Monday - Thursday:
Spanish Level: My teacher this week is Joan, pronounced Joe-Ahn, but this is a male name here in Costa Rica. I make him laugh a lot. My tico brothers are teaching me some slang this week and when I tell it to him he laughs. Like the word for "cool" and "this thing is a piece of crap". That phrase came in handy this week when the fuse blew while I was taking a shower and Miguel was heating hot-chocolate in the microwave. Wednesday the spanish organizer for the school, Otto, hosted a little seminar where I learned how to say "I have" (poca a poca (little by little)).

Sorry to lump so much together but Im so far behind in my writing now I dont remember a lot of the day to day details because I didnt note all of them. Basically my mom here is great. She and Sigfried (her oldest son) help me figure out where I want to go and do on the weekends. She makes breakfast for me every morning and dinner every night. She has figured out I like gallo pinto and fruit with yoguart for breakfast so that is pretty much what I have every day. Some days she makes pancakes or fried eggs. Her younger son Miguel knows a lot of English so he tranlates as needed and he has taught me some useful words. I wish I could carry him around in my pocket and when I dont know a word he could help me out. I remember a lot more like that. Their middle son Federico works a lot so I dont see him much, he leaves late and comes home late. He has a daughter that is about 1yr old but hes never been married. On Sundays the grandaugher spends the day at our house with Ana but she lives with her mom.

Carmen and or Wilbert (from Quepos) have called me every week since I have been in San Jose. They are so great. I would like to go see them again before I leave Costa Rica.

School is going well. I fell like I could leave this week and be ok but Im glad to have more daily practice so its not a waste of time by any means and I am still learning more. I have a really good start at this point. After school most days I go to lunch with Ana and Robert and Whitney, the three other spanish students here right now. Ana and Robert are from Oklahoma I think and they speak Pensylvania Dutch and English, they are in their 60`s and he is a pastor of some sort. They are very cute. Whitney is from CA and has a tico boyfriend. They met in CA and now they have come here to work for the tourist season as river rafting guides. She is really cool and her boyfriend is nice too.

This weekend I really dont want to go anywhere but there is a girl here from Germany, Nina, she lives with some friends of Ana`s, my tica mom. She is working here and she wants to go somewhere but I dont think she would travel alone (which I think is wierd because she came all the way to San Jose, Costa Rica alone...???) anyway, I told her Id go somewhere with her but I have really dreaded it all week. She is very nice but shy and dosent speak much English or Spanish (but she knows both). She just dosent talk much in general and Im tired and its a lot of work to travel alone much less with someone who dosent speak your language. She met another girl from Germany this week as well and they want to go to Montezuma. This is a beach I have not been to on the Pacific side and I hear it is nice but I also hear the road to it is terrible but I dont want to back out of the trip beause I think she might not go if I do.

Sunday:
Spanish Level: At the hotel Mawamba there was a little area for red eyed tree frogs. A tico, Eric, took care of the pools and the frogs and their pond as well. Amazing how good my spanish can get when some tico guy is flirting with me!!!

The hotel reminded me of being at Girl Scout camp only with private rooms. There were long cabins with wide, long front porches and 4 rooms in each cabin, no A/C, which was fine this week but I could imagine it gets HOT there other times in the year. The hotel had beautiful grounds, a restaurant, gift shop, two pools, about 10 hamocks, rocking chairs and about 40 yards worth of docks and boats in front complete with rain gear and boots for guests use. Mom, this was your ideal place on the river!!!

We got up very early for a tour of the national park in an open motor boat. The tour was wonderful, our boat driver had GREAT eyes for spotting wild life and our guide was telling us all about the animals and plants. He could make all sorts of bird calls and he could make a howler monkey noises too. Hearing the Howler monkeys (Congos) in the trees was really awesome. You can hear them for 100`s of yards away, the sounds of the canals and the jungle were awesome. There were a lot of birds. I got to see several toucans, two of the 6 types in Costa Rica but they were all in flight or far into the trees. I also got to see the 4th and final type of monkeys in Costa Rica, Spider Monkeys. I was really excited about this. We also saw these aligator things that are called Caymans and a few otters and a BIG blue butterfly. The jungle was great. We came back for breakfast and after that it was time to head back to San Jose.

The night before, everyone on the trip had dinner together (a couple from mexico, our guide, a single mom and her 10 year old son and man from San Jose). At dinner the single mom (who has the same BIG blue butterfly and a long vine tatto wraped around one of her legs) was telling me about this guy Eric who takes care of the Red Eye Tree Frogs at the hotel. Well before I headed back to San Jose I wanted to see them, so I went over to talk to him. The frogs were awesome. He took one and put it on my shoulder and took some pictures (i think he was more interested in my boobs than the frog but the pictures are good). Anyway he liked talking to me so I got to practice my spanish a lot with him because he didnt know much english. I think if I had asked him to marry me and come to the US he would have said YES on the spot. Its times like these your glad you have to get on the boat in 15 minutes to go home...

