Month: August 2014
Big blog update
Well I have a lot to write about in this post. BUT let me just start off by saying that there’s only 3 more days until I come home! I AM SO EXCITED! But over the past few days I have had some really amazing experiences here so let me write about them before I forget too much.
On the morning of August 8th (Friday) Jenna and I took a taxi with Cody to the San Jose airport at 7 AM. Cody was returning home to Georgia that way, so we were able to take a private taxi ride with him instead of taking the public bus! We got to San Jose at about 10 AM and then took a taxi to our hotel, Hotel Cacts. Then Jenna and I went to KFC for lunch because at the time we thought it was a good idea. We both got the “Big Box” combos which came with a TON OF FOOD. It tasted good but I regretted it after.
We went back to our hotel and at about 1 PM, Susan and Erin (Nitro) showed up. They are also Iaccoca Interns from Lehigh who spent the last 6 weeks at Los Cusingos, a bird sanctuary in Costa Rica. We went out to lunch again with them, and then headed down the main street of San Jose to the Costa Rica Gold and Currency Museum. In the museum we learned the history of Costa Rica’s currency, saw a modern art exhibit, and looked at many ancient gold artifacts from pre-Spanish times in Costa Rica. After finishing at the museum, we walked around San Jose some more and then got dinner at a diner-type restaurant. I don’t remember if I said this in my last post about San Jose, but in my opinion it is not a very nice city. It’s very dull and dirty looking and it’s too busy for my taste. Also, there are no plants or trees in site in San Jose, which is extremely different from every other place I have been in Costa Rica.
After dinner we returned to our hotel and waited for Professor Morris to arrive in San Jose from the US. He showed up around 9 PM and checked in with us. Then around 10 or 11 PM the four of us headed out to go to Club Vertigo (or so we thought). We had read about this club online when trying to find things to do in San Jose and according to the internet, it is the “best club in Central America”. We were pretty pumped to check it out, but since none of us have phones with roaming data here in Costa Rica, we had trouble locating it. We were lost, but we knew we were pretty sure we were close to it. So when I saw a group of people around our age walking past us dressed in clubbing clothes, I suggested we casually follow them. We walked behind them and ended up in a long line to get into a building with music coming from it, which we assumed was Club Vertigo. After waiting in line for about 45 mins, we finally got past the bouncers and into the club, but it was called Club El Techa, not Vertigo. We were a bit confused about how we ended up in El Techa, and later we found out that the two clubs are in the same building so we somehow got into the line for the wrong club. I was a bit bummed we missed out on the “best club in Central America”, but El Techa was fun too. They were playing some Latin pop music that I didn’t like too much, but people were dancing like we do in America rather than doing the Latin partner dances. And every once and a while they played some Kesha or Macklemore which was nice. We got a lot of attention in the club because we were gringas. It was a really fun night!
We purposely stayed out pretty late that night because the next morning we had to catch an 8-hour pus to Puerto Jimenez and we all wanted to be tired so we could sleep on the bus. We thought our Professor would be accompanying us, but that morning at breakfast he broke the news to us that he would be taking a 1-hour plane ride rather than the 8-hour bus so that he could spend more time in San Jose. I was pretty mad! We wasted an entire sitting on a cramped, hot bus while he got to take a plane ride there. He better have paid for that out of his own pocket. So on Saturday, August 9th, we spent the majority of the day suffering on the bus, then took a 45-minute taxi ride from Puerto Jimenez to Osa, and then chilled for the rest of the night.
At Osa we lived in a cabin with three bedrooms. Each bedroom had two sets of bunk beds with mosquito nets . There were also two bathrooms and a common area. The showers were cold but it was so hot in Osa that the water felt good. The only problem was that a few minutes after you dried off from the shower, you would be covered in sweat again. The dining area was inside of a large pavillion, and this was also the only place that had wifi. The grounds at Osa was a lot like UGA except it was much hotter and I saw a lot more wildlife there (toucans, howlers monkeys, squirrel monkeys, macaws, spider monkeys).
The beach was a 15 min walk from where we were staying. The path that lead to the beach went through a river, which meant that I had to be carrier over the water several times by different people because I didn’t have rain boots and I didn’t want to get my hiking boots wet. The beach at Osa was a sea turtle protection zone, so the only people who were allowed on it were people staying at the Osa wildlife station. We spent our first morning at Osa (August 10) doing beach cleanup. We walked along the two-kilometer stretch of beach that Osa owns and picked up any trash that we saw. It didn’t take as long as I think our professor anticipated it would, because we were done in about 2 hours. He told us we were free for the rest of the day, but Osa is in an even more remote location than UGA, so the only thing we could really do was go for a hike. We hiked about 45 mins to a lagoon, and then came back and went swimming in the river that lies between the Osa station and the beach.
The next morning our assignment at Osa was “trail maintenance”. This meant taking a bunch of round-end shovels into the forest and hacking away at the trees and plants to try to make a new trail. It was terrible, I felt like I was going to sweat to death. I was pretty annoyed that we were using the wrong tools for the job, and I was upset that this was our “community service project”. I didn’t feel like I was serving the community, I felt like I was free labor for Osa. But anyway… We were pretty tired for the rest of the day, but before dinner we decided to go down to the beach and see if we could go swimming. There are signs posted that say you shouldn’t swim because of the rough waves, but there were a few tide pools that were big enough for us to swim in. Jenna and Erin tried to go swimming in the waves, but after getting knocked over by a huge wave, they decided against it.
