I know it’s been FOREVER since I last updated here, but we’ve been so busy I’ve hardly had time to check my email every few days! We have done so much since classes got underway. Here’s a brief overview:
All of the students headed to San Jose in the first few days with our Spanish teachers for a tour of the city’s most important historical and cultural spots. It was a long day of walking, but we got to get a feel for the city and figure out which museums and parks we want to check out when we have free time on the weekends. We ended our day in San Jose with lunch at the Mercado Central. It’s basically a GIANT indoor farmer’s market with everything from fruits and vegetables to chickens and rabbits to cigars and souvenirs to kitchen necessities. It was absolutely overwhelming, but we all had a great (and enormous) lunch. We returned to ACM by taking our first Costa Rican taxis, which actually turns out to be really easy.
We spent one of our first free afternoons exploring the University of Costa Rica campus and stumbled upon the UCR Insect Museum. Naturally, we had to go in. The bugs were absolutely unbelievable. There was one insect that was actually bigger than my face. Although it looked sort of like a crab, so I have no idea what to think of it. Looking back, it was probably a bad idea to see the world’s largest insects before we even set foot in the rainforest, but I guess now we’re prepared!
For our first full weekend in Costa Rica, ACM hosted a lunch for all of the students and their families. Lunch ended up being a tiny part of the day though. We spent hours playing ridiculous games like musical chairs, trying to dance with an orange between two people’s cheeks, and three-legged races. It was a great day, and everyone really appreciated getting to meet all of the other host families.
The next day, a few of us headed to the National Yoga Festival in San Jose. It took us a while to find the festival, and we ended up finding an outdoor concert first. I have no idea who it was, but there were a lot of older women that seemed absolutely thrilled to be there and knew all the words to the songs. Even the police working at the concert were singing! We finally made our way over to the festival with no idea what to expect. This is only the 5th year for the festival, but it was a lot bigger than I was expecting. There were a bunch of vendors with all sorts of yoga-related things and vegetarian food that looked and smelled sooo delicious. Not knowing there would be food, we had grabbed pizza earlier in the day. We weren’t actually able to do yoga since we didn’t have mats with us, but there were some really interesting performances like belly dancing, acrobatic yoga, and a few musicians. Overall, it was a great first day in San Jose without teachers to help us figure everything out.
A few days ago, we had our first of several dance classes. Our teacher is apparently really famous because he’s one of the mentors on the Latin American version of Dancing with the Stars. I have no idea how the ACM managed to get him to teach us, but it was great! He was a lot of fun and was willing to put up with our general inability to dance. We learned the merengue and the salsa, but I got so confused switching between the female and male parts (unfortunately our ratio doesn’t quite work out for dance classes). We definitely need to practice a little more before we can take our dancing out in public, but everyone is really excited for our next dance class next Monday.
We spent last weekend on our first big field trip to Finmac and Tirimbina. Finmac is a chocolate/banana plantation. We got tours of both parts, but the chocolate was definitely a highlight. We got to see each part of the chocolate process and we tasted the chocolate at each of the stages. The chocolate tour also included a few sloth encounters! We got to hold a three-toed sloth, and then were told that there was a baby sloth nearby that we could look at. When we got there we found out that this sloth was not just any baby sloth. It was only 4 hours old!! It was up in a tree with it’s mom, but we were able to get a few pictures. A few of the women from Finmac prepared an amazing lunch for us, and we were able to buy some of their chocolate. We each bought a few bars of different flavors before heading to the banana plantation. The banana plantation was really impressive. Again, we got to see each part of the process, although we didn’t get to eat any bananas. They told us that the bananas from that particular plantation go to Europe.
When we finished at Finmac, we headed to Tirimbina. Tirimbina is a combination of an ecotourist destination and a biological reserve used for education and research, and it is absolutely beautiful. When we arrived on Friday night we had a presentation of Costa Rican bats. They caught several different types for us to look at, and then we got to release each of them back into the rainforest. The next morning, we had a tour of the biological reserve. To get there, we had to cross a river on the longest suspension bridge in Costa Rica. During our tour, we got to see many different insects, plants, and birds as we walked through different types of rainforests. Our tour ended with yet another chocolate demonstration. This one was much more touristy, which meant they made sure we got to eat a lot of chocolate. I had a hot chocolate drink with chili pepper and vanilla, followed by spoonfuls of thick liquid chocolate. I had no idea it was possible to eat that much chocolate, but it was so good that we weren’t able to stop! We finished the demo with a few finished pieces of solid chocolate. We had to hike back out to the main buildings for lunch, but the combination of the heat and the absurd amounts of chocolate left us all pretty exhausted. However, I was snapped back into action when our guide announced the pit viper sitting next to the trail. A few people in the class stopped for a closer look, but I ran past it as quickly as I could. In reality, I never actually laid eyes on it, so I’m going to pretend it didn’t exist. I can still say I made it through the first field trip without seeing a snake. Everyone regretted the chocolate when we got into the bus to head home, but we all made it back in one piece. I have a few chocolate bars in my room that I still can’t even think about eating yet. We all need a little more time to recover from the chocolate overload. We also thought it was a great idea to buy 10 kilos of chocolate for the class to split. We’ll have to figure out how to divide the giant block of chocolate to bring back to each of our houses.
Today we had two short field trips. In the morning, we took a driving/walking tour of the architecture in San Jose. I hadn’t realized how much variety there was in the city before. While we were casually looking at a house, we heard a lion roaring behind us! It turns out that there’s a zoo right in the middle of the city! We’ll have to check it out when we get some free time. In the afternoon, my Neotropical Biodiversity class headed to the university for a really interesting lecture on the different types of insects in Costa Rica. After the lecture we walked around the campus to find a few of the insects we had talked about. There’s a tree on campus that you can shake and then see thousands and thousands of ants crawl out of teeny tiny holes and cover the whole tree! I’ll take my camera next time I go to the university to get some pictures of the campus. It has some of the biggest trees I’ve ever seen right in the middle of it.
I have a ton of pictures to post, but I’m still trying to figure out how to put them on here in a time efficient manner. I tried last night, but each individual picture was taking a few hours to upload. I’ll work on it tonight and tomorrow, and hopefully I can get caught up before our field trip this weekend to the Arenal Volcano!
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