Made it

So today was the second full day of being at my program in Costa Rica and so far it's been pretty amazing.  There are 31 kids here in total and so far everyone has been pretty awesome.  People here are from all over the country and have very different stories to tell, but we are all more or less cut from the same academic cloth and share the same interests.  Its been pretty cool tho... not really a whole lot to share yet.  Till next time y'all

Woah, lucky

So today during our walk around the cloud forests of Monte Verde we were fortunate enough to stumble upon a flock of quetzals.  According to our guide seeing these guys all together was something akin to finding all the legendary Pokemon together at the same time.  However, wikipedia says there only kind of rare... still pretty cool though.

Toucan Sam wishes he was this cool

Tortuguero part 2

So I’ve been a little behind in keeping this blog up to date and I apologize (mostly to myself) and I’ll try get stuff up more promptly.  Anyways, beaches.  Can’t live with them, can’t live without them.  Am I right or am I right?  Right.  So Tortuguero is on the northeast coast of Costa Rica, meaning one of its boarders consists entirely of the majestic Caribbean Sea and all its sunshine and blue skies.  However, this translates to something completely different than what you are thinking to the Hotels and insurance companies of the area: look, don’t touch.  The coastline is absolutely gorgeous with its warm sand and coconut trees stretching as far as the eye can see, but it also means danger.  Apparently the combination of the facts that the area is entirely undeveloped due to its protected status and the extremely warm water cause Tortuguero to be somewhat of a breeding ground for bull sharks and barracuda.  In addition to that the coast is known for its impressively strong currents that have a tendency to drag things away from shore with the intention of never letting them back on dry land.  If you didn’t see where I was going with this, it all equates to swimming being a veritable death trap.  So look, don’t touch.  So instead of swimming the fam and I walked along this beach for a good long while and saw some pretty cool things like drift trees (its like driftwood, just that it’s the whole shebang if you catch my drift… wood…) and this flock of birds that incessantly pecked at the sand for bugs.  But more interestingly we kept on seeing these tracks that we couldn’t quite place that led up from the water to these giant pits.  They looked like the imprint of a car tire, just that they were a yard and a half wide and the tread was located only on the outer quarter of each side. Turtles.  Apparently they were the tracks of the green turtle, a mammoth, saltwater version of our amiable shelled friends that we love so well in the states.  Pretty.  Frickn. Schweet.  And the next night we got to see the baby making, well egg laying, magic in action.

So between July and November of each year green turtles come up on the beaches of Tortuguero at night and lay their eggs.  In order to witness this process in action the fam and I dress up in dark clothing and hit the beaches to see to turtles give birth.  Now I’m going to do my best to paint all of you a word picture, so don’t blame me if it ends up sounding melodramatic and stupid, blame my lack of command of the English language.

TRACKS!!! I really wish you guys
knew what I was referring to

Don, our guide, lands our boat on side of a canal that leads to the ocean and we all gather our things and step cautiously onto the riverbank.  By this time the sun has set completely and the world would be in total darkness if not for the white light cast from the moon which a day past being full.  Because of this, nothing on the beach had any true color; just black, white, shades of grey and shadows.  We continued to down a path flanked by low-lying bushes and trees until it opened up onto a beach.  Overhead the moon is still shining brightly thorough a hole in the clouds that had thinned since threatening rain earlier in day.  The sand appeared a grainy, ghostly white while at the same time the waves reflected light off their crests until they turned pitch black as they curled and fell and washed calmly onto shore.  Out farther in the water the turbulent peaks directly beneath the moon shone brightly while those to the sides, which were less impacted by light, gradually darkened until they disappeared and became indistinct from the dark horizon.  The only true colors we could see were bright flashes of orange and yellow periodically spilling out from the quiet lightning of a storm looming on the distance.  All the while along the shore large, curious shapes slowly and laboriously dragged themselves up from the water, over the beach and all its debris towards the low lying foliage that marked the entrance to the forest.  Under the brush by the path where we entered, curiously dark soil stood in stark contrast to the white sand of the beach around us.  There one of these gentle giants was fighting into the earth, violently displacing the ground with arms and legs better suited for gliding through ocean waters.  By the time we found her, she had already been laboring and digging into the ground for an hour, if not longer.  Soon she began to lay her eggs in a small cylindrical hole at the bottom of the large pit that she had dug.  We quietly made our way up to a place behind her and watched as her eggs fell two, three, four at a time until a hundred or more had been deposited into the sandy earth.  Then she began to delicately close the hole, which contained what will someday become her next generation.