Why Osa is the best
– the food
– the beach
– the monkeys
– the salad dressing
– the showers
– the coconuts
– the wifi
– the mattresses
– the bug nets
– and the friends!!!!
San Jose and OSA
We traveled to San Jose on Friday morning and then to Osa on Saturday. I don’t have a computer here so I most likely won’t write about them until we get back to UGA. Here’s a picture of a monkey.
Mas galletas!
Jenna and I befriended the kitchen staff and made 120 peanut butter cookies with them on Thursday because why not!
Mantequilla cookies
Yesterday Loandry and I made butter cookies from one of Gaudy’s recipes. We ate a lot of the cookie dough, but we made about 3 or 4 dozen cookies. I put some in a bag to make sure they didn’t all get eaten again and it’s a good thing I did because they were all gone this morning!
La Fortuna
Because we finished our work so early, Cody gave us Friday and Monday off so that Jenna and I could take a longer trip somewhere. We were debating between going to a beach town or to the nearby town of La Fortuna. We decided on La Fortuna because we really wanted to see the large volcano that sits next to the town. Also the weather is much less hot in La Fortuna than it would be at the beach (but it’s hotter than Monteverde which is nice!).
On Friday morning, Jenna and I met at 7 am at UGA and got a taxi that took us into Santa Elena. Then, we got on a bus in Santa Elena with about 15 other people. After about 1.5 hours, the bus dropped us off at the shore of Lake Arenal. From there, we took a 30 min boat ride across the lake, and then took another bus to our hotel in La Fortuna. This mode of transportation, known around here as taxi-boat-taxi or jeep-boat-jeep is the fastest way to travel between Monteverde and La Fortuna. The two cities are separated by the lake, and the main highway winds around the lake, making a journey solely by car take much longer than the taxi-boat-taxi option. The boat ride was also really relaxing and scenic.
The taxi dropped us off at our hostel, Arenal Hostel Resort, and we checked in at the desk. It seemed more like a motel than a hostel, all the rooms opened up to a courtyard that was full of hammocks, a pool and a bar. We got a private room rather than a dorm-style one, but when we arrived they said the room wasn’t ready yet and they told us to wait at the bar. It took 3 hours!!! for them to have our room ready, which was really annoying. Once we got in our room we put our stuff away and then went to explore La Fortuna. It’s a pretty small town but very tourist-y. Everything is centered around the Catholic Church and park in the middle of town. Around the park were various shops and restaurants, but there wasn’t too much other than that. We went to happy hour at the hostel bar that night (6-7 pm) and then went to the Lava Lounge restaurant for dinner. We were going to go out again after dinner but we were both too tired. We’re used to waking up at 6:30 and going to bed at 8:30 like our homestay families do.
The next day we made waffles for breakfast in the hostel kitchen, and then headed to Baldi Hot Springs. For just $30 per got to spend the entire day hanging out in more than 15 different hot spring pools of various temperatures. The place also had four waterslides! But these were the most extreme waterslides I’ve ever experienced. They were really fast and steep and they threw you around a lot. Jenna even ended up cutting her arm open on one of them.
We hung out at the hot springs until 2:30, and then we got picked up by a taxi to go on a volcano hike. You can’t actually hike up the volcano, but this hike took us to a spot 600 m from the base of the Arenal volcano to the site of an old lava flow. It was so cool to be able to stand on top of the lava flow and look at the volcano so closely.
After the volcano hike we went back to the hot springs until 9:00 when they took us back to our hostel. We were planning on going to the La Fortuna discoteque that night because the bartender at the hostel told us that was the place to go on Saturday nights, but we both fell asleep early again!
On Sunday we went on the Rainforest Chocolate tour. They took us through a plantation of cacao trees and then showed us the process of making chocolate. It was really interesting to see each step and participate in the process. They also let us taste a lot of the chocolate, and although it was tasty, it made both my and Jenna’s stomachs hurt. The chocolate was too rich!
After the chocolate tour we went to the La Fortuna waterfall. It was really beautiful and the water wasn’t too cold so I went in for a dip. There wasn’t much else to do other than look at the falls though, so we didn’t stay too long.
On Monday we had more waffles, chilled in our room until noon, and then got lunch. At 2:00 we went to sit outside our hostel and wait for the taxi-boat-taxi to pick us up at 2:30. At 3:00 they still hadn’t come, so we asked the guy in the hostel lobby to call the company for us. And it turns out they forgot about us! So we had to wait until 4:00 for them to come back and get us. I was really annoyed that we spent so much of the day waiting around when we could have actually done something! And they didn’t even offer us a discount for forgetting us. Darn ticos……………
Last night I went to Jenna’s homestay families house to have pizza. Jenna’s family has a little pizza restaurant for tourist groups. Now we’re finishing up our data analysis in the UGA lab. We’re here for one more day and then we head to San Jose, and then OSA! I can’t wait!
(this is a picture of me with our favorite Costa Rican snack, CHURILITOS! They are addicting)
Emily Is In Costa Rica 