Well, it's been a while since I have posted anything and at this point, I don't expect a lot of following. Sorry, everyone, I guess it turns out that I am not really one of the blog crowd, I just don't have that kind of dedication. Or maybe I do, but I just don't like the dependency of a following- I much prefer the hook and sinker of a mass email correspondence. Who says a comm major has to be up on all the major technologies, anyway?

More than two weeks ago I left my startingly routine life in Mal Pais and headed out traveling with some friends on vacation from Atlanta. Firstly, not to get on a soap box, but I've realized that life can get pretty routine anywhere, no matter who beautiful the scenery is around you. Maybe that is a lesson for me to appreciate my surroundings no matter where they are. It is a guaranteed fact that the longer you spend in a place, when you leave it, you will always be searching for it in the next place you go. At least for me, but hopefully others older and wiser can appreciate what they have in the moment.

Anyway, so we left Mal Pais, after spending a great day surfing and sunning on the beach. The next day we headed north to Playa del Coco, or Ocotal if Coco isn't on a map, because Cindy and Ashkan, my friends that were visiting, wanted to go scuba diving. They've been a lot of great places in the Atlantic, but had never dove in the Pacific. So we drove up there (they had rented a car, which was a great idea on their part!) the next day, I think that was Monday. They drive up was amazing! I'm so glad we had the opportunity to do it because taking public transit to the same place would have been via different roads completely. Cindy and AK had reserved a 4WD vehicle for the trip, as I had warned them that the roads we would probably take would need it, but the rental car agency fell through and by the time they found another car, it was just a Toyota Carolla. So we took an easy road over to Montezuma (Montefuma as I learned that day (fumar means "to smoke")) and hiked up to the waterfalls and jumped off. That afternoon we got back into the car and took about two hours to drive, maybe.... 20km. However, the ride was beautiful. One thing I have realized throughout this trip is that Costa Rica is very small, compared to the states, but, more importantly, it feels huge because of the condition of the roads. So in a way, it all evens out, because if it was as accessible and well paved as the states, the whole country would have already turned into a jungle amusement park for tourists, not by Ticos choice, though. Getting off track, we saw some beautiful countryside. The road was gravel, unmaintained, barely trafficked, and so pictureseque. Guanacaste trees everywhere, huge green pastures with cows and birds, mango trees, and not another person in sight.

We got up to Playa del Coco and found a place for the night. The next day, we booked a tour to go snorkeling/diving in the bay there, and then headed over to a nearby beach to get some sun. My Auntie Janie had friends renting a house for the month of February in Playa del Coco, and upon finding the beach, discovered that the house was just a stone's throw away. Late afternoon I ventured up to their place to meet them, and they graciously invited us all in for some cocktails and appetizers. Well, as it goes with hospitable Southerners, we ended up staying, drinking, and telling stories well into the night, heading back to our hotel only because of our early appointment with the scuba team.

I got really ill on the boat in the morning. I've never been cursed by sea sickness, but the wine from the previous evening did not help, and I only snorkeled for a bit before I returned to the boat. We still saw a lot of amazing fishes, however, and Dave even saw a turtle! Cindy and Ashkan went deeper, of course, and at a wreck Cindy spotted two sharks! I was almost ready to take a diving course for beginners, but my finances couldn't quite take it at the time, so snorkeling was the next best thing.

That afternoon we drove through beautiful, steep, green hillsides to Monteverde/Santa Elena area, south of Lake Arenal. It was weird seeing everything so green in another part of the country, after being in the Nicoya for almost five months, where it was really starting to get brown. And the temperature drop, whew!! I probably hadn't felt anything below 90 in months!

We got a great hotel with a beautiful view of the hillsides in Monteverde. We cooked a great dinner and booked some tours for the following day. So the next day, we woke up early and went for a hike through the cloud forests in the Santa Elena National Park. The whole thing was like walking through a cloud, literally! It was a misty, green wonderland of strange plants growing off each others roots!

Whoops, I'm holding up the line for the Internet, will write more later!

February

As the days get hotter and the hillsides of Mal Pais get hotter, rain is becoming a distant memory here. I guess this is February as everyone has described it. It hasn’t rained here in over a month and the lush, green jungle around us is starting to turn into the same shade of brown. In the last few weeks, I’ve noticed an amazing amount of pelicans flying south over the coast. They must be migrating, but I doesn’t seem to make sense that they’re migrating to warmer places, because this is about as warm as it gets. Perhaps they’re looking for fresh water, but again, I don’t know if pelicans need fresh water to survive. If anyone knows about the travel habits of pelicans, please tell me what you know!

