Puerto Viejo - Caribbean Baby!!

So I could fill this thing with descriptions of my finals (Both of which I am done with!! WHOOOO) But I won't. Because that is boring. It's enough to say that I took them and I did fine. However, I would like to describe my last weekend here in Costa Rica. It was our free weekend which means we didn't have a planned excursion with ISA. We could go anywhere we wanted. My roommate actually ended up flying all the way back to the States in order to take a plane to Antigua to see her boyfriend. Wow.

I wasn't up to leaving Costa Rica yet and I knew exactly where I wanted to go. Long before I was even signed up for this program I knew that I wanted to go to the Caribbean Coast and check out the Jamaican vibe at Puerto Viejo. I started trying to get a group together that was willing to travel together before we got here and finally found a group of girls.

Friday I took my Spanish final and then took a cab to the bus station. Back home, a 5 hour bus ride will cost you around fifty bucks I think. Here it cost me 9 bucks! Whooo!

We got to Puerto Viejo around six and started looking around for a place to stay. Our travel director at ISA had advised us against making reservations and we were a little worried about it but it turned out fine. We found a hostel that had a room with six beds for us for ten bucks per person. Not bad!

Then we hit the town! We went to a dance club across from the beach named Mango where they had free daiquiris. They sucked but the music was awesome. We ended up going to the beach and dancing for hours under a palm tree. It was one of the highlights of my entire trip here. Seriously, if you ever have the opportunity to go dancing on the beach . . .  Do it!

Dancing under the palm trees

The next day we rented bikes and rode around for hours checking everything out. It was great. We rode to this beautiful beach we were told about and swam for hours. (Yes, I got sunburned. I had a ton of sunblock but it could only do so much.) After a few hours of swimming we were finally exhausted enough to wonder what all the red flags stuck along the sand were for. Finally we found on an itty bitty little sign a half mile down the beach tan explanation that red flags meant it was too dangerous to swim that day. Oops.

Later on my friends and I decided we needed to spend at least one night at the notorious hammock hotel, Rocking J's so we packed up all our crap and checked out a hammock.  We paid 7 bucks for a hammock, a sheet and a locker. This place was seriously cool but seriously crazy. The entire place is crammed full of mosaics and murals from traveler before us. I meant to make a mosaic but with everything else, I forgot until after I left. Oh well.

My cocoon! So comfy! 

So after the long day of riding and swimming this old lady took a nap. Fortunately, this meant I slept through most of the craziness. Unfortunately, this meant that I woke up just as everyone was running around drunk (chasing armadillos, yelling "This is a chance of a lifetime!!!"). Most of the people there were under twenty one so by 11 O'clock most people were passed out. This left the entire place for the ones that managed to stay awake. It was pretty cool. The owner came down and gave us all free beer and we sat around the bonfire for hours. I even made friends with a tico couple. We went down to the beach and sat around talking in some really bad Spanglish until it got light. BTW, My spanish still sucks.  :(

Oh, because of this couple, I no longer freeze up when someone tries to do that cheek bump kissing thing. I used to stiffen up and be like Why is this person moving in on my cheek? Are they going to bite me? But the tica broke me of this. Every single time she saw me the next day she would run up and do the kiss greeting thing and then again when she left. And . . . I never once forgot and leaned in the other way. Which has always been a fear of mine because you would end up with more of a kiss than you were intending on. :D

The next day we went back to the beach (one that was safe to swim in) and lazed around until four when our bus left. Oh, right. Okay, so we had all bought our tickets back to San Jose the day before, knowing that they sometimes sell out. Well apparently we needn't have worried because they over sold the tickets anyway! By like 30. We were waiting in line to load when the bus abruptly left, leaving our group of five split into two groups. Of course I was in the group that was left behind. We were like . . . Um . . . that was the last bus of the day and WTF? We have tickets. And of course it's not like we were at a bus station to ask someone. It was only a random spot on the road. So we wait around. And wait. Then wait some more. Finally we heard a rumor that someone had talked to someone who had talked to someone who said that they were sending another bus. Which finally arrived almost an hour later.
Pura Vida
The bus ride back was more fun than any bus ride should ever be. My friend Katie and I decided that I had contacted Dengue (from the 24 bug bites I got in Tamarindo) Tuberculosis (One of my classmates that sat next to me found out she had it right before she came here.) and Malaria from Puerto Viejo (It is the only area in Costa Rica that occasionally has Malaria). Because of my collective diseases, I was going to immediately die and did not have to worry about the fact that I was leaving Costa Rica. Therefore I was the lucky one.

No, we were not drinking. I can't even blame it on sugar.

