33% Complete

I am about 1/3 of the way done with my study abroad trip. It has gone by so fast and there are still so many things I want to do. For the next 3 weeks I will be doing my volunteer project in Pueblo Nuevo de Guacimo. I will be teaching English to a group of women who work in a chocolate co-op. It's the same group of women we bought chocolate from on our first chocolate tour a few weeks ago. I have never taught English before so it will be an interesting experience. I am a little nervous, but mostly excited. I will be living with a new family...internet will be more limited.

Last Saturday was Independence Day in Costa Rica. The day before we celebrated at ACM by eating typical Costa Rican food and learning about the national symbols of Costa Rica. That night there were lantern parades that all of the kids participate in. Saturday there were parade also. I went to the main street in San Pedro with my mom to watch the marching bands and dance groups. It reminded me a lot of 4th of July parades, especially since the flag colors here are also red, white, and blue.

Last Sunday a group of us went to La Sabana, a huge park in San Jose. We found out that there are tons of activities to do on Sundays: Soccer, basketball, baseball, Zumba, Paddle-boating, horseback riding, etc. We originally went there to watch baseball. One of my friends even asked to play catch with one of the teams and they let him practice (throw, hit, and pitch) with them before a game. It was really fun to watch. After, we paddle-boated and walked around to see what we could in the future.

National Stadium

Exercise and dance classes

Tuesday we had a cooking class. I made gallo pinto (rice and beans) and Mateo, Adam, and our professor Marco made cheese empanadas, coconut bars, strawberry juice, and tortillas with cheese and avocado. It was delicious. I can't wait to bring back some recipes to the US.

The cooks (Mateo, me, Adam)

Preparing gallo pinto

Empanadas

Iveth (the expert cook) and us

Serving up some gallo pinto

Arenal, Maleku, La Fortuna

Two weekends ago my class went to Arenal Volcano. We stayed in a beautiful hotel with natural hot springs and the view from our rooms was gorgeous. We had a tour of the surrounding area with Jorge, a famous volcanologist who knows more than anybody about Arenal. On one of our tours we stopped by a neighborhood where the main street had been ruined by the earthquake. We hiked a lot this weekend and were able to see some great scenery as we walked through the forest.

Working to fix earthquake damage

Road affected by earthquake

Lake near Arenal

Arenal Volcano

Hotel Room #105

View from hotel room

Garden in shower at hotel

Hotel hot springs

On our trip we also stopped at a conservation reserve called Danaus (Monarch). We had a tour which was a lot like the conservation and biodiversity tour we had at Tirimbina the week before. After lunch I was able to participate in a presentation/dance given by a local tribe, the Maleku. I learned a short dance, some short phrases, and I was given a Maleku name: Corahutu, which means "the most beautiful flower."I also dressed up in their traditional clothing. After the presentation was over, the rest of the group joined us. It was really fun.

The final activity of the weekend was going to a waterfall (catarata) in La Fortuna. We had to walk down a lot of steep stairs to get there, but it was worth it. The waterfall was beautiful. We got to swim there and climb some rocks too. The water was pretty cold and very powerful so we couldn't get too close to the waterfall. We stayed for about 2 hours but we all wanted to stay forever. 

Flora y Fauna

Flowers:

Caterpillars:

Butterflies:

Animals:

Ants:

Other Plants:

7.6

This morning there was an earthquake off the west coast of Costa Rica. It was a 7.6 in magnitude which is really big. My professors at ACM had never felt one this big before. I was waiting for my class to start when I felt some shaking...I thought somebody was coming down one of the rickety staircases but when I saw the ACM secretary walking out of her office towards me I knew it was an earthquake. Luckily, I didn't have far to walk to the "Zona Segura" (Safe Zone) which is in the ACM backyard. I watched as the ACM building rocked side to side along with several plants and I could hear things clanging together on the 2nd floor. Some of my friends and professors were on the second floor and felt it more than I did. The movement lasted for a minute or two. It was a bizarre feeling... a mix between being on a ride/dizziness. Even after the earthquake my body still felt as if the ground was moving. Shortly after, everything seemed very still; the trees hardly moved, not much noise from birds, etc. Then it rained. My professor Mario said that this is typical. He also said that aftershocks are possible up to a few days later. As of now (almost 14 hours later) I haven't felt one.
Within a half an hour of the earthquake, everything was back to normal and people went on with their daily routines. Evidently Costa Rica is situated on land that is very elastic and can easily move side to side during earthquakes which means that a large earthquake like this does not do too much damage whereas in other parts of the world an earthquake of a smaller magnitude could do lots of harm.
You'll have to look at CNN or another news station, but as far as I know 1 person died and only a few were injured. Everything is good at ACM. We are all safe and so are our families. As many Ticos would say, "Gracias a dios."