With the heat and the lack of rain it naturally gets dirtier and dustier here every day. Even though the road was “paved” throughout town last month, the quads and the big trucks still kick up so much dust that when they race past walkers on the curbs of the road, sometimes a walker has to pause a minute to let their sight clear. A man that works at the Israeli restaurant next door told us that Israel has so much dust that if you can live there, you can live anywhere. To be honest, quads are very hard when you're on road as a pedestrian, they are also very convenient here.

My friend Jen has a quad on loan to her for a few weeks so last night we explored a little bit, following our road all the way south (all the way, read 3 km) to a place called “Secret Beach” because it’s hidden in a little cove behind the fish market. Then we turned around and headed back north through town to Playa Hermosa, the next beach area north of Santa Teresa. If we followed the raod we were on, we would travel north up the coast, all the way to Nicaragua, supposedly, but the road is very dusty, potholed, rocky, and not well worn. A quad or a four wheel drive car is the best way to travel that road. We made it a little ways up, though, and stopped at a beautiful, flat, soft sandy beach for sunset. When we got out onto the beach and looked south, I realized that we were not very far from our beaches at all. The roads are so slow going here that it’s almost faster to travel by beach than by road. From my house, I could probably walk up to the beach where we were last night in less than an hour. We watched the sun go down from an old pile of driftwood and then headed back into town, holding bandannas over our mouths and eyes as we went.

Yesterday at The Bakery, I was taking a break outside, sitting on the patio having tea when I heard a pathetic mewing sound, the desperate sound usually associated with helpless kittens. I walked over to where Martjin and a neighbor were looking into the area between their two buildings when Martjin pulled a full grown cat out of the alleyway. He was soaked, and covered in filth, because he was in the alley where the gray water runs into the sewers. The cat was having trouble walking straight and seemed disoriented. Martjin said they thought the cat had been poisoned.

Poisoning animals is supposedly a common thing here in Mal Pais. It seems that anytime they come to an early demise, someone always blames poisoning. And I do not doubt that every once in a while, someone thinks that the stray dog population is getting out of control (as we speak, there’s a pregnant stray cooling off on the tile in my room), but our gray water runs through public streets, out into the storm drains on the sides of the road. When it hasn’t rained here in a month and the only freshwater available to stray animals is laden with cleaning solutions and dish detergents, it’s no wonder animals poison themselves trying to find water.

In the States, the fear hanging over our heads now is the issue of sustainability and pollution in our environment. Anything you use in your house is probably being made organically in someone’s basement in Berkeley or Portland, with the results of living organically hardly ever seen, or so it seems. Here, however, when I pour something down my drain, or when I do my dishes, all of that goes right down the tube to drain into the street outside my house. When I walked down the lane to the main road, I follow my trail of gray water into the street.

I was thinking about this last night as I cleaned up after dinner. In the States, I dumped all the leftover food and scraps into the garbage, washed everything else down the drain, or into a garbage disposal, which leads to some mysterious sewage system far away from me. Here, I know where everything is going, and it makes me feel like I’m not putting quite as much waste into the ground. I put my vegetable scraps into the compost and the leftover cooked food goes into a pile by the street for the dogs to make dinner out of. Maybe this is already a common method for a lot of people in the States, but in Charleston, if I had put the rest of my chicken and rice on the curb for a stray dog to eat, people probably would have gotten mad about polluting the streets, or inviting more cockroaches to the neighborhood.

A new supermarket opened up right across the street from our apartment. They have been constructing this building since before we got here, but the majority of it has been going on outside our windows for the last four months. So it opened up on Saturday and we all went in to go check it out. It’s not fully stocked yet, but I noticed that most of the new products they have now are junk foods now imported from other countries, namely the U.S. Our new super now his Pepperidge Farm cookies and potato chips of every flavor and brand. What a great influence we have here in Costa Rica.

Speaking of which, there is a presidential election coming up this month in Costa and one of the nominees actually wants to abolish the colone and establish the American dollar as the Costa Rican currency. The dollar is already the currency in Panama, so as their neighbor, I suppose it makes sense that the influence is spreading in Costa, as well. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised to read that, but yet I was. Even if that doesn’t come to pass, it’s interesting that it’s being considered.

Well, I have the next three days off work and I’m trying to decide where I want to go to get out of this little town. I have a friend coming to visit in about two and a half weeks, so I’ll be seeing a lot of the country then, but I want to go somewhere before that. I figure I mgiht as well, if I have some free time! I hope everyone is doing well and I’ll try to post again in a few days!