A surprising fact about French people is that they are French. The people I knew through my daily activities at school and at home happened to be more French than most; that is, they were from families who had lived in France for as long as anybody can remember. These peoples’ roots come from a mixture of the Gauls, the Romans, and also Germanic tribes, but everybody is commonly referred to as French now.

I can say the same thing for myself, my family, and many of my friends – we are all Americans. My family has been in America for several hundred years, and after that amount of time one of my ancestors ceased to be a Scots-Irish, British, French, or German immigrant, and was actually recognized as an American. So therefore I am American.

To the French, however, I was not just an American. I was Irish, also. Maybe a little bit Scots. No, I was not just American, I was something else. Although I am as much of an American mutt as the next American, these French people felt the need to qualify me as something else, as a type of European who had fled and forgotten to keep with the customs of the home country.

Although I am pleased to know my ancestry, I did not like that the French forced me to be a member of the Scottish or the English people. American is American; that’s the beauty of our country. There are no questions asked, even if someone has an accent; every person who lives in this country becomes American after a time, whether they have citizenship or a green card. Meanwhile, second- and third-generation North Africans are still classified as foreigners in French society.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, the title says it all. Today (Monday) is our last day here on this island. Yesterday the liberal arts group arrived. We knew they would be doing things that we did on our first day, so when they came to a particular lookout, we made sure to be snorkeling in the water down below. Incidentally, it’s the cove on the island where Darwin arrived. Hey, did you know that when Darwin came to the Galapagos (in 1835), he was here for only 5 weeks. He probably didn’t stay on San Cristobal for more than a few days to a week, and he definitely didn’t go snorkeling.

A few days ago I bought an underwater disposable camera. I took some really cool pictures of fish and sea lions. It was a lot of fun, but I can tell I got spoiled by the invention of the digital camera. After like 20 minutes in the water, I looked down at the camera and was surprised to see I had used up 2/3rds of my pictures already.

So I’ve been here for about a week. Here’s what my next week looks like: us ecology kids are going to go on a tour with the liberal arts kids to three other islands: Floreana, Isabela (the biggest) and Santa Cruz. We’ll spend a few days at each and get from one to the other via boat. There will be more snorkeling involved and a bunch of other cool stuff.

Cross-posted on Joey’s personal blog

OK, first off: Correction – In my previous post, I said that the sand on one beach was coarse because the islands were relatively new and the material making up the sand was still breaking down to finer sand (or something like that). That’s actually not the case at all. What I should have said was that the beach was young. The island is plenty old enough– at least 5 million years old. A few days ago, we went on a field trip that ended up at the world’s most perfect beach: white, soft sand, clear blue-green water, black rocks poking up in artistic ways along the fringes of the beach… It was beautiful. It was at this beach that I saw my second wild octopus. This one was bigger than the first one, and it was moving around more too. It was crawling around the rock it was on and then it shot off and swam a little ways, changing color do a dark blue, then it landed on a different rock and instantly camouflaged. It was really cool to watch its color changing right before my eyes. A part of me wanted to bother it so I could watch it shoot out an ink cloud, but I decided that probably wasn’t the best idea.

Cross-posted on Joey’s personal blog