Las Orquideas y La Fiesta del Toro

On Tuesday I went to San Jose to sell the orchids that we grow at the nursery. I was really excited, imagining a little Tico market, with tons of cool stuff. It turned out to be a market celebrating health. The other tables were selling Listerine, Theraflu, chlorophyll to be taken orally, gatorade, Kashir brand cereal, and then there was this one table where the ladies would take your measurements to make gurtles. Pretty different from what I expected. But it was cool because it was in downtown SJ, between the Congressional and Judicial buildings. So we got to talk to Congress people about orchids, and look at all of these professional people walking around. I like it how all the women wear really bright colors--like beautiful made dresses that are bright orange and yellow.

On Friday my roommate Noelle and I went to the Volcan Irazu with our little Tica sister´s class. It was very interesting. We were told that we would get to walk around with them and learn everything that they would, and I was really excited because the teacher is a biologist and I was stoked to learn all about the trees and volcanoes. But it turned out, as always, to be different. We had to hide in the bus to get past the security gate, since we had already paid in the packaged school deal a Tico student fare. That was interesting. And then we just went to the volcano on our own, with one of the teachers, but without all the other kids, who were off at a different part of the park. It was freezing, so we sat inside with the teacher for a few hours and we taught him how to play hearts. It was fun, but not much learning going on. The field trip was complete experience with many interesting occurrances including--
-our host mom preparing us 5 sandwiches for a day trip
-one of the bus windows shattering on the students when a rock was kicked up by another car
-one kid getting sick on the bus
-the lights turning out at night and everyone screaming at the top of their lungs and flashing pictures in each other´s faces for about a half hour
-being splashed while walking across a bridge--it had been raining so there were huge puddles and we were a little line of kids walking along, with nowhere to go and this car of teenagers intentionally sped up and hit us all. We were soaked
-an earthquake as soon as we arrived back safely in Atenas.
Needless to say, it was a very intense day.

This past week has been exams for all of the elementary schools and high schools. The whole town celebrates that they are done with exams--there is a huge festival-party all weekend long! On Friday night they converted the gym down the street from my house into a discoteca. There was tons of loud regaton playing and everyone in the whole town under 30 was there. We danced to all of the crazy beats of regaton, and then it would switch to merengue and salsa, which was really cool. Except that I can´t dance. My Tico novio was there, and he can really dance, it was cool to see him dancing with all his friends who also know what they´re doing and lok good while they do it. But it was so fun!
On Saturday, Noelle and I went to the beach with Miguel, a friend who is the son of one of the women I work with at the Orchids. It was really fun--he picked us up early and we went to a beach at Jaco where the waves were perfect for body surfing and we played in the water all morning until lunch, and then we went to Playa Hermosa, which is down the road a little bit. It was so beautiful, with big surfing waves and black sand. We took a nap in the shade and woke up because it was starting to rain. A huge storm had rolled in and the sky was completely black, and the wind was so strong that some of the bushes and trees were being blown over, and a huge tree had fallen over on the autopista and this soccer team, complete in uniforms and cleats, had to move the tree. It was pretty crazy. We waited out the storm by sitting in our car along the sand and then getting a coffee. It was a perfect day at the beach.
Today Noelle and I are going to cook lunch for our family, which we´re really excited about. And then tonight is a rodeo, complete with bulls and cowboys! I´ve never really been to a rodeo before, so this should be really cool. I´m excited! And then, my parents, brother, aunt and cousin are coming to visit on Wednesday, and I´m going to take time off work and go travel around with them! I´m so excited!!!!