It was a wonderful weekend.

Poas volcano, coffee plantation, and La paz waterfalls!

So it is monday the 1st of August but I never got around to sharing about last monday so I thought I should get around to that. :) Darn school, finals, and paper. Not to mention spotty internet. It messed up my blog schedule.

Sigh

Anyway, last Monday was a school holiday. I have absolutely no idea why we didn't have school but I'm glad we didn't because I had an awesome day. I signed up for this three in one tour and toured a coffee plantation, saw the crater of a volcano and walked through five waterfalls.

The worst part of the day was waking up at five so I could be picked up at the Holiday Inn hotel at 6 in the morning. Ugh! Luckily they were nice enough to start the day off with breakfast at the coffee plantation where I got to drink enough coffee to make it through the day. Whew!

After breakfast we had the tour that conveniently ended in the souvenir shop. I ended up spending way too much money but hey, some of you are going to love your CR gifts! ^_^

Coffee Trees

Then it was back to the bus for the trip to the volcano. In our group were 12 of us from the U.S. Two from Spain, one from Brazil and one or two from Mexico. So our tour guide would say everything in spanish and then repeat it in english. I had a great time trying to figure out what she was saying before she switched to english. I could follow about 20 percent of what she said.

By the time we got up the mountain, the sun and heat had turned to cloudy and rainy. When we hiked up to the crater of the volcano all we could see was pure white. It was actually pretty funny. There were about 50 tourists, all with camera's out, looking at nothing but a block of white. No matter which way you looked you could only see two feet in front of you.  

Finally, the fog lifted and we could see in the crater. It was amazingly cool and beautiful. There is a lake in the middle that is supposed extremely hot and acidic.

Inside the crater

After a while the clouds came back so we left. We headed back down the mountain and went to the La Paz waterfalls and animal sanctuary.
There were so many animals!! It was crazy. At one point I was trying to talk this Tuscan into crawling onto my hand but he was being stubborn. He ended up chewing on my fingers for a couple minutes and then flew off. :(

It tickled

What are you looking at?

After the birds we went to the butterfly farm and there were so many! Thousands! I had like half a dozen land on me.

The next stop was my favorite . . . . . . MONKEYS!!!!! I was talking to one and it all came up and was like Hello, who are you, why are you here, what are you looking at, do your clothes taste good, can I try them? It was adorable!

Moooom, Can I keep them???

After the monkeys I went to the Snake house. For some crazy reason there was no one else there but it was pretty cool.

Everybody liked me here

One last stop before we left for the waterfalls.


Big cats!! There were two cougars!!! Woot! Woot! Go COUGS!!!!!

There were quite a few different types!

Then it was on to the waterfalls. There was a whole row of them, one after another. So cool.

All in all, it was a freakin great day!!!

Monteverde, zip lining and much much more

I wrote this all last week but the internet was being a jerk so I couldn't post it. Just be aware that this post is a week late.

So on Friday (The 22nd)  we went to Monteverde which is a cloud forest. Basically that is a fancy way of saying that the mountain is so high up and the clouds are so low that the two join together. It's very pretty but too chilly for me. I didn't really need more than a jacket and long pants but that was more than I wanted to wear. However, it was totally worth it for Saturday. I went Zip Lining and jumped on a Tarzan Swing. For those of you that don't know, Zip Lining is when you hook yourself into one of those harnesses that wraps all over your butt and then you slide on a wire that is suspended between two trees.

Don't worry. I got this. 

I went on eleven. The first few were baby ones that taught me how to brake so I didn't run into a tree but then it got fun. I went on one that was thousands of feet long where I was flying through the trees, probably about 30 feet up, looking around when all of a sudden -WOW! The trees dropped away, the sun hits me and I am flying 240 feet over the forest. It was incredible! I wish I could explain it better but I can not find the words to describe it.
Just WOW.


Then it was time for the Tarzan Swing. I stood in line for twenty minutes pretending I didn't know what I was in line for. I was like Hmmm. There seems to be a line in the middle of the forest. It must be for ice cream. This was totally ignoring the fact that I had had been looking forward to the Tarzan Swing for months. Then when it was almost my turn I told myself Oh Look! I get to walk on a suspension bridge! I love suspension bridges! Finally I started walking down the bridge towards my doom, I mean the two men, the bridge stopped abruptly over the forest, the men hooked me to a rope, I bent my knees and . . .


~Free~


        ~Fall ~


                   ~ing~




One hundred and something feet later the rope caught me and I began to swing. Freaking Awesome! I now want to bungee jump so bad but I can't find the courage. I think I would love it if they could just throw me off of the bridge. Definitely the next thing on my list of things to do!

