For a link to a short CNN article about it click here.
Thursday, November 4, 2010
Mudslide
Although this doesn't seem to be breaking news anywhere but in Costa Rica, I just wanted to let you know that there was a really bad mudslide just south of San José last night. We've had a lot of rain the past few days, I think because of tropical storm Thomas or something like that, and it caused a huge mudslide in a suburb of San José called San Antonio de Escazu. It hasn't really affected anything here in Heredia, but in that area there are bridges out and homes completely destroyed. I think they've declared a national emergency, and schools in the San José area are closed indefinitely (though I still had class this morning). I was watching the news at breakfast and it showed a picture of one house where there was mud several feet deep all around it. They also showed several houses that looked like they'd been shoved into the trees and were just completely destroyed. Several people have died and a lot more are missing and displaced, so please be praying for everyone down here, for the rescue effort and for the people who have lost their homes and loved ones.
Monday, November 1, 2010
Halloween
Okay, really quick entry before lunch.
Yesterday was Halloween, but it's not nearly as big here as it is in the States. Nevertheless, my friend Jennifer, who's in ISEP, threw a Halloween party, which I went to dressed as a ninja. Unfortunately, I could only stay for about an hour, because my friends from my theater class called me that afternoon and said they were going to the play that night. So I left after about an hour, met my friends at the University, and we went to go see "Dos arriba, una abaja" (Two above, one below), which was a comedy about this guy who's dating three different girls, all flight attendants, and things get complicated when all three show up at the same time!
The next two weeks are going to be insane, homework wise. Between now and next Thursday I have due:
2 term papers
3 presentations
2 literature essays
1 group essay
1 take home final (basically a big essay)
Ugh. Needless to say, I'm kind of excited to be done with school for the semester. Although I think I'll be sad to leave, I'm ready for that six week break I get when I go home... :)
P.S. It's November, and it's 80 degrees out. Pretty sure this is going to be the warmest November of my life.
Friday, October 29, 2010
Nothin' Particular
Well, it's Friday night, and I don't have anything in particular to talk about; just wanted to write. Even though I'm not one for going out much on the weekends (leading one of my host mom's friends to ask me one Friday night, "Don't you have any friends to go out with?" Awkward.) I still have trouble making myself do homework on Fridays. Which is a problem, since I have big term paper due Tuesday for my Anthropology & History Class, and I have a loooong ways to go on it. But instead, I've been watching an episode of Chuck (thanks Bekah) and listening to Great Big Sea (thanks Drew). My host mom brought me pizza for dinner, and everyone's gone, so I have the house to myself. Which is nice. I'm planning to skype with my family soon, and then I'll probably go to bed. Then get up early and start hammering out that term paper.
This week I caught a little cold, so my nose has been running like crazy since Tuesday. Which is not much fun, but so far it hasn't been too serious, and I'll take this over stomach issues any day.
Wednesday evening at Bible Study we watched the movie "Faith Like Potatoes." The movie itself was good, but the message was really good. I'm getting to know the people better and I'm glad I finally started going.
Thursday I went to San José with my theater class and we toured the National Theater. It was a little shorter than when I went with the ISEP group, but we got to stand on the stage, which was pretty cool. That theater is absolutely gorgeous, and if anyone reading this ever gets to Costa Rica, you should go see it. (If you want to see a cool picture that I unfortunately didn't take, click here.)
Today I slept in until 8 (woohoo!) and did some random things that needed doing, then had class at 1. Next week I have to give a speech for that class, and I'm going to talk about American holidays--I'm really excited about it. After I got home I drank some coffee and played this Monopoly card game with my host niece and nephew, Andréa and Adrián. Adrián won the first game, and I won the second, and it was really fun.
Well, that about sums up the exciting parts of my week. Sunday night I'm planning to go to a Halloween party that one of the ISEP students, Jennifer, is throwing. I think I'm going to be a ninja, just because it's a really easy costume, and it should be fun!
¡Pura vida!
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Pictures!
Okay, so I've just figured out how to link to my facebook photo albums so you can see pictures even if you're not on facebook! So here are a few links if you want to see some pictures of my time here:
This one is for the coffee tour:
These are pictures of our excursion to Volcan Poas and the Waterfall Gardens, as well as some random pictures at the beginning:
And these two albums are from my first week here (warning, the first one has about 200 pictures!):
All right, now I really am getting back to homework!
La Playa
This morning I went to church with my friend April, who's Catholic. It was very different, but I liked it. Everyone knew exactly what to do and when, and I did my best to follow along. The church building was gorgeous--I'll try to post pictures soon.