Blah, glad that’s over.  All in all it was really cool to see this all happen.  These turtles only come to the beaches of Tortuguero once every two or three years to lay eggs.  The rest of the time they are hundreds, even thousands of miles away in their ocean feeding grounds preparing for this journey.  It truly was a miracle of nature that we were very lucky to witness.  Now, I realize how weird and possibly perverse it was for us to sneak up behind a defenseless turtle and watch its distended vagina poop out scores eggs, but there was definitely some magic to it.

Tortuguero International Airport

So the next day we packed up and left for La Fortuna and our ride was this sweet little six-passenger plane that was well, rickety.  Probably could have used a little more vitamin D during its childhood… Anyways, I got to ride shotgun during our little flight to La Fortuna and it was pretty cool.  Instead of being stuck next to a little 1 square foot window sitting over the plane wing, I got what was pretty close to a panoramic view of the Costa Rican sky.  Pretty Frickn Sweet.  Also, you know how there is gps for your car?  They make it for planes too.  Who would have thunk it.

Another interesting part of traveling to Central America is all the drugs and vaccines that you get to take so you don’t come down with some tropical disease.  However, the one I’m here to talk about is the antimalarial that I’m currently on called Chloroquine.  Now, I don’t know what you have heard about this fun little drug, but “minor side effects occur in up to 15% of people. These include stomach upset, dizziness, vivid (good, bad, erotic and otherwise) dreams, insomnia and anxiety” (http://www.drwisetravel.com/malaria.html).  I’m here to tell you that the dream part, at least for me, it is true.  Now I don’t know if its happening because I really want it to be true (ie. placeboing myself) or if there is actually something to it, but for about a week now I have been having some really weird, intense and vivid dreams.  And I figure that it would just be rude if I kept them all to myself so I have decided to start a new subsection of this here blog: Chloroquine Dreams.  There’s no reason to be prude and wait so I’ll just go ahead and share the wealth.

Chloroquine Dreams: Entry 1

So the first chloroquine dream has to do with one of my good friends who I will assign a false name to keep him anonymous to any possible scrutiny.  Lets call him B.J. Dicks.  Now BJ may have a long history of not having a driver’s license as well as parents that give him rather impressive incentives to motivate him to do certain things.  BJ also may have also celebrated his 20^th birthday in the very recent past and what happened in my dream so seemed lifelike and strangely plausible that there was no doubt in my mind that it was real until I woke up very confused.  Now in this dream BJ calls me and is very excited about his brand new Mercedes that he got for his birthday.  He is informing me about how awesome it is and how much fun it will be to drive despite the fact that he does not have his license.  I actually remember thinking to myself in the dream that this was such a classic Dicks family move that I was actually angry.  I go over to his house to see this thing in person and when I get there I see him proudly standing next to an old, busted up blue Honda sedan.  Sick Mercedes BJ.  Then I woke up.

You know who I'm talking about

This next dream was by far one of the strangest that I have ever had.  It involved me and the fat kid from hot tub time machine on a cross country road trip.  Instead of a car or something like that we were riding BMX bikes because we were super cool and original like that.  So I remember us being in the Midwest or someplace boring, flat and generally stupid until we took a turn off down a dirt road.  The next thing I know were biking down a ski slope and going off of jumps.  They were little at first but then for some reason I was getting really cocky and I started doing 360s and stuff because I was such a boss at winter, downhill, BMX trick biking.  This went on for a good while longer than any real mountain would ever actually allow for and it was actually pretty satisfying to be so amazing at such an unrealistic thing.  But then there was this one enormous jump and I remember just getting after it and going off it as fast as possible, but then I actually start to panic in real life because I’m like a hundred feet off the ground or something ridiculous like that in the dream.  The ground looked really far away… Anywhoo, I’m falling really fast towards the landing of the jump and I’m thinking to myself that there’s no way that I can actually land this jump.  And then… I smash into the side of the ramp and I wake up with a kick and a cold sweat.  I’m sure the kid from Hot Tub Time Machine was sad that I left.

