Looking Out for Dinosaurs!

I'll pick up where I left off!

Last night we had spaghetti with meat sauce, beans, steamed veggies, lemonade, and coffee for dinner. The tap water here comes from mountain springs and is delicious. Also, they really do put Lizano salsa on everything. SO good! After dinner we watched "Rhythms in the Clouds," a movie about Monteverde wildlife. There are "giant carnivorous snails" here. With teeth. And I found out the eyelash viper is only found on the Carribean side of Monteverde, not the Pacific (where I am) - good to know. After the movie we were walking from the indoor classroom (named Chachalaka) to our bungalows when some of my classmates stopped mid-step and said, "WOW!" All we had to do was look up. I have never seen so many stars so clearly in my entire life. It is so amazing. Venus is incredibly bright right now. Wow. I went to bed, sleeping on the pillow case Margie sewed for me.

This morning I got up at 7am. We had breakfast at 8. I ate eggs, french toast with molasses, watermelon, pineapple, cantaloupe, gallo pinto and coffee. Immediately after breakfast we started off on our hike to San Luis waterfall. I saw amazing birds, a morpho, and the cutest baby cow romping around a pasture. I also swam in the waterfall! It was so cold, but so amazing! The pool is tiny, but deep enough to swim in. The current from the pounding water is hard to battle, so its a good challenging swim despite the tiny size of the pool. Hopefully we're going to go back when it warms up just for fun, but it was a beautiful (albeit difficult) hike to a massive several-tiered waterfall. Off the trail to the waterfall is another trail that leads to an abandoned house full of bats. We're going to try to organize a night hike to go see them. We got back for lunch, which we wolfed down just in time for me to change out of my soaking wet sneakers before heading to La Finca Bella coffee farm for a tour. We got to pick coffee, see how they make it into the coffee we know and love, and got to sample the dark and medium roasts. The dark roast is probably the best coffee I've ever had. It is a family owned and family run farm. They also had home made banana jam, which was SOOO GOOD. I cannot emphasize that enough. It was served on home made bread, which looked like pita bread but was much softer and moister. The family who runs the coffee farm sometimes hosts students, and they also had a neighbor Virginia over who gave Ashely a massage when she felt sick and was incredibly sweet. After seeing how warm and friendly and caring these potential host families are, we're all less concerned and more excited about our homestays, which we go to next weekend. While I was picking coffee I got bitten by an army ant. It latched on to my foot, and instead of yelling an expletive I was able to sensor myself, find my teacher with first aid stuff and tell her it "hurts like the dickens." Army ants are so strong you can use them to suture cuts if you don't have anything else around. It was pretty big (penny sized at least), and the bubble on my foot was about the size of a quarter. After 15 minutes or so of stabbing pain and chills it went away, and the bubble is almost completely gone. We also saw a porcupine in a tree while we were out. Here the porcupines have prehensile tails, I think. It was scratching its belly, aww. The coffee farming family had hummingbird feeders in front of their house, where I saw at least 2 different kinds of hummingbirds. I'm not sure how many different ones there were or if the same ones kept coming back, but they had amazing coloring and really long necks. I also saw a mott mott flying into the woods, and several scarlet rumped tanagers. On the way back to campus we saw a really pretty baby cow and took a neat little path back, which we'll probably take to get to our homestays. At least we hope so, because it is so peaceful and secluded.

Tomorrow morning I have horseback riding class at 6:15! Then breakfast at 7, then class until lunch at noon without any breaks. Not having any afternoon classes hopefully means I'll have time for a nap tomorrow, I'm already up too late and I'm not even in my bungalow yet. We need to start planning our spring break vacation which is in February, if we wait until we get back from homestays it'll probably be too late. We're thinking beaches. We're also going to ask our professors to bring a copy of Jurassic Park with them when they come to campus, because it looks exactly like that here. I think they said Jurassic Park was constructed on an island off the coast of Costa Rica in the movie. The theme song for the movie is becoming the theme song for our trip, which we whistle while hiking through the forests.

I'm off to bed, tiene una buena noche!