Heredia and Tico Randomness

On Friday night I went to Heredia with a few other volunteers. There is a national park nearby that I wanted to see, so we all thought it would be fun to go together; it would be a short trip because Heredia is less than an hour from Atenas. Heredia is a big university town and we were going to be meeting up with Melissa (she works for my program, she's 24 and super cool) and all of her friends at a bar nearby; her boyfriend is studying at the UNA. We arrived late, and had a little bit of trouble finding a hotel that didn't charge by the hour. (Don't stay at Hotel Central). But we met up with all of Melissa's friends, and we had a blast! I had met a few of her friends beforehand, because two of them are the Tico brother and sister of another volunteer, and one of them is a classmate of Melissa's, who I had already met when I went with her to her universidad last Monday. Everyone was really nice, and it was so fun to sit around at a chill bar, sipping Imperial and talking in Spanish. Marcela (Melissa's best friend who lives down the street from me) and I have grand plans of cooking lots of Tico food together, I'm really excited. And her brother, Alonzo, is going to teach me to dance! We moved on to a bigger club-type bar in San Jose, which was also a lot of fun. There was no room in the place itself, but we hung around outside where there were tables and tons of people and had more Imperial and danced and sang along to the regaton and crazy Latin music.
It was well after three by the time we got home, and the next morning was rainy and we decided that we really didn't have enough time before the park closed to go all the way there, and besides, there was a crafts art festival in Heredia itself. We wandered around the city for awhile, ate in a little soda, and then walked around the Universidad National. Their marine bio department has an exhibit of all of their specimens, but it was closed, grr!!
It was just a nice, fun day. We came home last night, and today I went up to the pool in a hotel overlooking Atenas with my roommate Noelle, and now it's pouring a nice tropical rain. I love it here--it is so nice and hot and beautiful in the mornings and then the rain cools everything off before it becomes unbearable in the afternoon. Costa Rica is seriously really good for me, I am so happy all the time and everyone I meet is the nicest person I have ever met. Everyone has opened up their homes to me, even the woman who cut my hair and didn't get it exactly right, and instead gave me a mullet (yes, and now I wear it pinned up every day). All the little details of daily life are so cool and so many of them are cute, and many others very random and odd, so I will try to include a few little vignettes when I think of them.

One time when I was walking down through the center of Atenas, there was this huge flock of more than 30 birds, all green parakeets. So pretty! And the next day there were two men standing on the side of the street, holding onto a leash and watching what I thought must have been a dog. Turns out, it was two cows, grazing on the side of the road. Very cool.

On Tuesday, when I got off the bus to go to the orchids, one of the women called me into her house and introduced me to her husband and gave me some snacks (twinkies, the first time I've ever had them, and I'm not a fan). She asked if I had my camera, which I did, and so we went outside into the backyard and she had me take photos of her husband and his chicken. I kid you not. The chicken wasn't even that good looking and it was shackled to a little peg in the middle of the yard. She said not to tell anyone, and I thought that it was because the other women would be jealous that I had gone to her house and not theirs. I found out the following Thursday that, no, that wasn't the reason she wanted me to keep it quiet. It turns out that the chicken is not a chicken and really a rooster, and that it is the big winner of the recent cock fight, hence why it was missing so many feathers and why she didn't want me to tell anybody about it. Craziness. Now I've got to develope blowups of these pictures for her, because I told her I would, but, cockfighting? I don't like that.

I am understanding and speaking a lot of Spanish, but I obviously have troubles when people talk quickly, especially amongst themselves. And very few people correct me as I speak, recklessly making things singular and masculine when they should be plural and feminine, changing the gender of things midsentence, and making up verbs and then putting them in the wrong tense. And I found out that I have been oblivously swearing as I describe things, since "stupid" does not translate well here.
There have of course been misunderstandings because I have the very bad habit of faking to understand instead of admitting that I have no idea what people are talking about. Many times I ask them to repeat, and they do, but they just say the same thing just as quickly, only sometimes louder. Because they aren't finding another of saying to me what they want, and I didn't understand the vocabulary in the first place, I still have no idea, but they want me to understand so badly that I don't want to let them down, copy whatever their expressions are, and nod or laugh, or grimly shake my head no. This has undoubtedly made me blindly agree to things I do not understand, like when they asked if the dog bit me because I was bothering it and throwing stones at it. Si, that was it, I said. It is also a problem when people are talking about me and I'm just there, smiling and nodding. What are they saying about esta muchacha? No idea, but I just nod and go along with it.