The rest of the weekend was a lot less adventuress. A few friends and I went to a discoteca to dance for a while but the music was terrible. While the DJ was in charge all we heard was Rihanna and Pitbull. When the band played all we heard we 80's english songs massacred! The only cool thing about the place was the number of dogs chilling in the bar. At first I thought they were strays and I kept my distance but I finally noticed that they were all clean and healthy. Then I thought it was adorable. However, we couldn't handle the music. We called a cab and asked him to take us to a bar where there would be no gringo music. And he did. Me and one other girl were the only white people to be seen. It was soooo much fun!

The next morning I ended up going on a hike in the Cloud Forest National Park (or something like that) My two friends and I can not read a map so we ended up on a wrong trail and didn't make it to the continental divide but I think I liked it better that way. We saw no one else from our group and it was kind of nice. We pretended we were hiding from the dinosaurs. (Jurassic park was filmed in Costa Rica.)

Yes, the leaves are this big. 

Not knowing what I am doing is kind of working for me.

So my spanish is rather . . . shaky. I came down here to learn it and I am definitely improving but I still sound like a two year old when I try to talk. And my vocabulary is limited. Extremely limited. However, I realized today that this has it's benefits. I try out all kinds of new food almost everyday. Instead of going to a restaurant and ordering something I know I will like, I end up hunting for items that I understand. It's like playing Where's Waldo with the menu. Oh! hongos are mushrooms, carne is beef, arroz is rice. It doesn't matter if they are things that I would never put on the same plate at home, I am just excited when I know what it is I am trying to say. This has meant that I have ordered carrot juice with dinner because it was the only drink offered that I understood. And you want to know something surprising? I liked it. And I don't even like carrots much. Though when I mentioned this to a friend I was told that the carrot juice here is very different than that in the US.

Then today I decided to head to a cafe that is close to the school for lunch. Only this time I didn't have a convenient friend to come with me and translate my order. Yikes!!! So I get there and decide that I don't want any of the things that I usually get there. And I don't understand what the other things on the menu are. And I left my dictionary on my desk. And no one speaks english. Oh No! Usually this is when I would have given up and gone to the pizza place down the road. Pepperoni pizza is pretty easy to order. ^_^ But today I just started hunting through the words I did understand and I eventually found something with beef, potatos, soup and salad. I didn't understand exactly what they were going to do to the beef and potato and I couldn't figure out what the soup was but I ordered it anyway. And then when I didn't understand the drinks offered (they are different everyday) I just told the waitress to surprise me.
I ended up with a curry soup, a strange but good beef mixture in a hollowed out baked potato and mango juice. Win for the Gringa!!

As a side note, the juice here is AMAZING!!! Even just the regular bottled juice is a million times better than what we have at home. It is incredible. And it is everywhere. When you head into a corner store there are three times the amount of juice as soda or beer combined!!! And when you eat out, the drink is almost alway included and is usually some sort of juice. Yum!

Routine. Not as bad as it sounds.

For the first time in my life, I have a routine I follow in my day. And it's all because of my host mom. I wake up every single day at 6:30 because I know she will have breakfast on the table by 7. I eat a banana each day at 10 am because she always gives me a banana in the morning and at 10 I have a short break in my spanish class. Okay so my lunch at noon is on me because I get out of spanish at noon and after four hours of class I am starving!!! But dinner each night at 6:30 is back on my Tica mom and each night after dinner she makes me a cup of coffee to drink while I am doing my homework. Then I fall asleep at around the same time each night. 

It is sooooo FREAKIN weird. 

Is this what normal is like? (Minus the having someone else do all this for me?) I know that once I go home I am going to slid right back into forgetting to eat until I am starving and yo-yoing between all nighters and sleeping for 12 hours to catch up, but for right now. . . I am enjoying the hell out of it. ^_^

~Pura Vida 

Arenal Volcano

Where to Start? Where to Start? Hmmm

Well, On Friday we left for the Volcano and I have to say that I have never been absolutely terrified on a drive before. (Frightened - sure, disbelief - yes) But never heart-stopping, can't breath scared. The roads up the mountain are narrow, steep and twisty. Did I mention narrow? In the U.S. it would be considered a one lane road. Here it just means the cars would pass by the bus with two wheels hanging off the road in the mud. However, every time the bus would go around a corner, it would end up taking the entire road and would have to slow to a crawl to do so. At one point we were on a edge of a cliff with the drop on one side and the mountain on the other and this huge truck full of cows decide not to wait for us to maneuver our way around the curve and tries to slide past us. The bus driver ended up hitting the breaks and the truck did the same so we're both stuck on this hill with maybe two inches between us and the cows and neither one of us could go anywhere.