That’s it for this entry.  You stay classy planet earth.  And always, if you don’t know, now you know, Jimmer.

More Pics

La Playa

We think were really big stuff in the US, but this guy is harder than we could ever hope to be

These are actually from the area around the Arenal Volcano

SHNYYAAAAAAAKE

I'm not totally sure what's going on here, but I think
that cloud wave is breaking over that there volcano

Adorable

And thats why you never trust glory holes, no matter how tempting it is

Sup?

I just don't understand how people figure things out like this

Earthquake

So apparently the little earthquake that I felt earlier this morning was actually kind of a big deal.  The people working at the hotel we were staying at said that tremors comprable to the ones we felt were fairly common so we didn't think a whole lot of it.  The thing is our hotel was really close to this really huge mountain which is also called the Arenal Volcano because well, its a volcano.  The quake hit as I was sitting on my bed looking at yesterday's photos and initially I didn't understand why everything was shaking.  I thought maybe I was having a minor psychotic breakdown, but then it kept on going.  We realized that it was an earthquake and my next thought was that the volcano was about to erupt and that I was going to die a fiery brimstone filled death.  The tremor was a pretty long one apparently, it lasted about 20 seconds where I was.  Thankfully there was no damage or general mayhem, the worst of it was a picture frame that fell and shattered on the ground.  Conveniently we were scheduled to leave a little less than an hour after it hit so we continued our day as usual.  To leave Arenal we had a short boat ride followed by a drive through the mountains in the area as we set off for Monte Verde.  The sediment in the area is pretty loose and sandy and from the shores of the lakes to the mountains sides we drove past we saw displaced earth that had fallen when the quake hit and one or two sizable cracks in the ground as well.  Luckily no roads or anything were made impassible and throughout the country the damage wasn't too terrible.  Could have been a lot worse I suppose.  But anyways, the earthquake was real cool.  This will hopefully / hopefully not be my last earthquake.  I kind of have mixed feeling on the subject.  Anywhoo if y'all were worrying about about me and the fam, not that any of you were,  don't worry, all is well.

Holy balls

Just popped my earthquake cherry.  Frickn schweeetttttt

Tortuguero Part 1

Hey all, sorry that is has been so long since the last entry.  Who would have thought that the internet would be hard to come by in super touristy hotels…  So the last time I informed all of y’all about my whereabouts I believe that I was still in San Jose fresh off of a tour of that grand ‘ol city.  A whole bunch has happened since then so I’ll do what I can to spill a few details.  About three days ago the fam and I went white water rafting down the Pacuare River.  Pretty cool, not a whole lot to say about it though… There were a lot of rapids and some cool waterfalls lining he canyon walls (but no walls on the stalls so if you looked real hard you could see some balls) that you could go under and drench yourself with if you so chose.  I’ve been rafting a good number of times now so it’s a little difficult to get really animated and excited about it, but it was definitely a fun trip.  After that leg of the journey we took a two-hour van ride down this road, if you are so bold as to say it was a road, it consisted mostly of baseball sized rocks densely layered on top of gravel and stone dust.  In those two hours we probably only went 20-30 miles at a top speed of just about 15 mph.  The thing is, because of all those rocks we were shaking worse than an epileptic in the middle of an earthquake.  No joke, if I were a baby I would probably have suffered some rather serious brain damage.  In short I loved it, it was like sitting on a really soft, comfy washing machine for far too long (ladies, you wish you were so lucky).  Plus, it had to have been the road less traveled, which if the cliché stands true is a good thing… Anywhoo, on the sides of this road there were banana and diary farms as far as the eye could see, which was actually a little scary.  The best way I can describe it is that it was like driving through the Midwest, only instead of golden wheat or corn there were perfectly straight rows of these rather awkwardly shaped banana trees standing on horribly gnarled ground.  Thousands and thousands of them as far as the eye could see.  The weirdest part was that each tree had what looked like a blue 55-gallon trash bag wrapped around the fruit.  That hermetic icing on the artificially assembled cake was a little offsetting.  I guess if you don’t understand why this is weird the best analogy I can give is that I felt like I was walking through a toy store, but the only thing on every shelf were identical copies of a creepy looking doll with a blue baggie wrapped around its arm. Oh, and as it turned out those trees belong to Chiquita, the artist formerly known as the United Fruit Company, one of the evilest corporations to have ever existed.  If you don’t know them, and again I’m not trying to be rude, go look it up… Wow, I sound like a hippie and I apologize sincerely, but its kind of true.  Feel free to chew me out for it on some later date.  OH and if I become a dirty tree hugger after I come back from this program that I am going to I give you each permission to hit me once and renounce our friendship / family-ship.  Don’t worry, I totally understand.

