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.