a week with yoav!

Well, its now July, and as of tomorrow, I have exactly 6 months left in my internship! This past week, Yoav came down to Florida to spend time with me! It kind of sucked cause of the 5 days he was here I only had 1 day off, but we managed to do a lot of stuff in the evenings after I got off work. He got here on Wednesday, and we went out to dinner at the Outback Steakhouse. On Thursday night, we went to Downtown Disney to eat dinner and see Eclipse! On Friday night, we went to a local restaurant called the Alehouse. On Saturday, we tried to go to Universal Citywalk, but ended up getting lost and back exactly where his hotel was, so we just decided to go to a closer restaurant. We ate at a tapas place called Tu Tu Tango! Sunday was 4th of July, and after I got off work, Yoav and I went to the upside down building place called WonderWorks, that had a comedy magic dinner show. It was pretty funny, and they had unlimited pizza, salad, beer and wine, even though it was kind of ghetto with like plastic plates and silverware. Haha.



After dinner, we couldn't decide where to go to watch fireworks, so we ended up going to the Disneyworld Boardwalk Resort, which is super cute and pretty close to Epcot. We wandered around, got ice cream, sat in the rain and watched the Epoct fireworks!



Monday was the first and only day that I had off while Yoav was here. We started the day off by going to a diner for brunch, where I got cinnamon sugar pancakes, which were delish! Then we headed off to GATORLAND! Gatorland is just a local amusement park in Orlando, relatively close to where I live, that has a ton of gators. It was pretty cheesy, but also pretty fun, since they have cool white gators, a trainride, gator wrestling, and other animal shows. I bought a package that let me sit on a gator and feed a gator, so that was pretty exciting! After Gatorland, we drove to Cocoa Beach, which only took about an hour, so I'll hopefully be going back at least once this summer! Once we got to Cocoa Beach, we walked along the sand and ate dinner at a restaurant on the pier! Overall, it was a really fun day! Sadly, I had to take Yoav to the airport at 5 am this morning. :( Luckily, he might be coming back around Labor Day!




As for what's been going on in my marine mammal work life, this week I got trained to do the opening shift! This shift starts at 7 am, and the first thing you have to do is make all the fish buckets for the dolphins! Its kind of gross because you have to sort through frozen fish that sometimes are broken in half with guts spilling out, and it made my shirt smell terrible like fish, but at the same time its really awesome because I am making food for dolphins!!!! :) After preparing buckets, the opening person (me, this week) and the person that comes in at 8 have to clean the manatee tank. Since I was the opener, this meant that I got to vacuum up manatee poop! hahahahah. Also kind of gross, but hey, you have to start on the bottom somewhere! One fun thing about scuba diving in tanks while there are guests at the park is that people love scuba divers! I made it into a few family photos with little kids this week! :) Other stuff I've been doing is cleaning dolphin toys, watching dolphin research sessions, feeding manatees hundreds of heads of lettuce, and spreading manatee knowledge to the masses. Fun facts about manatees: live to be 50-60 years old, related to elephants, eat 60-100 lbs of food a day, and they can weigh up to 2000 lbs!!! If you want to know anymore manatee facts, you'll just have to come to The Seas at Epcot and ask me! :) Well, working 8-5 tomorrow, so I better go get ready for bed (cause I'm a granny! haha)!

Adios amigos!!!!!!!