Moving on.  At the end of the grey stone road (yellow brick haahahaha) there was this cool little town and waiting for us there was a man and a boat waiting to take us to the next stop on our journey, Tortuguero.  The boat was about 30 feet long and 6 feet wide.  One engine in the back and this really awkward roof that didn’t really look like it belonged where it was.  I mumbled some Spanish to him, asking where our bags should go and, visibly annoyed, he gruffly replied back in English that he had them.  Classic tourist move on my part, good first impression. He threw our bags into the boat and off we went.  As we are bombing down this river at speeds that I thought unachievable by boat he points out some birds on the shore and tells us their name.  I noticed that they were pink and I made a joke about them looking like flamingoes which I still think was pretty good.  Nothing but crickets…  Great first impression. We continued on in silence to a fork in the river; one way is basically a continuation of the same waterway we are already on.  The other is a side channel, which is about 30 yards across, headed straight into the forest.  We take the later.  The highway to Tortuguero.  Nice.  Despite the rather curvy nature of the waterway we maintain our impressive velocity until the driver kills the gas throwing us all forward in our seats.  He rather angrily states “typical” and stands up from his seat.  I crane my neck forward to see what was going on and I see that there is a piece of bamboo or some other cane-like plant blocking the whole width of the channel.  Out of nowhere he draws this rusty old machete, lays down across the nose of the boat and proceeds to hack the thing to pieces, GREAT first impression.  He quickly finishes his piece of river etiquette and soon we’re off again.  As it turned out his name was Don and for all intents and purposes he was our guide for the whole time we were in Tortuguero. And he became a contender for the Matt Peterfreund’s Favorite Person in the History of Ever Award.  No big deal or anything.  He is this big black guy, about 60 years old, slightly shorter than I am and a self proclaimed Jamaican born in Nicaragua who has lived in Costa Rica since the early 1970’s.  Nice.  He had this weird accent that was something like Jamaican with a twinge of Spanish and it sounded more than a little funny.  The best part was that between my parents and myself, I was the only one who could understand him.  More often than not my folks would miss some instruction or fact that he would say and he would get annoyed in just the same way that he did when he we first met him.  I on the other hand usually got what he said the first time and would sit back and chuckle to myself as he passively scolded my parents.  However, more importantly than all of that he knew literally everything about the plants and animals of Tortuguero National Park.  You could point to anything around you and he could tell you what it was and whole host of facts about it.  He also had eyes sharper than any human had a right to have too.  On our tours he would point out caiman buried in the mud, birds sleeping within the brush and monkeys in the trees that literally no one else could spot besides him.  He would then proceed to describe where these animals were to everybody else in the same annoyed voice that I quickly learned to associate with him.  Theres more, but I’m tired or writing.  I’ll tell the rest of the story tomorrow.  Peace, Love, the Gap.  You don’t know yet, but I’ll let you know soon, Jimmer.

