Sitou Experimental Forest II

The schedule below describes the next two days. In between the meals we have time with our teams to perform whatever research is necessary, utilizing the forest. 

Baker's catch phrase is Basically, spoken in a British accent.
He attends school in Leicester and is trying to change his accent from standard English to British.
Our group uses this phrase to basically describe everything, basically.

Instead of having free research time like we thought, we took another tour of Sitou. This time we learned about how to prevent landslides and natural erosion by using man made structures such as walls, logs and dams. What would've taken about an hour to hike to took us a mere twenty minutes via golf cart. I felt like we were the royal family of Sitou Experimental Forest, passing all of our subject who were struggling up the hill. Thank you! Thank you! Have a great morning!

This driver spoke to us in Chinese. 

Sad to say that although I could understand him,

I wasn't as fast as Jiling to respond to his questions.

While we waited for the rest of our group to arrive, I taught everyone the ridiculous dancing game called Boom Chicka Boom Boom. I always seem to draw the strangest games from my memory. They're usually entertaining, luckily. When one person starts a dance move, it gets passed around the circle. The first dancer has to switch every time we finish singing, "boom chicka boom boom." It goes fairly fast, so our moves ended up being more silly than good looking. Both Shengyu and Vico did different poses for each round, instead of dancing. Too fun. 

Okay, so every one finally came and thus began our outdoor lecture. Although the information was great, I had a difficult time seeing the pictures our guide brought with him. So instead I listened while looking out at the dam. Man has tried for centuries to help nature when it comes to erosion. What I've learned is that  planting things that are actually supposed to grow outside can help, if you don't want to deal with the up keep of man made structures. The guide seemed to have traveled to various places, including Japan and Europe, just to study this. I guess what you love to do can really take you places...

Daaaaaaam.

After a nice lunch (they still serve us like every meal is a special occasion), we finally started our project. Have I mentioned that we switched our topic again? Yep we did, for probably the third time. No bother, because this time I made our group promise to settle on this one topic. We only had one and a half more days to research. Aiyaaaa!

So our final topic is something along the lines of Wind Damage to Japanese Cedar Trees in Sitou Forest, Based on Their Proximity to Typhoon's Wind Direction. Long title, but it'll be cut down for our final presentation. Hooray! I feel relieved that we have a solid and workable idea. Thanks to Judy who helped up work this out.
The setup of our four plots involves taking a 50 m measuring tape...or tape measure. I had a disagreement with Jimmy about which one is correct. Anyways, we acquired one and measured out another 50 m with red nylon string. Taking the real one and jank one, we found a plot off the Giant Tree Trail to start measuring our space (with a compass of course).
This took longer than expected, probably because we were being extra careful and none of us were that experienced in our method. What took even longer though, was counting the trees. Walking through the dense and wet jungle forest was fun at first, but could have also been dangerous if we weren't careful. Soon it became wetter, as the rain came down along with the sun. I'm sure that our data wasn't that accurate, but we finished and got out of there.

Brave men trekking through with our Northern plot line.

Enjoying the outdoors

Ahhhhhh. It felt so good to take off our wet clothes and shower. A friend came back with me...a leech. At first I thought it was a bit of dirt, but after much flicking I had a realization and pulled it off. Turns out that the proper was is to let them finish sucking your blood and they'll fall off. Either that or burn them off with a lighter. I think this is what Shengyu and Kevin did. That would've been fun?

I live with an elf named Jiling

Later at night many people were watching a dumb horror movie in my room. I mean really dumb. Even Andria, who is afraid of a lot of things, was amused. I saw clips of it as I made my rounds doing both my laundry and my friends'. A good time was had by all, and I guess we have Andria's bat if any Bat/Scarecrow/Human creatures from the movie come a crawling.