The ride back to San Jose was painfully long and bumpy. I need a masage after my masage. The only good things about the ride back to San Jose were: lunch, passing back through the large rain forrest just east of San Jose and getting to see the Saprissa (the #1 Cosa Rican football team) stadium. I miss football! American football that is. WAR EAGLE!

Saturday:
Spanish Level: I thought my tour was going to be in two languages but everyone on my trip spoke English; therefore, I didn’t get to practice much Spanish this weekend…

This morning I took an overnight tour to the Atlantic/Carribean side of Costa Rica to a town called Tortuguero with hotel Mawamba. On the tour there was a couple from Mexico who own a travel agency, a Costa Rican older man who owns a Rental Car office in San Jose, and a single mom with her son from the US. We took a bus across the Continental Divide to the East (I thought that was cool). Our guide Jorge was awesome!! He talked about Primary and Secondary forests and he knew all sorts of information about the plants of Costa Rica and medicinal uses. He had cured his wife of flebitis in her legs with plants and knew what plants helped diabetes etc. Come to find out he used to be a guide in the primary forest and would take people from National Geographic and scientist for drug companies etc. into the forest for weeks looking for plants and animals. Sadly, he had a motorcycle accident and lost his leg, he had a limp but you’d never know he had a wooden leg, because of this he is now a tourist guide. The bus trip to Tortuguero is about 4 hours with 1.5hrs on a bumpy dirt road. They call dirt roads on tours "free costa rican massages". To break up the trip we stopped for lunch and then at a banana plantation.

The banana plantation was pretty interesting. The workers care for the bananas until they are ready to harvest, each banana stalk produces one time only about 75 bananas and it takes about 5 months. They put plastic bags over the bananas for protection and to create a micro climate to speed up the process. When the bananas are ready, a worker cuts the entire stalk and hangs it on this track and pulley system they have in the fields, a man ties the end of the rope full of about 50-70 banana stalks around his waist and RUNS with it to the processing plant where they sort wash and pack the bananas. I think they have a job opening for this job and I definately would loose weight at the same time... but I think Ill pass.

We continued on the dirt road to a dock where we boarded a covered speed boat for an hour long ride up the canals to the hotel. The canals were wonderful. I felt like I was in "The Jungle Book" the vegetation/foliage here is different than other locations I have visited. It is really lush forest here and there are manatee and crocodiles in the water. We arrived to the hotel got settled in and then went on a little tour of Tortuguero. The town is on a strip of land between the ocean and a canal and because of the zoning regulations land here is not legally owned by anyone but there are people living here and paying mortgages for papers that wouldn’t hold up in court. A doctor and nurse visits the town once a month and school here is for fewer years than anywhere else in Costa Rica. Costa Rica has something like a 94% literacy rate, education is mandatory here for 10 years. The town had a hostile, a few B&B’s, a couple of souvenir shops, a few stores, a discotheque, a tour agency and some small houses.

We walked from the town back to the hotel along a path that passed behind another resort and the CCC conservation project, we took 10 steps off the path to the right and we were on the beach. We looked at some nests for Green Sea Turtles, it is the end of mating season. They swim off for years and return to the same spot to lay their eggs. We saw a few tracks of some moms who had been there last night to lay eggs and a lot of track of babies who had hatched that morning. It takes about 3 months for the eggs to hatch so now is the time you could see some babies but they are very protected and not many people are allowed on the beach in the mornings or nights to see them.

Tuesday – Friday:
Spanish Level: My teachers name this week was Ana Maria. She is from Argentina originally so her accent is a little different. This week I learned how to say: “Would you”, “could you” and “you should”. I also learned past participle verbs (ending in –ed) like “he walked”, “she visited”, “the book is closed”. Thank heavens it was a short week with only 4 school days, my brain aches with all these verb tenses.

The rest of the week went by quickly. Wednesday after class the students went to visit the other campus of Conversa in Santa Ana. We had a nice lunch there and a conference about verb tenses. I missed the dance lesson that night and the barbecue because I had planed to meet Mauricio and go to his family’s house to watch the “classico” football (soccer) game between the top two Costa Rican national teams, Alajualea and Saprissa. It was a lot of fun and I spent the night with them again. Their mom, Mayela, made all sorts of snacks including these platanos baked with sugar and cheese in the oven… oh my they were GREAT! The neighbors came over too and it was just like being home with Mike, Matt, Andy and Monica and Bobby and anyone else who came by from the neighborhood. Or like being at the Lawson’s, watching a game on TV with all the Auburn fanatics. I spent the night there and Mauricio drove me to school the next day. He helped me with my homework in the car. I had to write sentences saying what I would do if I could. Ironically, the one he gave me was my teachers favorite one, hhahahaaha.