ALSO---7 of my little hijos (the women at the orchids call the baby crocodiles my children) are still alive. When I went in to check on them on Wednesday one of them opened its mouth as wide as possible, growled (sort of, in a crocodile way), and was lunging at me, trying to eat me with its little baby gums. I'm so sad! My own little baby crocs are trying to attack and eat me, !que triste!

Happenings in Atenas

I had a good week here, switching between the Orchids and the Escuela. On Thursday there was only one woman who showed up at the orchids, so it was nice to sit there and talk with her as we worked (planting babies). We talked about everything from travel to her sons to why didn´t I steal the little orchid I saw in Monteverde. She also tried to explain the plot of the number one soap opera here, and as far as I can tell, there really isn´t one. I watched it a few times so that I could understand a little bit about what the women discuss as we work, and wow, it is the cheesiest thing ever, right down to the dramatic girls that are in love with the scruffy cowboys, and the fight scenes and the old mother who doesn´t approve. Wow.

Eight of the baby crocs survived, and they are so cute! I will put photos up when I figure out how to do that. One of the men that works at the front gate of the Escuela has the most awesome comb-over, full with curls. We asked a Tico and he said that they call it a Coca-Cola here. How awesome is that! They don´t have a word for mullet, however, but they do understand when you explain it as business in the front, party in the back.
On Friday I hung out a lot with some of the students there, and they are really cool. The fence that encloses the big mean adult crocs has been sort of caving in, so we had to take big posts and prop it up. There were eight of us working, and one had to be on watch so that a crocodile wouldn´t sneak up and eat us, no joke. It was pretty crazy. I got to use a chainsaw for the first time, and I saw my first real-life scorpion--I was being chased by it. The guys and Priscilla (who is so cool) invited me for a coffee, so it was cool to hang out with them a bit, and they really like Bryan Adams.

Yesterday I was on my way to go to the Volcan Poas and I had to change my plans because I was bitten by a mean little hyperactive dog. There are tons of dogs always hanging around everywhere, they have their own little communities even if they have owners, and they never bother you and you never touch them. Yesterday these rules were broken when this one little dog decided to take a bite out of my leg. The owner looked at my bitten leg and said that the dog was just a chicitita. But this was no little cutesy thing, this was a man-eating evil dog. I freaked out because I thought I was going to get rabies and have be be shot like Old Yeller, but it turns out all I needed were antibiotics and that I don´t need stitches. Good thing. I ended up just going to the Megamall outside of San Jose with my Tica mom and little sister. It was fun--we saw Madagascar in Spanish and then went shopping (they have Zara and Mango here)(!!!!!)
Today I did make it to the Volcan without being wounded again in the process. It was really beautiful, and it really smelled of sulfur. There is also the Laguna Botos which is beautiful and that is where I had my avocado for lunch! I met some cool biologists from CA (also traveling independently), and one is working at Corcovado, which is where I am going to go with my dad and my cousin, so we will get a little insider´s tour! How cool!
Anyways, a new week starts tomorrow, and hopefully there won´t be any change in the rabies situation!