OOOOHHHHH PRETTY PICTURESSSSSS

Back off dude, caiman? 

Toucan play this game

Its a monkey highway 

Towel day 1...

Towels day 2...

J Chillun

He's majestic if you couldn't tell

Monkey'n around 

Homie was eying my lunch hard

La Pura Vida...

First of all play this while reading this entry:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VabzzH-v3Q

So here's the thing.  Costa Rica is arguably the greatest thing that has ever happened to me, except for you Joey (the first born always hits home the hardest).  It might be the fact that these 48 hours here have been my first outside of the United State's direct jurisdiction minus a two hour stint in Canada sometime  in the early years of the new millennium.  But in all seriousness, I am having trouble finding words that due this place justice and express how amazing it is down here.  The sum of everything from the confused sense of architecture running rampant in San Jose, to the mountains that decorate the horizon, to the country's motto itself (see title of entry) all add up to... Well, I don't even know what, but I love it...  I mean, yesterday I saw two policemen dressed up body armor, pistols and billy clubs at their hips, leaning against their motocycles shooting the shit and indulging in some ice cream cones on one of the busiest and hypothetically most dangerous streets in the city.  Lazy? No, there was just that little to do.  People here just seem more relaxed and generally less frustrated and angry than Americans.  People dont look at their feet as they go about their day, they look around and make eye contact with the those around them, not to inflate their machismo, but because they are legitimately interested in who their neighbors are.  Here when people see someone they know, regardless of weather they are hustling to work or just strolling by, they don't just nod silently and keep moving, they stop, extend a handshake or a kiss on the cheek and have a chat.  All of this is true in San Jose, the big bad capital.  The place where everybody has an agenda to attend to and no time or patience for anything but their own goals.  You know that awkward feeling that you get when you walk down the street in downtown Boston or New York, like everybody is sizing you up and generally loathes you existence?  Basically non existant in San Jose.  Pura Vida.  If you don't know what it means I highly recommend looking it up.

Also in the last two days I have walked through San Jose, had a meal worth more than 10,000 currency units (colones), seen a national museum that houses both bullet holes and a butterfly garden, eaten at least a dozen things that I have never heard of before, been seduced by store vendors, had a delicious vegan meal (weird, I know), seen more species of plants that I knew ever existed, visited a coffee plantation (had like 4 cups of free coffee), stood at the top of an active volcano, stood next to a 120 foot tall waterfall and I don't know... I'm sure there is more that I am forgetting, but its been pretty fun here.

I could ramble for a while longer, but pictures are worth a thousand words...

COFFEEEEEE

If you have never smelled 20 kg of coffee beans being roasted at once I highly recommend it

I'd let her grind my beans any day of the week...

So this picture doesn't really fit on the page, but it's still pretty cool

Woah Black Bumble-Bee, bam a lam

I thought these were cool, never seen it before.  They're like red bananas

Despite all my rage I'm still just a bird who got out of the cage?

Pato says Quack Quack, Mother Fucker

Humming birds are pretty cool... They can fly and stuff...

Never seen one of these before either.  Say hi to Mr. Beetle! Don't know where the Bard is though...
If you understood that reference you are a NERD

Ribbit

Pretty sedate right?

Not really...

San Jose from the balcony of the National Museum

Day 0 part II

Oh, I forgot to mention this but I am currently in San Jose, Costa Rica.  Chicka Chicka Yeaaaahhhhh

Day 0: Planes, Trains, and Automobiles (minus the trains)

Exibit A: Best.  Food.  Court.  EVER. ALSO
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5K1RcKJVbHA

