Well I definitely thought I’d be writing more often than I have, but I haven’t yet figured out how to balance school, field trips, exploring with friends, having limited Internet, and the catholic guilt of my host mother always wishing I would stay home. I’ve been quite busy, so I’ll try my best to give a concise summary of the almost 2 weeks since my arrival.
I arrived on January 8th to the San Jose airport. Customs and immigration were pretty uneventful, because they pretty much roll out a red carpet for anyone with the “tourist” box marked on the customs forms. I landed and found my way out of the airport with my luggage in under 20 min.
After meeting with the rest of the group, we wasted no time starting our week of travel. On our second day in San Jose, we met with our professors. There are five in total, and they traveled with us for the week, which was a great way to get to know them on a personal level. Carol is a professor from Goucher college in Maryland, Jim is an anthropologist living half the year in Costa Rica and the other half in Minnesota, and then Sofia, Christina, and Pati, are all professors from the Monteverde Institute. Sofia (Tropical Ecology) is a Costa Rica native, Crisitina (Spanish) is originally from Madrid, and Pati (Environmental Sustainability) is originally from Ecuador. All three are incredibly beautiful and generally pretty badass women.
Beautiful Sofia. We ran into her at the bar while Cally, Ahdi, and I were taking Merengue lessons.
Pati teaching us about highland plants while we were on a volcano hike.
Cristina's husband is a very well-known local artist, and he designed their beautiful, artsy home. The six of us in our Spanish class went to her house to make dinner one night.
I can’t possibly describe in full detail all of the action packed days in the first week, so here are the highlights:
January 9- Went to the National Museum
January 10-Went to the Irazú volcano in the Cartago province for a hike (very cloudy/cold/rainy,) then drove to downtown Cartago to go to the market and buy a bunch of common fruits of Costa Rica. (My new favorite fruit is guanabana.) While we were downtown we also toured the Basilica, which was beautiful. At the end of the afternoon, we drove to the town of Turrialba to the campus of an institute called CATIE. The acronym is obviously in Spanish, and I can’t remember what it stands for, but it’s a graduate school and tropical agricultural research center. We spent the following three days there:
January 11-We went to a national monument/archaeological site called Guayabo. More rain. Then we went to a small-scale, family dairy farm, which I found incredibly interesting. We had a cow milking race, which I won (see first post,) and we made Turrialba cheese, which is unpasteurized, famous throughout the country, and quite delicious. MORE RAIN.
January 12-We went to two sugar cane plantations and processing plants to contrast conventional and organic production systems.
January 13-We went to a town called Siquierres in Limon province and we toured a pineapple plantation and processing plant. They supply pineapple to DelMonte. I've never eaten so much pineapple in my life. Of course they stuffed us full before we saw how much chlorine they soak the pineapples in. Then we drove to the Veragua rainforest and took a gondola canopy tour and walked through the forest floor. I saw a couple sloths, a few toucans, some poison dart frogs, and an owl. After the rain forest, we packed up our stuff from CATIE and drove to the province of Alajuela where we stayed for the night.
Strawberry poison dart frog.
January 14-We drove well into the mountains of the Puntarenas province, to the town of Monteverde! Finally. It was here that I met my family, and where the real adventure begins.
Here is my home (with our trusty albeit tiny watchdog.)
My room.
Maria, my 4-year-old host sister. (Technically she's my niece because she's the daughter of my host parents' 24-year-old daughter, but sister is easier, and she's certainly what I imagine having a little sister would be like.) She's endlessly interested in everything I do, VERY chatty, and she has an infinite supply of energy. Don't let her innocent smile and Sunday Mass outfit fool you, she's very sassy.
My walk to el Instituto is 50 minutes up and down many hills. It's quite the workout, but 3 of my friends live quite close to me, so it definitely helps to do the hike together. Classes have been fine so far, but I don't think I had mentally prepared myself for starting "school" again. The nightlife isn't much to write home about. There are two real bars in town, neither of which are very populous, and all of the restaurants are pretty touristy and expensive. I didn't realize just how touristy it is here, and sometimes I'm a little embarrassed. While I'm technically a tourist as well, I want people to know that I'm going to be a part of this community for at least the next few months. However, I'm still making classic tourist mistakes. I've already had my phone stolen.
It's going to be an interesting semester.
