travel I'm going to learn some of the language as it makes me feel ignorant and makes it much more difficult to know your headed in the right direction. I was so terrified of getting on the wrong bus to who knows where. Safely on the bus to Kalamata I attempted to sleep for the next long 4 hours, being periodically disturbed by the man next to me and waking up for the entire thunder and lightening storm, there was sideways lightening?? Greece it a lot more mountainous than I expected it to be. Finally arriving in Kalamata hot and sweaty but ready to catch the next bus asap I discover that the next bus isn't till 7pm. It's currently 3:30pm. My bags backbreakingly heavy holding my tent, sleeping bag and clothes for the next month or two and the Mythos from the night before hangs over me. I settle down in the bus cafe for the long wait, no one speaks English here and I'm concerned ill miss my bus if I fall asleep, my phones on 10 percent power with a new break number in it when I receive a message from Freya who's to be my leader for the next month. She hopes I've had a good journey and asks when I'll arrive, finally contact with someone! I furiously type away letting her know what bus ill be on and that I'm sorry ill be late and asking whatever random questions pop into my head. I'm worried that I won't get on with her or tara-marie the other volunteer, a months a long time with just two people.

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Friday 6th june

I arrived in Athens on Friday and stayed over at a hostel there where I met a nice group of individual travellers and went to the acropolis with a Canadian guy called Christian. This is my first time traveling alone and although I was incredibly nervous it turned out pretty well. We check out a number of the ruins around Athens and had a look around the back streets, I’m lucky Christian was part Greek and could speak a bit of the language as the mid day Sun melted my brain so much I don’t know if I’d ever have made it back to the hostel. Once we returned to the hostel Christian went to meet a family member and me and the two girls in our shared room (Kelsey a Canadian nurse and ikira a half Chinese news researcher) went to tea. I had my first meal in greece, a quasidia (although I’m not sure how Greek that is). Then we went to a roof top bar at our sister hostel and drank mythos a Greek beer and spoke to many different people from all over the world. My favourite was Andrew an American who’d been traveling for a couple of months and was about to return to his job in environmental energy in America. It’s amazing that one night of traveling alone could let me experience so much. We ended up going to a tiki bar before tracking back to the hostel. In the morning Kelsey and ikira had left to catch their early ferries, Kelsey left me some soothies for my stomachs which was defiantly needed for my long journey…

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I can't believe its almost here! I've finished my last lot of exams and on Friday i'm off to Greece for my volunteering placement with turtles. This'll be my first proper experience that's vaguely related to the line of work I want to go into I'm so excited.