Dear friends,

Bird ringing season is over for this year, so I finally got time to write up some of my life in the past few months here. After the last day out in the field I slept for something like 16 hours straight but now I am sufficiently recovered to take on the rest of the semester (which isn't much fortunately!). I'm still doing fine, I am slowly finding out where to get real food, I have met some people that do not think that the US is the standard for everything and I have sort of accustomed to biking in the city of Miami so I am not constantly in danger of being hit by a car and killed. Also, and that is quite important, the weather has changed considerably and it is actually really nice and warm now. It is not as humid and with the sun it can still get pretty hot but when it's cloudy it can even be quite chilly (well that is when you start feeling cold as soon as the temperature drops below 24°C…). It also rains less which I think is very unfortunate but I must also say that it is much less dangerous to bike when it's not wet.

So, it will not surprise you that most of my time is spent at the university. The campus where I am on is located in the west of Miami, almost bordering the Everglades. But it is a universe on its own. When you're on campus you hardly realize that there is also a world around you that is not all fancy, bright and glowing. The campus is very beautiful. Most buildings are relatively to very new, all the lawns are perfectly cut and green, everything is very clean and there are lots of pools (and the water is very clean too). It is also huge - if you need to walk to a class on the other end of the campus then it can take you up to 20 minutes or more (although most science buildings are clustered in one place so I usually only have to do that when I walk back from the gym or the soccer field - which are closer to the other end). The campus also has: 1 baseball stadium, 1 soccer stadium, 1 softball stadium, 1 basketball arena something like 10 tennis courts, several fields that are exclusively for the athletic teams of the university and a (from European perspective) ridiculously big football stadium. Not to forget, there is also a ballroom (which I have never been to). Besides there is a huge and really good library but a constant lack of lecture halls big enough to fit all first-year students, laboratories that are not well furnished and not enough anyways, and I will not talk about my office here, more than saying that it doesn't have a window. About twice per week I get an email from the university saying that because of this or that football or basketball match some parking lots are closed. While I am not saying that this is the case I must certainly say that I get the feeling that other things are valued more by this university than science and teaching.

Besides that, there are also something like 5 parking garages and several parking lots on campus (which together really take up most of the space here). I must also say that there are more bike racks on the campus than probably in all of the rest of the city together (which means that there is space for about 50 bikes). Even though if you have a car and want to park it at the university you need a parking permit (I don't know if you pay for that or not), everybody has to pay $100 parking fee per semester as part of their university fees. There are about 50,000 students in this university so I guess it is not too wrong to say that if the money we pay for parking would rather be invested in public transport they could build a whole metro-line to connect the existing metro-line to the campus. I will not go any further into the argument here but you can imagine that I am not very happy with the whole situation.

And one last but important thing about the university: it's called Florida International University (FIU). Which sounds great. As it turns out, there is not much international about it, more than its name and the fact that there are three buildings on this campus that have foreign names (Primera casa, Deuxième maison and Viertes Haus). While to an outsider this possibly makes it look very international, once you are here and you are trying to figure out where your colleagues have their offices, it actually serves mainly to embarrass Americans even more than they would normally be ('it's in Furtas Hose' - '???'). The fact that there is a lot of "international" students here is actually mainly that there is a lot of immigrants from several Latin American countries living in Miami and FIU is "cheap" (that is cheap for American standards but still ridiculously expensive for Europeans), which is why it attracts most of the immigrants' kids - most of whom have grown up in or around Miami anyways, so technically they aren't foreigners anyways. Contrary to undergraduate students, the vast majority of graduate students is American (and in some disciplines Asian). And professors are almost entirely American either by birth or have immigrated long ago and the majority of the are male. Most of them also seem to think that the American way of doing things is the only (or in any case the right) way to do things. Which is sad because it happens to be different from what I think is a good way of doing things several times.

Now so much for the university in general. More than in other universities I've been to, graduate studies are very different from undergraduate studies at FIU. While undergraduate students' levels are really bad, for graduates the levels are supposedly much better. I say supposedly because I find that maybe my standards and expectations are somewhat different from the ones from this school - not better or worse, just different. Also judging from the little insight I have got so far into my colleague graduate students' work I think that levels differ quite a lot between students and between working groups - which is probably the same all over the world. Also the setup of the graduate program is a little disturbing since in the first two years of a PhD you are basically supposed to only take classes and think about your research. This would then be followed by two years of actually doing field work and collecting data after which your initial 4-year contract gets extended to allow you for another year of writing up and publishing your data and defend your thesis. Now, obviously I am not going to do that, I will be starting with my own research this spring and I will probably also use the data that we have collected in the fall for my research so technically I have been doing research since the first week after I arrived here. Which is really what it should be like if you ask me, but well, this is America… I should also add that my supervisor is (finally!!!) only coming back to Miami this weekend so I can finally get to know him and really talk about both which classes he wants me to take and about my research. After that I hope everything will be clearer and easier too. I think he is much more open than some of his colleagues here, that I have talked to, who didn't seem to be too happy about my starting my research already (not that I care about their opinions!).