Palabras Nuevas
medias (calcetines) - socks
marco - frame
botiquín - first aid kit
fosforos - matches
mareado - dizzy
colibri - hummingbird

Chocolate and more chocolate

This weekend was a whirlwind. On Friday I had to get to ACM early so we could leave for Finmac, a cacao plantation. It took us about 2.5 hours to get there by bus. We drove northeast from San Jose over mountains and through the rainforest. The scenery was beautiful but it was hot and very humid.
Once we got to Finmac we walked though the cacao tree farm. We got to see 3 sloths. One was only 4 hours old. I even got to hold one. They were very cute (not soft unfortunately) and they were not happy that we were interfering with them. After watching the process of how the cacao gets collected, we went into the plant to see how the cacao bean gets turned into chocolate: separating the fruit from the bean/seed, fermenting and drying the beans, grinding the beans, adding sugar, etc. We had to wear a uniform over our clothes: white smock, white rain boots, white hair bonnet. At each step of the chocolate-making process we were able to have a taste. The dried beans of 100% cacao are not very good. Very bitter. Think dirt with a very small hint of chocolate flavor. At the very end we were able to have organic chocolate made with 65% cacao. Mmmmmm. So good. We were also able to drink coconut water directly from the coconuts trees there.
We stayed at Finmac for lunch and our cook was a woman who works with a co-op of women selling chocolate. She was a great cook and she sold some of her chocolate to us. I bought 5 bars, all of different flavors.
After seeing the chocolate plant, we went to a banana plantation about 10 minutes away. We walked through the banana tree farm and saw the whole process of bananas on tree to the bananas being boxed into Dole trucks. Very interesting.

2.5 hour bus ride to Tirimbina. Tirimbina is a rainforest conservation reserve. It is in the middle of the rainforest. We had dinner at the restaurant there and then saw a presentation about bats. During the presentation, the expert actually had bats for us to look at and touch. I learned so much. Afterwards, we were able to release the bats back into the wild. I wore a glove, the expert put the bat in my hand with its wing between my thumb and palm, and when I let go, it flew off into the darkness. We spent the night in the lodge there.
The next morning we went on a tour through the rainforest. We got to walk across 2 swaying suspension bridges (the longest one in Costa Rica). I was not as scared as I thought I would be although the bridges were pretty high up. I learned a lot about the forest, insects, and animals there. We heard howler monkeys and saw a snake, white bats sleeping under a leaf, bullet and army ants, blue-jean frogs, and lots of vines, trees, and flowers. The tour took 2 hours. After, we hiked a little more to watch another presentation on cacao and chocolate. The technology used at Tirimbina was much less sophisticated than what was used in Finmac, but I enjoyed the experience more because it was more interactive. Again, we were able to try cacao in every stage until it became chocolate. At the end of the presentation, we got to mix our own melted chocolate with vanilla, chile, and/or nutmeg. It was fantastic. The men giving the presentation kept giving us more and more chocolate. It was amazing, but I'll admit, I didn't even want to think about chocolate for a few days. I learned that there is such a thing as too much chocolate.
After lunch at the restaurant, we took a bus back to San Jose.

Sunday I slept in and didn't go to church with Marta. I did some homework and then hung out with a few of my ACM friends. They walked me home and got to meet my family. Dinner. On Sundays Marta watches La Voz Mexico so I watched that with her after dinner.

Three-toed sloth

Cacao pods right after being picked

3-Toed Sloth

2-Toed Sloth and Baby

Cacao fermenting and drying

Cacao liquid

Drinking from coconuts

Banana farm

Washing and packing bananas

Bat Presentation

Bats

Tirimbina Suspension Bridge