But on to the recapping of my trip from last weekend:
I went with three other girls from the ISEP program, Caitlin, Callie, and Corrylee (I guess I missed the memo on the "C" name). We left early Friday morning (I skipped my Friday afternoon class) and took a bus from San José to Brasilito, a little town on the western coast of Costa Rica, in the region of Guanacaste. The bus trip was about five hours, so by the time we got there we were sweaty and hungry. After checking into our hotel, we ate lunch at the nearby restaurant, Outback Jack's, where we were serenaded by a mariachi band (we then had to pay them). Then we went straight to the beach, which was literally right by the restaurant and hotel. The beach was beautiful, the water felt great, and we had a lot of fun swimming and looking for shells. When it started to get dark we went back to our room, showered, then went to the nearby soda for dinner. (Quick note: a "soda" is like a little family-owned restaurant, and they usually sell typical Costa Rican food for fairly cheap.) The food was deliciosa, and after walking around town a bit we went back to our hotel and watched "Pan's Labrynth," which was good, but dark. So we watched half of "Raising Helen" to cheer ourselves up. :)
Saturday we got up and took the bus to Playa Tamarindo, a bigger beach about 18 km away. There we rented surfboards and Caitlin, who's from Hawaii, taught us how to surf. I have to confess I didn't get very far though. At one point, Caitlin was helping Callie, and Corrylee and I were sitting on our boards in the water, when a set of big waves came in, and we kept getting shoved underwater and hit with our surfboards. So I took a break and sat on the beach. Later Caitlin took me out again, and I rode a couple waves in just lying on my surfboard. It was actually really fun, but that was as far as I got. We ate lunch in the town of Tamarindo then went back to Brasilito, which was a little trickier than it had been in the morning. See, there's a direct bus from Brasilito to Tamarindo, but not one from Tamarindo to Brasilito. We asked a guy which bus we should take, and he told us we could take a taxi, and then proceeded to hail one for us. Only it cost about $30, which is ridiculous, so we turned him down. Then the man got another taxi for us (people are sometimes overly helpful), and this taxi driver lowered the price to $18. That was still way too high, so we said no thanks, but it took us about 10 minutes to convince the man we really didn't want to take a taxi. When our bus finally came, Corrylee got pooped on by a bird right as we were getting on. A girl told us it was good luck, and it kind of turned out to be true, since when we got off that bus at Haucas, the bus for Brasilito was right there.
Once we made it back to Brasilito, we went exploring and walked to Playa Conchal, which we had heard a lot about. It was a beautiful beach, and a good portion of it is made up entirely of shell pieces! (Hence the name, "conchal" means "shell.") We stayed there for a bit, until it started raining, and then we went back to our hotel, showered, and ate dinner at Outback Jack's again.
Sunday we were planning to go back to Tamarindo, but we missed the bus. So we had to wait a while for the next one, which would only take us to Haucas, but we met these two nice women from the Netherlands who were on vacation in Costa Rica. Once in Haucas we waited for a while, but the bus to Tamarindo never came, so we walked over to the taxi drivers and asked how much it would be. It was only $5, so we took it. On our way we got stopped by, of all things, a herd of cows walking down the road. Our taxi driver, who was really nice, said this happened pretty often. We finally made it to Playa Tamarindo, where the other three girls rented surfboards again (I was content to lie on the beach, read, and take pictures). We ate lunch at a soda in Tamarindo, then hung out there until the next bus came (figuring out the buses in Costa Rica can be frustrating). For dinner we ate at a pizza place in Brasilito-- it was a really cute place, with all the tables under these grass-roof huts, and the pizza was yummy.
Monday was a very long day. We walked to the bus ticket office to buy our tickets for San José, only to find out that the 9 o'clock bus was full. And the next bus wasn't until 2. Shoot. So we went back to our hotel and asked the manager. She told us we could take a bus to Santa Cruz, where buses leave for San José every hour or so. Oh, but the bus for Santa Cruz was leaving.... now. So we ran across the town square to the bus stop, made it onto the bus and took it to Santa Cruz. But we found out the 10 o'clock bus was full. As was the Noon bus. Argh. If we wanted to, we could take the noon bus, but we would have to stand. Since we wanted to make it home, we decided to do that. So we sat in the bus station for a couple hours, making quick trips to the grocery store across the street for food, since we still hadn't eaten breakfast. The bus trip wasn't as bad as I expected. We stood or sat on the floor the whole way, but the ride was only about 4 hours, with a rest stop about half-way. We got off at the airport and took another bus to Heredia, and I was home before 5. As fun as the beach was, I felt good to be home.
