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.