Looks like it’s about time to sum up the past 2 months of my vida! Where to begin? I left off with the lovely trip to a volcano, waterfalls, and a coffee farm…as well as some insect horror stories.
June was a lot of fun! We were fortunate enough to have some visitors come keep us company for about a week…Brock and Becky! Having visitors is a great excuse to do some really fun things!! We had to introduce them to some local dishes…so we decided to make gallo pinto and arroz con leche! And I must say, it turned out great! Gallo Pinto is rice and beans (a great Costa Rican staple) along with some eggs, spices, hot sauce…and some fresh mango on the side! Delicious!
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| The cooking and eating crew:) |
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| Gallo Pinto, eggs, and the empty space is for the fresh mango! |
Another favorite spot we discovered…(thank you Kyle), is a lovely restaurant looking over the valley of San Jose. The twinkling lights are so impressive at night from this mountain top restaurant! I think I have enough photos from up there to make an entire photo album:) In addition to the great views…you can see some typical Costa Rican dancing! The girls dance with a lot of dress, and the guys stomp their feet a bit.
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| Chicas! |
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| The Guys! |
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| Traditional Dancing |
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| Hello San Jose |
I don’t have any photos of our rafting adventure. It’s a good thing I did not bring my camera..because I would have definitely been ruined from getting WET! We were wet! Picture green jungle everywhere, huge whitewater rapids, waterfalls, canyons…it was wonderful! Now I understand where the water goes during rainy season-waterfalls and rivers! I’ve never seen so much water. We enjoyed it so much, we’ll being going on another excursion pronto:)
We also ventured back to our favorite playa, Manuel Antonio. It was just as lovely as we remembered it! The beach, jungle, and company was excellent! We did even have some sloth encounters!
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| Just the view from our hotel...horrible, I know. |
Another reason I love Costa Rica…our walk back from dinner turned into a wildlife night hike! We saw a sloth, toad, glowing eyes of a mystery animal, and all kinds of plants!
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| Giant Ants. |
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| Night Hike through the jungle! |
We also went to our favorite 1,800 colone breakfast which includes gallo pinto, fruit, bread, eggs…What more could you want?!
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| Course 1 |
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| Course 2 |
It’s about time I showed a picture of my amazing class. They are great! They are good little workers and are always so excited to answer questions. I'm enjoying 4th grade:)
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| 4th Graders! |
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| 7th grade chicas |
The end of the semester ended July 1st. All the teachers were running around like crazy that week! We were trying to finish up grades (which is a bit of a tedious process), as well as teaching. In the states you’d have a workday for this sort of thing. It was a crazy, busy time…but as always, we got it done! And we were all READY for break! We finished up on a Friday, and were so happy to have completed our first teaching semester, as well as pack up and go home for our 3-week break in July.
But life doesn't seem to be quite as easy all the time, for example the rain. That Friday afternoon it was pouring. I’m talking about the most rain I’ve ever seen in my life! It looked liked waterfalls were falling off of roofs; it was also so loud with some of the tin roofs and such around. It was definitely raining gatos y perros! We were soaking wet even having a huge umbrella taking the 3 minute walk home (but I made a fun purchase of fun rain boots yesterday:)). When we managed to make it home afterschool, we came home to more water...our house flooded a bit. Mostly in the bathroom and our bedrooms. We were trying to mop as well as sweep the water out with a broom. We didn’t want to leave a wet house locked up for 3 weeks since we were leaving the next morning at 4am. Our landlady found a drain that was clogged, so that must have been the problem…but the rain didn’t stop anytime soon either, so it was difficult to dry the house.
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| Agua! |
This day was becoming one of those days where things just aren’t exactly going the right way, but then it’s funny later. The afternoon/night proceeded with Kristin and I going to the bank to empty our accounts here, and taking a Wal-Mart run to buy coffee and hot sauce to family/friends. Well, the bank had closed 5 minutes prior to our arrival, and Wal-Mart was packed, and there weren’t any taxis in this poring rain. So we took the bus, which is fine on a normal day, but it was so packed, humid (the windows were fogging), and there was an accident, so it wasn’t the fastest bus ride home.
We finally made it home, the rain is lightening up a bit. We are getting very exhausted at this point, but we made a delicious scramble for dinner along with a Costa Rica beer. Then we cleaned, packed, and bug-proofed our house. We tried to eat all of our food as it would definitely rot during July. In order to throw away our trash, I had to army crawl under a fence to get to a dumpster..It was quite a night. We were able to sleep a few hours, then got on a flight to the states!
It was a wonderful trip to the states! I have such amazing family and friends! Being away from home really makes me appreciate how great Colorado is. I’ll admit, it was hard to leave home after those 3 weeks of family, friends, hiking, golf, weddings, and lovely summer evenings. But after being here a little over a week now, I’ve realized I’m having an experience of a lifetime! I forget that sometimes. It’s great to be back:) Just living the good life:)
Going to states, and now returning again has made me realize some definite cultural differences. But I will write that in my upcoming news. And yes, I will try my best to write more often!
