Puerto Viejo

This past weekend we went on a little trip to Puerto Viejo on the east coast of Costa Rica. Jenna arranged this trip for me as a little birthday getaway. She found this nice little hotel (3 rooms) that was off the beaten track. Puerto Viejo was a nice little town that revolves around beach life. We met up with some missionaries that our host family knows. They run a little ice cream parlor and coffee shop in town. We enjoyed visiting with them while eating their ice cream with the beach a few steps away. While at their shop, they connected us with one of their employees who has a boyfriend who works at a dive shop. So our host family connected us to the missionaries who connected us to their employee who connected us to her boyfriend, who set us up on a dive. Connections are fun.
So we did get a dive in. The conditions were better than in Guanacaste. It was good to get under the water once again. The rest of our time there was spent resting and relaxing either by the beach or at our hotel. Well, that is except for a little 5:30am hike up a nearby forested hill which I found to be a relaxing experience as well. Countless colorful birds were up and about singing their songs along with a few chattering monkeys. Of course I came across quite a few interesting creatures, the highlight of which were the Strawberry Poison Dart Frogs I found calling from the leaf litter.

It was a great weekend getaway and I came back refreshed, ready to learn more Spanish. For more photos from our trip, click on the slideshow link on the right side of this page.

Where did the time go?

Wow a month since the last post? How time flies. Well as far as school goes, life continues as usual. The Spanish learning process is becoming more challenging for me but still encouraging to see how much I am learning. Yesterday we had a break from the academic routine. The faculty sponsored a cultural day. We had the option to pick two out of four workshops. We picked one on food and one on dance. The other two workshops were cultural games and home remedies. The cultural dance workshop consisted of a sampling of a large variety of Latin dances followed by an introductory dance class in Salsa and Merengue. We butchered our way through it but it was a lot of fun. The food workshop was a tasty experience. We made a huge tropical fruit salad with ice cream, coconut & unrefined cane sugar candy, and Picadillo (kind of like a stew only eaten with tortillas). Tasty times!

We have had a few eventful weekends over the past month. The last weekend of February we spent up in the northwestern part of the country in the driest part of the country known as Guanacaste on a SCUBA trip. Each trimester there is a SCUBA course offered here at the school. Jenna took the Open Water course so now I have a dive buddy! Of course I wanted to go along on the dive trip so I took the Advanced Open Water course.

Guanacaste, right now during the dry season, looks like a combination of the northeast USA in the fall (after the leaves have fallen) and Arizona. There were huge cacti growing between bare trees. We set up at Playa de Coco (coco beach). This area is known for some great diving and incredible wildlife. Unfortunately we were at the right place at the wrong time. A cold, cloudy current moved in and made for an interesting dive with only 5-10 feet visibility. I was rather disappointed with the first two day dives. It was hard to see much and the cold, constant currents were frustrating. However, part of the advanced class was a night dive and it was incredible. I thought it would be overwhelmingly eerie to dive at night, and getting in the water at night was a little creepy but once we descended it was one incredible experience floating in complete darkness guided only by our lights. We saw quite a few Sting Rays and the biggest Green Moray Eel I've ever seen. One of the most fascinating experiences on the dive was when we turned off our dive lights. In the darkness, any movement in the water caused phosphorescent bacteria to glow green. It felt like we were swimming through a galaxy of green stars. Each diver left glowing green trails in the darkness. The next day of diving was a bit better than the first since the water had cleared a little over night.