Los Cocodrilos y Manuel Antonio

This past Friday I had an absolutely incredible experience at the Escuela de la Ganaderia (the cattle school where I am working two days a week). I did not start off the morning at 5:30 by shoveling manure, which is what I had done the Wednesday before. I am helping this guy, Esteban, with all of this work, part of which is in an organic farm, hence the manure. (Esteban reminds me of Marty McFly). But we also go around to feed the animals, which include iguanas and peacocks, agoutis (which are a large rodent like a capybara), and crocodiles. Why does the cattle school, which produces cheese, milk, yogurt and meat, also have all of these wild animals? This is a question I cannot answer.
Anyways, on Friday we went to go take care of the agoutis, and we usually count some of the juvenile crocodiles (cocodriles en espanol) as well. There are a few different cages that have cocos of various ages and sizes, from less than a foot long to 4 feet long. Then there is also a huge lagoon where they keep the big mean ol' nasty crocs. I watched as these guys cut up hunks of cow and then we took them to the lagoon. One of the guys flung huge chunks of meat into the lagoon and it was amazing to watch all of these crocs swarm the meat and fight over it, then stick their heads up vertically in the air and chew the food down. These things move so quickly and then disappear beneath the water, and their teeth are huge. But this wasn't even the cool part of my day!!
There was a veternarian and his student there, and they were checking on the crocodile eggs that had been incubating for the past 3 weeks. They had put the eggs in a crate with dirt, and all the eggs at the top had dried out, and we opened them to find that they were dead. It was really sad. I was holding one of these eggs in my hands and it started to move around inside, and then it started to break its shell, when I was holding it! It was so amazing--we helped break the shell open and there was this tiny crocodile in all of its yoke and ambiotic fluid, with its little teeth and claws, que pequeno!!! We opened a bunch of the other ones and helped all of these little crocs to be born! It was so amazing! I checked the eggs that had been at the top as well, the ones that had been written off as dead, and there were two that were still alive. We had to suture off their ambilical cord (yes, they have them, attached to all of the yoke inside; I didn't know this either) and they made these little baby cries, which were so sad but cute because they were coming from baby crocodiles!! We don't know if all of them will live because some of them were very young and not ready to be born on their own, but their eggs had cracked under the pressure of the dirt so we had no choice. We made a little crocodile nursery for all eleven of them, they were all so cute!!! Those little sounds that they made, it was ridiculously cute!!!

I went to Manuel Antonio for the weekend, it is a national park that is right on the beach on the Pacific coast. It was really beautiful, I hiked through the park and then stopped on the beach to swim at these incredible white-sand beaches. There were tons of white-faced monkeys, and there was a three-toed sloth as well. The vistas from the hike were amazing, and it was just so cool to be at a tropical rainforest that then extended into the sand and gave way to these amazing beaches. The forest was nowhere as dense as Monteverde had been, but this had the added bonus of being on the beach. I swam all morning on Sunday, and body surfed before heading back to Atenas.
I am sort of getting preparations together for when my family comes to visit--we are going to go to the Arenal volcano and then hit up the beach!!! I have also started to work at this orchid nursery after my Spanish classes. Today was my first day, and it is an organization of artesan women that get together and it is sort of a network for women and their interests as well as a nursery. Today was Karina's last day (another volunteer) so we just sat around and had cakes, talking. Karina says that it is a lot of work, but that there is lots of time to talk and you really get to know all of the women. An excellent way to learn and perfect Spanish every day! They also want to learn English, so today we had our first lesson, teaching them hello, goodbye, thank you, and the numbers to 10. They are all so sweet, and some of them talk a mile a minute and I get lost pretty quickly. And, of course, all of them have at least one son (some have up to three) that they want me to meet so that I can be their girlfriend. So, even more possibilities than just the cowboys here in Atenas!

Atenas, Dias 1 y 2

I arrived in Atenas yesterday. This is where I am going to be living for the next 3 months, volunteering. It is a great little town in the central valley of Costa Rica, about 45 minutes from San José. National Geographic published a few years ago that Atenas has the best climate in the world, so everywhere around town, on the buses, etc, it is written ´!el mejor clima del mundo!´ I would be very proud as well!
Melissa picked me up from the bus stop. She is the daughter of the director of my program, and she works for it as well. I am living with the director´s sister´s family, who lives next door to the director (Mercedes), and they share the same farm (papayas, mangoes and oranges!! I´m never leaving). My family is really nice as well, one of the daughters is 19 and took her first flight test today--she is in pilot school. There is a son who is 17 and a little girl who is 11 and is so sweet. Everyone speaks to me only in Spanish, and I am able to understand almost everything. Speaking is coming along as well, and everyone is really patient and helpful. Once I get a handle on the past tense and everything can stop being in the now, things will be better, I think! I had my first Spanish class today and it went really well. I also went to the place where I will be volunteering--the School of Cattle. What have I gotten myself into? There are cows everywhere, also horses, goats, iguanas, and crocodiles. It will be very muddy, since it has poured all afternoon! I will have to leave my house before 430 in the morning in order to get to the bus before 5, and then I will work from 530 until noon. Then I will have the afternoon free to sleep! Whenever I tell locals where I will be working they first tell me about the crocodiles, and then they tell me about all the guapos that work there--all of the hot guys. So maybe waking up at 4 won´t be so bad!!
I will write more when I get more and more settled--already I feel so comfortable here and I am able to communicate with people in town and then relax in the hammock at my house and study grammar. This is the life!!