Anyways, to make a long story short: I am really looking forward to get my real research started, because the classes are rather boring, and I have no intention of either staying here for five or more years nor using data from only two field seasons. So we'll have to bend some rules and find ways to do this I guess but I am confident that it will all work out.

Oh yes, and I forgot to say that part of my research should be done in Austria this coming summer, which means that I have to go to Europe for a couple months next summer to go bird ringing in Hohenau. There is no guarantee yet that this will work out but I am very hopeful J

So far for my university life. As I mentioned, there are also lots of sports fields on campus, most of which "normal" people aren't allowed to use but some are there for everyone. Intramural sports are very popular in American universities - it's basically a university-wide competition of teams that just sign up together and play against each other in various sports. The biology graduate students have a few guys who are very active there and since they don't have enough I am always welcome to join J. So I played soccer (men's), volleyball and ultimate frisbee with them. I also played soccer on a girls' team and last night we actually won the women's soccer intramurals for which you get a nice shirt to show off. The Frisbee finals are this week, all the other things we lost somewhere in the finals. Friday afternoons there is always loads of people playing soccer, where you can just go and join whichever group you feel like joining. It is quite tough playing from 5 to 9 pm but it's a good way to start the weekend. Apart from that the soccer options were rather limited, so needless to say I went to do something about that and founded a soccer club at FIU. We have our first practice tonight - I am really excited!!! Also as a side-effect I have only just been here for three months and I am already president (of the soccer club), so America does live up to the expectations of being the land of unlimited possibilities J

Unfortunately possibilities became very limited as far as floorball is concerned as when I suggested that to the recreation center, the reply I got was, that it's not possible because it would damage the gym floor (!!??) L Well, for now I'm busy with all other stuff (I am also hoping to get a group together to play beach volleyball because I think this is rather necessary in Miami) and later I'll maybe see again.

Well, it's hard to believe when you're on campus but there is a whole city out there. It's called Miami, although that officially is only the original center (where downtown is today). In total there are at least five cities that basically merged into one huge monster that you can hardly escape (especially without a car). There are places that are poorer than the rest and places that are richer but overall most parts of the city look annoyingly similar. Now in American cities it is rather hard to get lost, since the streets do not have names but numbers, but when it's dark (and street lights are not one of Miami's strengths) and you're biking it's sometimes hard to read the street numbers and since everything looks the same I have got lost (well taken the long way round rather, not really lost) several times. Other than that, nothing bad has happened to me, although it is rather strange that there are just no people on the street (other than in cars) ever. Which makes every place look rather spooky but that's just America. People are either so busy watching TV that they don't even think of going outside or they are generally always afraid they might get shot if they leave their house. I don't know which is true.

There is a rather interesting documentary about Miami: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5Yn_u1V-D4

I can not from my own experience tell you anything about either of these two faces of Miami that are presented here. The vast majority of the city is just some kind of middle class and not exciting if not righteous boring. Most neighborhoods are really only residential areas. Every house has a yard (most of which have boring lawns rather than native plants), the streets are quiet (and very bike-able compared to the big roads which are generally at least three lanes in each direction and you can really only bike on the sidewalk - well that is if you care to stay alive) and sometimes (very rarely) you would even see kids playing in the yards.

There are also of course several big parks in this city, on which my research is going to be based. They are generally nice and not as quiet as you would expect. There is a big Latin community in Miami and these people love to have pick-nicks in the parks. Besides that there are nice beaches and shores of course. Some nicer than others and some busier than others. I have been to South Beach once (which is famous for whatever) and decided that that's also enough. First it's hard to get there without a car, secondly it's crowded and you can't swim there anyways because the water isn't deep enough and finally you can't help feeling the whole place was created only so those who are fond of their looks can show off. Anyways, there are nice places where you can get to even without a car. Key Biscayne is actually bikers' paradise in the urban area of Miami. There are real bike lanes and - oddly enough because supposedly the people are the same as in the city - cars pay attention and you are not likely to get run over even if you bike slightly more following European standards than Miami standards. Also one of the best things about Key Biscayne (apart from the bird ringing of course) is that there are lots of shorebirds on the beach. And they are just there and don't care (too much) about all the people. There's piping plovers which are endangered, extremely cute and I am writing a paper about them just now for one of my classes, there's other plovers, gulls, terns - lots of terns! - loooots of sanderlings (that's the guys you can see on Dutch beaches in the winter btw) and of course black skimmers, which are just cool: the lower part of their bill is bigger than the upper one and when they feed, they have their bill open, flying very low over the water surface so that the lower part is actually in the water and they can scoop up whatever swims on the surface (they mainly eat fish and small marine animals). And overhead you can see black and turkey vultures, osprey and of course magnificent frigatebirds, which of course are simply magnificent (unsurprisingly). So why ever some people want to go to South Beach I will never understand but I am glad they go there because that means that the cute little piping plovers will not have to deal with those crowds J

All the best

Martina