6 people in 1 kitchen

Cooked dinner with friends last night...Spanish, English, and French were spoken during the process. There were 6 of us all in the kitchen at once...grilled cheese, tomato soup, green bean casserole, and a cookie cake. They were so much help and it was an awesome evening :)

which subtitles do we use?

Picture yourself in a room with 4 young women from 4 different parts of the world trying to watch the Wizard of Oz and deciding what language to watch it in and what subtitles should be chosen also. The 4 girls speak 3 different languages and luckily all of them know English (or rather are sufficient enough in their English reading abilities to read the English subtitles). One girl from Costa Rica, one from France, and two from the U.S.....we watched it in English with English subtitles. The story sounds like a math problem, I am a language major and the only solution I can compute from that mess of a story is that English is truly dominating the world.
Don't let all the other languages die! Learn a second language! (...Even if your second language of choice is English)

Which reminds me of a friend I met from Japan who didn't speak English and was studying abroad here and in Colombia. We spoke in Spanish...and that was the only language he was able to use here. End of that story is that he was fluent fluent fluent when he left here :)

Fonchingale de Graciela Rojas Sucre

"tengo el vicio del movimiento y la extrana locura de lo desconocido"

San Ramon "Moncho"

San Ramon or "Moncho" as the locals call it, is a little town outside of San Jose. In this town lives a friend of a friend named Yiyo. Yiyo loves living in Moncho and takes the public bus to school each way for an hour because he would rather live with his family there than in San Jose. He lives in a studio apartment above his Grandmother's house (his Grandmother's house is the most beautiful and creative pieces of art I have ever seen, it is so delicately polished like a cave in the mountains with a million different crystals and gems to look at) that overlooks the city. We went up on his balcony at about 5 in the evening when the sun was just perfect and the sky was filled with colors of rosado, amarillo, anaranjado, morado...basically a rainbow. His family owns an awesome burger joint called Bugy's which serves some killer burgers with fries on the burger. Neat little town with a really cool church in the middle of the plaza (just like all the other neat little towns haha)

the language of their love

Recently I went to visit my last gringo friend that was here in Costa Rica who wasn't staying in San Jose for his last few weeks, but instead saved his money to travel around the country that is well know for it's awesome riptides. He surfed for a few weeks in various places, Tamarindo and Malpais being his favorites until finally returning to MalPais to stay at the Calocita. He came here in August of 2009 and spent 9 months taking art classes at our school (Veritas)and was spending his very last week in a beautiful little town with some "friends from Norway". He was always sneaking off to places on the weekends and no one ever knew with whom he was traveling. The minute I arrived in MalPais I knew where and why he had been away every weekend. Her name was Maria and they couldn't communicate in either of their first languages but they got by with their Spanish. She is from Norway and was working in San Ramon in an orphanage and he studying at Veritas. They met one weekend and the rest was history. They couldn't speak Norwegian or English together, but Spanish was the language of their love.

with a little help from my friends...

I would not have been able to travel every weekend minus 2 in 5 months without the help of my local friends. It is a beautiful thing to have friends abroad. I say thank you all the time but do they really know how much it means to me? I hope that each one of them has the opportunity to come to the states in our lifetimes so that I can at least offer them the roof that I have and the food in my refrigerator and a hot shower. That is what so many people offered me along the way that helped me explore Costa Rica inside and out.

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."-Mark Twain

<3

Breathing in the mountain air...

I know Monteverde more than I know San Jose. I have never written about Monteverde but have been here a handful of times. I know the mountains of Costa Rica more than I know the beaches and that is just fine with me. I am sitting here in a cabin in the woods up in the mountains with the door wide open and the fresh air rolling in and realized I better write it down before I forget. It is easy to forget a cup of tea, a composition notebook, a door wide open, Corey Smith-Simon & Garfunkel-Sarah McLachlan-REM kind of morning. I am about to start some reading homework, might lay in the hammock, might go walk around...and Lanslide by Fleetwood Mac just came on. Ahhh...perfect. This morning was breakfast of eggs, toast, salchicha, cereal, and apple juice all cooked in a little kitchen that looks like it should be outside on a campground. Beautiful. The roads to get up to Monteverde are the hardest roads I have ever traveled and I pat myself on the back every time I accomplish it. It is so worth the sweat and tears. Why can't stuff like that fit in the palm of your hand? Fresh air, mountains, hard work, sense of accomplishment...why didn't the creator make it possible to carry around things like that? It would be so nice to have that everyday and have my family and friends around all at the same time. You can find a few of those things in the towns I reside, but you can't find it all...