I was so tired from the long weekend, all the riding around and all this new info in school that I didn’t do anything note worthy Thursday and Friday night.

Monday:
Spanish Level: A near death experience causes you to forget all Spanish, or all of any foreign language and you immediately revert to your “mother language” or “native tongue”. NOTE for future travel: this is a great reason NOT to go horseback riding in a country whose primary language is NOT the same as yours because the horse will not understand you.

This morning I wanted to take a guided tour of the cloud forest, where you walk for 4 hours in the reserve with a guide and look at animals, mostly birds. There were some other cool things to do there too, a reptile reserve, a butterfly farm, and a serpent place too. Nick, you would have loved it!!! but somehow the girls from Israel talked me into going with them on a waterfall/horseback riding tour. They were so funny, I went with them even though I know when you weigh over 220 you don’t go horseback riding because it’s cruel to the horses. We drove an hour to the farm and they gave me a very strong horse, Hercules. We rode into the forest and it was beautiful. Then we walked down several trails and saw sloths, toucans, geckos, lizards, iguanas, ants, hummingbirds and some HUGE spiders. Our guide was good and his neighbor, a dog, came with us too. The dog was pretty cool because he stayed with us the whole tour and he is on their website. We were walking down to 4 waterfalls when I slipped in the mud… ugh. We went to the various waterfalls which were all very nice and at the final waterfall we swam in the water. This waterfall was the highest of the 4 and the water was FREEZING!!!! but it was all fun. Then we took the horses back up the mountain. It was very beautiful country and you could see the windmill farms from the mountain tops. Costa Rica gets about 10% of their power from windmills.

We were getting close to the farm “home” for the horses, riding along the side of the dirt road. One of the girls had a horse back in Israel and she knows how to ride so she was running her horse, this was bad news for me. My horse decided he was going to be in the lead no matter what. He started running and I couldn’t stop him. HOLY SHIT!!! I mean it was literally a miracle I stayed on this horse. I was begging her to stop her horse but she couldn’t stop hers either, they were racing. Finally my horse passed hers and I pulled him off into the grass. Whewh, I didn’t want to die or worse, break a leg or an arm or my neck! Well that was all fine and good then we rounded the final bend in the road before the barn. After that, my horse wanted the tour to end…he raced towards the barn full speed. I could not stop him. I have no idea how I stayed on this horse. I was bouncing all over the place left and right, yelling, STOP… NO HERCULES… NO MORE… STOP…. but he just kept on plugging away. I thought we were going to hit the sign for the tour but he raced past it and on to the top of the hill (I wonder if the grip I had on the reins was making him go faster?, I have no idea… and we had no instruction in Spanish on how to command the horses. Two ladies and another man came running up the hill to help me… one lady was calling the horse but I was so scared I told her to quit calling him and please just come help me get down!!! When I finally got off and sat down inside and had a drink of water I burst into tears. I was so scared but since I was ok, at the same time it was funny and serves me right because at my weight I knew I shouldn’t have ridden the horse in the first place. During the trip one of the girls said this was scarier than the canopy tour and now I think she may be right.

We got back to Monteverde just in time to catch the bus to San Jose. I almost didn’t get on the bus!!! Most places in Costa Rica you just pay the driver when you get on the bus but because the bus here only goes 2 times a day, and the drive is 6+ hours long, they sell tickets in advance… who knew?? Luckily someone didn’t show up and there was an empty seat for me because the next bus was at 6:30am the next morning. On the road from Monteverde to San Jose the view was absolutely amazing. The dirt road runs along the top of the mountain range and is very curvy and narrow; thank heavens I didn’t have to drive. I sat next to a lady who was probably 5ft 4, 230 pounds and about 65 years old. She was living on her social security traveling all around Central and South America. She was very interesting. She had 4 kids and had lived through the depression in the US. She remembered living without plumbing and electricity when she was very young and had recently sold a farm where she had lived the last few years with her two sons, an outhouse and no electricity on the farm. She was living now on $25 per day or less here. She told me about these books “I choose Costa Rica” or “I choose ____” which tell you about retiring in foreign countries. She was telling me a lot of history of Costa Rica. She had been a history teacher for years and she said now she’s sad to know of all the miss information she was teaching. It was good to have someone interesting to talk to because the bus ride was a whopping 8 hours!!! PURA VIDA, gracias a Dios!