Pura Vida

I took an early bus to Monteverde on Sunday morning. The trip was so beautiful, especially when we turned off of the main road and went up on a dirt one, climbing higher and higher with amazing views of the Nicoya Penisula, the ocean, and all of the tropical forests around us. The cows were brought over from India (they are good dairy cows), so they have the hump and the big floppy ears. I was sitting next to this Tico guy who talked with me the whole way--in Spanish. He was very patient and helped me with words and spoke very slowly. He said that he is a native from Monteverde, and worked in the dairy industry for years before moving to the coast and opening a ranch for horses. He told me all about his family and kids and if I make it to his town I will look him up and go horseback riding on the beach!
This was such a good introduction to Ticos--everyone is so nice and friendly and patient with my garbled Spanish (which I am actually quite proud of, never having taken a class).
Monteverde is incredible. I met two girls that I roomed with and we went hiking the first day and then had milkshakes at La Lecheria. We went on a guided night hike at El Bosque Eternal de los Niños (The Children´s Eternal Rainforest) and we saw so much!!! We saw a sloth and agoutis, a huge tarantula (I was actually able to cope with it), a prehensile-tailed porcupine, we walked through army ants by accident... it was a beautiful night.
I spent the next two days walking through the Monteverde Cloudforest Reserve, which was incredible. It rained for bits of the walks, or at least the clouds were so thick that they were dripping all the time. The vista points were completely clouded over, but it was still beautiful, a sea of clouds. The wind would blow them past your face and it felt like you were on a boat, being hit by the sea spray.
I had amazing luck and saw so many incredible animals. The first day I saw a family of Quetzals, this really colorful endangered bird. The male has long green tail feathers and a red vestlike covering. The mother was nearby as well, feeding her little chicks that were just ready to leave the nest. I saw a bunch the next day as well. Another cool bird was the Motmot, it´s also really colorful and has this little bell-like thing hanging from the end of its tail. We saw a tayra, a sort of weasel-like thing, and lots of howler monkeys, with their very loud howls that sound like the sandpeople in Episode IV. We heard squirrel monkeys, and also saw a tiny little bat sleeping hanging upside down under a tree. Through binoculars the wrong way, we were able to see an orchid that was smaller than this letter x, and that isn´t even the smallest orchid known. It was incredible. I spent a lot of time just sitting in a clearing with my book and avocado and maracuya, and hummingbirds would come and drink the flowers next to me. So incredible!
While I was there I sort of hatched a life-plan, where I go to France and learn how to make all the best pastries and then come back to Monteverde and open a fantastic café and work with the scientists there in a sort of informal manner. I was very happy with my relavation, and spent a lot of time at the Monteverde Café, talking to the people there about their fair trade coffee and what it is like to run a business. Who knows? There need to be good breads etc in Monteverde, and also it would be cool to have a place where all the biologists could get together to discuss and plan. Maybe some day!
After four days in Monteverde I took the bus and the ferry and then then the bus again to go to Montezuma, a sweet little beach town. It was so chill with all the token hippies and crazy old white ladies making jewelery. The weather was perfect, even the torrential downpour when I was sitting in a restaurant on the beach having a cerveza, watching the crazy waves and the sheets of water hitting the sand. I walked up the river to the waterfalls one day and then I went to the Isla de la Torguga the next, to go snorkeling. The snorkeling wasn´t that great, there was hardly any algae or coral cover, and precious few inverts. Lots of Spondylus shells, though! There were a surprising amount of fish, however, for there not being much else. It was a beautiful day, especially when we ran into a flock of dolphins on our way back, and they were jumping and playing in our wake. Very cool. Every response to everything is ´tranquilo. pura vida´. I can definitely get used to this!! !Estoy muy muy feliz aqui!