Grilled Cheese and Tomato Soup

I made my host family a typical lunch that I would have eaten when I was a little girl. We were in conversation this week about what my host brothers and sisters used to eat when they were little and it sparked an idea for me. For all the food that my mama tica had cooked me over the last five months I owed her AT LEAST a nice lunch. We had grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup, green apples and green grapes, and chocolate chip cookies. It may sound simple, but to them it was so different and they loved it. I forgot to get a beverage to go along with it so we had coca-cola, they loved every bit of it. I showed them how to dip the sandwiches into the soup (highlight of the lunch). They loved the grapes and apples because those aren't typical fruits that you go and buy at the store here, they are very expensive because they are imported. Chocolate chip cookies can be found in bakeries but it is more common to buy some sort of pastry instead of a cookie...they were Betty Crocker too, yum yum... :)
Overall it was a great gift to my family, I wish I could bring them all to the states with me to try all sorts of other different foods but that isn't possible. Cooking for them was the next best thing.

Local Friends...

I was so blessed to have met so many great locals over the course of my stay here in Costa Rica. To mingle with the locals is to really know the culture you are visiting, and until you have at least examined the shoes they walk in you will never know the road they travel. Not only have I had the honor of spending time with costarricenses, but also guatemaltecos, peruanos, nicaraguenses, panemenos, mexicanos and colombianos. I am sure there are some nationalities that I have failed to mention and I apologize for that. Each friend really helped me to speak Spanish and to try and get through all the dichos (sayings) in this country.

This past weekend I celebrated Kata's birthday with her...

I wish I had more photos of all the other events...

I will try to dig some more up and post them later. :)

kind of like home...

I went to a play today and it was sort of like being at the Victoria Theater. I was awesome, it was in Spanish, and I understood it. I went with my literature class and after enjoyed an ice cream cone. It's going to be a good day :)

Los arboles mueren de pie~ de: Alejandro Casona...el es de Espana...exilio...escribio esta obra en Buenos Aires en 1949

white water raftng el rio pacuare

I basically thought that I was going canoeing the weekend I went white water rafting, I figured it wouldn't be hardcore white water rafting like the pros. I was wrong! It was so much fun and so beautiful. It was a day long trip and my whole independent group of students from the states went together. My raft was a crazy bunch of loonies with an awesome raft guide (insert name here...woops, I forgot his name)-he was a great instructor and made the whole day a lot of fun. He would shout Go and Stop when it was time to paddle and we couldn't understand him in English so we had him switch to Spanish. We stopped and climbed some rocks up to a camp ground to eat lunch and when we returned to raft we got to float through a lagoon like stream. We all got off our rafts suited in our gear and floated on our backs looking up at the sky. The lagoon we were floating in had to large boulders on either side of it very high up so the lagoon was like a cave with a tiny stream of light shining through the top. The lagoon was a greenish blue with little waterfalls spitting out of the rock...which made for a really cool and calming atmosphere. There were also little footbridges and cables with baskets going from one boulder to the other that the indigenous people still send objects and people over on at the top of the rock. It is like a little pulley system, and unfortunately we didn't see any indigenous people using the system while we were there.
The rapids on the river were really great because they were spaced out enough so that we could stop and take a dip from time to time before getting back in the raft. What a rush. White water rafting in Costa Rica. :)

Notice I am the one with the goofy faces in the very back of the raft, left hand side.

Bocas del Toro, Panama

I ventured outside Costa Rica with a group of girls for the last weekend in February to Bocas del Toro in Panama. That weekend we had an extra day off school and all piled into the school bus to go down to Panama. We were on the Caribbean side of the country and it took around 6 hours to get to where we need to be to cross the border. With as many girls as we had on the trip of course we were late getting to the border...this was not a good thing to have happen because we also were trying to make it to a ferry on time in Panama to take us to Bocas. We get near the boarder in Limon and it was flooded-time to get out of the bus and take a taxi-enter the boarder-cross a bridge-miss the ferry, take a small speed boat instead...

vale la pena-Panama was a beautiful place and we stayed on an island off of the mainland (which I later regretted, stay on the mainland!) and we had a wonderful weekend

Angela and I took a taxi boat to the mainland to have dinner Sunday night and when we went back to catch the boat...there were none...it made for an eventful night! Times like those you really learn about what you can handle and how strong you are! :) It was a great weekend...

We did get stuck on the way out of Panama because some of use did not have proof that we were actually leaving Costa Rica at some point when we returned...it is a good thing to carry a copy of your flight itinerary with you!!!!!!

Fun fact about Panama-they use U.S. currency! They paper currency is from the states and the coins are produced in Panama :)

no posts in quite some time...

I have thankfully been jotting things down over the last couple weeks in order to be able to fill in the gaps of my story here in Costa Rica. It has been a great last two months and I am now ready to close this last chapter of the story. 28 days left until I am back on U.S. soil. 5 months was long enough in some ways and in others not long enough at all.