Here's a link to the facebook photo album of pictures from the trip. You should be able to look at them even if you don't have facebook:
Well, I should be getting back to homework now. Sorry that this was a really long entry...but as you may know, I'm really bad at making short summaries. :) This week looks to be full of paper writing, since I have two term papers coming up in the next couple weeks. But I'll try to keep you updated if I do anything interesting. ¡Hasta luego!
Friday, October 22, 2010
Coffee!
Well, I haven't been being super productive with homework, so I figured I would be productive in updating my blog. This post is about, as you may have guessed, coffee! The coffee in Costa Rica is amazing. I'm pretty sure I'm going to have to go through a caffeine detox when I get home (as well as a sugar detox, since Costa Ricans like everything sweet).
Two weeks ago I got to go with my Spanish class to tour the Santa Maria de Dota Coffee Co-op. Coffee is the second largest source of revenue for Costa Rica (next to tourism), so we had group projects on coffee for our Spanish class (mine was on the history of coffee, which is really interesting) and took a "gira" or tour, of the coffee farm two Saturdays ago. There we learned about how they grow coffee and how they roast it, and got to see and sample different coffee drinks made by professional baristas. All or nearly all of the coffee grown is of high quality, mostly because it is grown at a higher altitude: higher altitude=higher quality. The co-op we visited uses sustainable methods of farming coffee, which includes growing shade trees among the plants. This keeps direct sun off the coffee plants, and provides more nutrients for the soil. You'll see a lot of coffee fields on hills in Costa Rica that are just coffee, completely stripped of trees, but that method isn't as good for the land, and produces coffee of lower quality.After touring the co-op, we met up with this guy named Arturo, who's a private coffee farmer in that same area. He's Tican (Costa Rican) but lived in the US for a few years, so his English was pretty good. Arturo grows organic coffee, and is kind of an advocate for organic coffee farming. He explained to us how the traditional methods of growing coffee (like the shadeless coffee farms and using chemicals for fertilizers and pesticides) isn't sustainable, and in the future the land will be useless for farming. Also, the use of chemicals on the plants can be dangerous for the people who work in the fields, since coffee is tended and harvested by hand. The problem is, organic coffee is more expensive to grow, which is why a lot of people don't do it. But Arturo says he grows organic because he thinks it's the right thing to do, for the land and for his children and future generations. He was very passionate about everything he talked about.
Next he took us to the house of some of his neighbors, who are indigenous Costa Ricans and work on a coffee farm. There he explained about another project he's working on, which has to do with a stove. He told us that about half the women in the world cook over an open fire, the smoke of which not only contributes to global warming, but also is breathed in by the people, especially women and children, tending the fires, causing lung cancer and other respiratory diseases. So there is a company, based in Seattle, Washington, that has created what they call a "Estufa finca" or "Farm Stove." It's a very simple contraption that looks like a metal bucket with holes punched in the bottom and surrounded by a layer of rippled metal, but it's pretty incredible. It will burn a small amount of biomass (sticks, leaves, etc.) for hours, because it also burns the smoke it creates. And because it burns its own smoke, it releases hardly any into the air. It needs hardly any tending, only uses a small amount of wood, reduces the emissions of toxic gases into the air, and only costs about $40 to make. Pretty cool, huh? So anyway, Arturo is helping this company make and deliver the stoves to indigenous families in Costa Rica, and the people have really taken to them. Apparently the company recently received a grant to further test the stove to see how much it really reduces emissions, and also to see if native peoples are willing to make the switch from an open fire. Here's a link to their website if you want to learn more:
The trip was interesting, and I learned a lot. It definitely made me think about where my coffee comes from!
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
Quick Update
I know it's been a while since I've posted, but homework has really been catching up to me. I have two posts I want to write in the next several days, one about the coffee tour I took with my Spanish class, and one about the trip I took to the beach this past weekend with three of my friends (I have pictures up on facebook of the coffee tour, if you're on facebook). Also, my friend mentioned something about being able to link my facebook photos to this blog so that people can see them even if they aren't on facebook. So I'll be looking into that and hopefully I'll be able to figure that out.
I have less than 40 days left here, which is crazy. I have one term paper due in two weeks, and another one due a couple weeks after that, plus all the regular amount of homework. I would greatly love to travel at least to a couple more places, so with all that it looks like the next 40 days are going to be packed! The weather has been really nice lately, hardly raining at all, and it's been really warm. On the one hand, it's kind of nice, not having to worry about the cold and all of that, but on the other hand I miss Fall (it doesn't feel anything like October here) and when I get back to the states at the end of November I'm going to FREEZE!
Well tonight is Bible Study (I missed last week because I had homework) and I made some chocolate cookies for snack, and then after wards I'll probably try to finish up some homework, or just go to bed. We'll see. :)
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