Sunday:
Spanish Level: From the hotel to the lake this morning I had a van driver that spoke only Spanish and I understood most of what he said. We talked about animals in the area and he said this is the place to see toucans. Too bad he wasn’t my guide all day because I would have benefited from his only speaking Spanish with me on a tour all day.

This morning I had to get up early to transfer to Monteverde. I wanted to stay in La Fortuna/Arenal area another night (now that I knew I liked it) and visit the park to try and see toucans and try again to see the lava at night, but for now I had a ticket transfer to Monteverde. My ticket simply said Jeep-Boat-Jeep. I had no reservations for a hotel, no plans, no tour, just the transfer and that was it. In the van we passed a bike race on the way to the lake and some very odd looking racoons. In the boat we crossed a beautiful man made lake, lake Arenal. After the boat ride we took a van to Monteverde there was a couple from England on their honeymoon, a couple from Israel, two girls from Switzerland and two girls from Israel (not traveling with the couple) and me. We rode for about 2 hours on a curvy dirt road up-up-up into the mountains. The Quakers live in Monteverde and there are a lot of dairy and coffee farms here and the cloud forest. It’s beautiful, green, rolling hills, countryside complete with cows and farms and fields, it is very isolated due to roads to get there. Monteverde is famous for the “cloud forest” and for the golden toad that once was discovered here but is now thought to be extinct.

When the van stopped at a hostile in Santa Elena/Monteverde, Paraiso, the girls from Switzerland and Israel got out. I had been talking to them and they told me I should stay here with them, the hostile had room for me too so I stayed there. Staying in a hostile is a cheap great way to travel and you get to meet a lot of great people. I asked for a bedroom to myself and had a community bathroom. It was $5 for the night. I think running a hostile would be fun, maybe that is what I will do when I retire here.

After lunch I took a tour on these “hanging bridges” save your money on this one folks, it wasn’t too good, basically just a walk through a wet forest, but I did learn something new: trees here don’t have rings inside when they are cut or they fall because rings are created in the fall season when the tree becomes dormant for winter. In Costa Rica they don’t have this season, they only have summer and spring basically; therefore, trees here don’t have rings you can use to count the age. There are trees in this forest that engulf other trees and overtake them. At the end of the tour they had one such tree hollowed out and we had to climb up the inside of this tree, it was pretty cool but definitely wasn’t easy.

The other girls went on a canopy tour. After the tours we all went into the town of Santa Elena for coffee and to look around. For dinner we went next door to the hostile. The restaurant in reality is a lady’s house, her living room is the dining room and she makes meals in her kitchen for customers. She was very nice and a good cook. The girls from Israel were hilarious company. They are about 28 and are good friends but act like sisters and they currently live in Birmingham, Alabama. I think everyone on tour here speaks multiple languages, including me!!

Saturday:
Spanish Level: I didn’t have to use much Spanish today. It’s the weekend and my guide was bi-lingual (and great!) lava = lava in Spanish.

This morning I headed out on a tour to Arenal, the most active volcano in Costa Rica. A married couple (Robert and Ana) from school went along and in our van we had about 20 people total. We drove about 4 hours and arrived at the volcano. It gloriously stands alone in the range of mountains, as we approached Arenal the mountain range forms the face and figure of a man lying down Arenal is the bent legs. One side of the volcano is very green and covered with vegetation and the other side is black lava rock. We had great luck and were able to see the top of the volcano during the day, 70% of the time the top is covered by clouds. You could see puffs of smoke rising from the smoldering lava cinders; it looked like snowballs rolling down the hill. At night the lava glows red hot and is easier to see. I spent the night in a hotel with a view of the volcano top but bad luck for me… that night it was too cloudy to see the top of the volcano.

I FOUND THE HOT WATER IN COSTA RICA!!!! It’s at the base of Arenal volcano at the famous hot springs. Two resort hotels have hot springs and my tour went to one, Tabacon. On the way to the hot springs, the van stopped and pulled over where some cars had stopped. People were out of their cars looking at Congos, or Howler monkeys. This is the 3rd type I have seen out of the 4 that live in Costa Rica. They are medium size all black monkeys. It was great!!! Then back in the van and on to the springs. The place had hot, warm and cold rivers, several pools, a swim up bar and a waterslide too! It was like being in a bath that never got cold, we spent 4 hours there. This was the best day I’ve had on tour in Costa Rica. The volcano was truly awesome, the hot springs were wonderful, dinner at the resort was wonderful and the Volcano Inn where I stayed that night was perfect, 11 little bungalows all with views facing the volcano. I woke up several times in the night looking for the lava but never did see it.