It eventually worked out but damn!

And then there were the bridges. We were lucky if they were made of concrete. We went over one plank wood bridge and the way it creaked I thought for sure that we were going down. Other ones were made of concrete but they didn't have side rails and it was raining so hard we could barely see out of the windows. I didn't find the bridges as scary as that damn cow truck but other students were squealing and hiding their faces.

Somehow we eventually made it to the Arenal Volcano and our hotel. Which was conveniently right at the bottom of the volcano.

Arenal Volcan
Smoking up a storm!

It was so beautiful there! And the hotel was huge. To get from the lobby to our rooms we had to take a shuttle. It was crazy!

And . . . there was probably 10 different swimming pools. A few were filled with cold water but most of them were hot!! I loved it! The first night I probably spent four hours just soaking in the heat! Of course it helped that there was a swim up bar! But one without the other would not have been as fun!

Really big hot tub!

 I even smoked a Cuban cigar. Just to say that I did. It was awesome. We all felt like we were in a Godfather movie! Of course it kind of ruins the image to say that we were all in bed by 11 both nights so I just won't mention that.

This is actually my friends hand but it looks cooler than mine. 

The next day we went to La Fortuna Catarata. Or in English, a really freaken big waterfall! And to get to this wonder of the world we had to climb down four hundred plus steps. That would have been hard even if they were all uniform and dry. But they were not. Some of these steps were concrete, some were cinderblocks with the holes filled with dirt, others were natural rocks that happened to be handy when they were building a way down, and there were even a few wood ones! Then, to add to the confusion, they were all varying heights! It would go from 4 inch gaps to 12 inch and back down to 6 inches. Some steps tilted forward while others tilted sideways. And they were all wet and slimy! It could have been considered an extreme sport just to make it down there in one piece! Most definitely worth it though!!

It was gorgeous! For awhile there I was so focused on getting these perfect pictures that I forgot to actually look at the waterfall directly instead of through the camera. Once I did though . . . . Wow!

And then we climbed back up the four hundred steps. It makes me feel like an old lady but my hips still ache from that climb!


We headed back to San Jose Sunday afternoon and on our way back we stopped in the town of La Fortuna. I ran into a coffee shop to escape the rain and bumped into a man I have YouTube stalked a hundred times.

Every time I couldn't sleep because I was freaking out about going to a foreign country I would log on to YouTube and watch this guy's videos on Costa Rica.

Thank God for this guy or I may have not slept for the entire month leading up to leaving! ^_^ It was cool to run into him but very random too. The internet truly makes the world a smaller place!

A cold, shopping and a midterm.

So the last few days have been a little crazy. On Tuesday I had a spanish quiz (97% baby!!) On Wednesday I came down with a cold. On Thursday I had a ten minute presentation on Ecuador in Spanish!!! And today I had my Spanish Mid-term. That's right. A mid-term. I was blown away until I realized that since my Spanish class is only four weeks long, I am half way done! My politics class is five weeks so my mid-term for that class is next week. Wow. Where has time gone? 


I am a little worried about my spanish grade because of this damn cold! I was doing great until I came down with it and then I couldn't focus on anything. In class she would ask me questions and I'd just repeat No Se, No Se until she took pity on me and left me alone. Yikes! I know I didn't do oh so great on my presentation either. I remember everything I wanted to say but then she was asking me questions about Ecuador and I couldn't remember the words I needed to reply and make sense. :( I'm going to have to kick butt once I get better and make it up. 


Oh! On Wednesday before I started feeling nasty I finally made it to downtown San Jose to the Mercado Central! It is basically a maze of little shops crammed as closely together as possible. Knick knacks, clothes, shoes, food, ice cream, butcher shops, cheese shops. It was crazy! But a ton of fun. A few friends and I ended up eating at a Soda (cheap cafe) and getting a plate full of food and a drink for like 3 dollars. It was amazing. 

We then ended up walking in the rain 6 blocks (might explain why I got sick eh?) to the artisan market. Oh man I am going to spend so much money there. It is just stall after stall after stall of hand made souvenirs! I spent all the money I had brought with me (which was only like 20 bucks) and found at least twenty things I have to come back for to get for other people!

I want a hammock so bad. I can get one for like twenty bucks but I don't know where I would put it. Hmmmm.  I am so glad that I fit a duffle bag into my suitcase on my way here! I am a genius!!!  






Oh so this afternoon I am going to Arenal Volcano! I am going to soak in the hot springs heated by the Volcano and try to get over this nasty cold!!! Whooooo!!!



~Hasta Luego!