The Dallas Fort Worth airport is pretty nice I have to say.  All around the seating area I now find myself in there are a few fairly interesting things that I have been gradually exploring during my SUPER FUN and EXTREMELY BEARABLE (that’s sarcasm) 5 hour layover.  It has some cool art like this 30 foot tall castle looking thing that would probably fit in just fine in a Tim Burton movie if only for the fact that it is silver, sitting in the middle of the D terminal.  There are also three tequila bars / taco-joints tastefully juxtaposed in what I guess is the food court.  But this isn’t just any food court as it would appear at first glance.  No, interwoven between the coffee shops, Chinese fast food joints and home-style Texas Bar-B-Qs there quietly lies another type of store, but not just any store.  It would seem this is in fact a food court with a bookstore.  Now this doesn’t seem too farfetched, that is until further inspection.  Apparently this isn’t just any bookstore; it’s a bookstore whose façade consists almost entirely of a giant poster.  And this isn’t just any poster, it’s a poster advertising the New York Times best seller 50 Shades of Grey with the slogan “Reading for pleasure has a whole new meaning”.  God, its good to know that being tasteful is an American trait, not something reserved for us Yankees.  Now, I could go into a whole shpeel about this book and how hilarious / generally amazing it is, but I think I will refrain.  Ask me about it in person and well have a grand chat between old chaps about this timeless classic. But alas I digress.

Now I’ll keep this part of this entry fairly short because I am well aware of the fact that I stretched my artistic license a little thin in that previous paragraph.  But I got to say, that old cliché about how you never know who is going to sit next to you is so unbelievably true that it is unbelievable.  For instance, when I was 13 or 14, I was flying to California during summer break to visit my family and I happened to be sitting next to a very attractive young woman.  At the time, my adolescent reasoning skills determined that she was of approximately college age or perhaps slightly older.  In short she probably could have been anywhere from 17-30 years old because well, who actually knows what goes through the minds of pubescent males.  Anyways, take note that I vividly remember her wearing a grey tank top, which I can best describe as a lady white-beater.  So the plane takes off and the flight is moving along swimmingly, nice and boring.  To me travel is supposed to be like a trip to the doctors: you show up, you drop your shorts, the doctor does his job, you do yours, you pull up your pants, shake his hand and say “Good seeing you Doc, till next year” and then its all over.  Not necessarily comfortable, but its business that needs to get done.  Business is business and boring is always a good thing when it comes down to that type of business.  Anyways, this flight got very much less boring and I would dare say it even approached the realm of interesting when this woman decided put her hands together and reach for the sky, well space I suppose seeing as we were already pretty far up in the sky at that point.  I saw her move out of the corner of my eye and I glanced over to see what all the commotion was about, and then I saw it.  This woman had the hairiest armpits that God ever put on this good green earth and they also had a very distinct and not perfectly pleasant scent to them as well.  To be honest I’m not sure if there was a smell, it could have simply been my subconscious telling my nose that armpits like that had to come with an odor and it promptly filled in the blank left by the lack of sensory input.  Anyways, at that point she sees me looking and we make some very awkward eye contact and I proceed to say, “Sorry Babe, its just not meant to be”.  Our gaze lingers for a moment and then she breaks down and starts hysterically crying about her future and all the years of her life that I have wasted.

Exhibit B: Floor of Row 7 seats A, B, C
I like to think that her name was Fluffy
McSnugglebottoms.  What a cutie

JUST KIDDING.  None of that is true.  But she did have really hairy armpits.  But back to why that’s relevant.  Now, I know many of my readers (I will assume that more people than just me read this) have a bit of a green thumb, an interest in the botanical arts if you will.  And I know for a fact that some of you like to practice your interest in herbage in various places and have transported it great distances in order to do so.  Well all I can say is that it is a good thing you weren’t on the same plane as me this morning.  For the entire duration of my flight from Boston to Dallas, there was a police dog happily curled up on the floor by my mother, who I just happened to be sitting next to.  Now I am not implying that I do, because I don’t (MOM), partake in any questionably legal / decriminalized practices (depending on what state you’re in). But if I did and if I were like my friends who like to travel with their… items of interest… today probably would have been pretty high up on the Worst Day Ever scale (units = balls/m³).  The moral of the story is you never know who is going to sit next to you until they are sitting right there next to you.  And as always, you don’t   know ‘till you know, Jimmer.