Our intensive Spanish class is over, although it will be continued with medical Spanish classes in Las Cruces. Our last day, after our final exam, was great: we went to the Museo de Insectos at la Universidad de Costa Rica (UCR), and got to see a bunch of cool things that I hope never make their way into my bed in the jungle.
Me with a tarantula!
We also got to walk around after lunch, looking at some earrings sold by street vendors. They make lots of jewelry out of fruit or other natural materials– bracelets with orange peel, earrings with orange slices, necklaces out of semillas (seeds), and earrings with banana slices, which I purchased.
Here we are in our class with our Profesora, Mariela, where we spent 60 hours speaking Spanish. Some of us (Vanji) are a little more excited to be in class than others...
Here's our group celebrating the end of CRLA classes at UCR.
Yesterday we had a lonnnng day of exploring and bus riding. There’s a BioCursos program provided by the Organización para Estudios Tropicales, and they take care of most of the cost for us OET students to travel on the weekends. This weekend was an optional trip, and even though sleep was looking very, very tempting, I headed on the trip, spurred by one of those “I may not be in this country again” moments.
Sleep was looking so tempting because we had to be on the bus at 5:00 am. It was about a 5 hour bus ride to our destination, so we didn’t come back until 9:00 pm!
We saw a waterfall, the hot springs (supposedly they’re really, really clear blue on a day when there isn’t so much rain), and animals! Agoutis, toucans, parrots, and sloths – finally! The hike was nice, and the waterfall was majestic. Nothing wakes you up in the morning like the mist from a roaring catarata rushing at you in the rainforest.
An agouti!
Also, as I predicted in my last post, I’m getting a bit of a cold. Luckily I got a lot of sleep last night (10.5 hours, a new record!), and my mama tica is supplying me with cloves of ajo (garlic).
Mango season has officially started, so my mama tica has served mango for breakfast for the past three days! I’m in heaven. Right now I'm working on my plant report, on the Zingiberales order (families Heliconiaceae and Musaceae, the latter of which is the banana family!). I feel like I'm reading a Lewis Carrol poem sometimes, with words like "pendacle," "glabrous," and "ligulate" everywhere in the literature.
We leave for Las Cruces tomorrow, and then we are ALL OVER THE PLACE for the next month. In the next four weeks, we are traveling to Las Cruces, to Las Alturas, to Boruca (an indigenous territory of the Brunka), back to Las Cruces, to Panama to visit the Ngöbe (another indigenous group and the first that we visited), to Bocas del Toro in Panama (beautiful beaches, so I’ve heard – don’t know what we’re doing there but I hope it falls on a day off!), the BriBri territory and chocolate factory (!!!), to La Selva, the rainforest biological station, and then we have our midterm exams and go back to San José for spring break!
Our Día de San Valentín will be celebrated tomorrow by taking a six hour bus ride back to San Vito. I think I speak for our whole group when I say that going back to the mountains is going to be a huge sigh of relief. Literally, because it feels like we’ve been holding our breath in this dirty city. San José is great for immersion into Spanish, but it’s going to be great to breathe fresh mountain air again, see the stars at night, and hear cicadas instead of dogs barking.
It’s hard to believe that I’ve spent four weeks here!!
Hasta luego,
Anya
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