The weekend

Arenal

friday after class we drove to Arenal, a volcano north of San Jose. It was about a 4 hour drive, and after we checked in to our hotel (Rossi something), we went to the Baldi hot springs. These hot springs are heated by the volcano, and the hottest one is 152 degrees, which all of us got in. It was scalding to say the least. They had this ridiculous water slide that was definitly unsafe and caused a few headaches and pains in our entire bodies, but it was so much fun. It could never have existed in America. There weren´t a whole lot of people there, which was nice, and it was very relaxing. At first, I thought the hot springs would be in the mountainside and wouldn´t be touristy so I didnt bring my camera bc i didnt want it to get wet, but they were like pools and it was obvious it was a tourist destination. I was mad that I didn´t bring my camera because it was really cool. After we got out of the springs, we had a delicious dinner with some really good pasta that hit the spot after eating rice and beans for such a long time. After returning to the hotel a few of us were exhausted and fell asleep watching tv.

Saturday morning we were up early, and we visited a hydroelectric powerplant. We got to see the dam, and then we drove to the powerplant part of it and we able to go inside and see the turbines and other mechanical things like that. It was pretty neat, and I took some pictures for grandpa. It is over 2 miles from the dam to the powerplant itself, so all the water has to travel to and from the dam in order to go through the turbines. A lot of people didn´t find the powerplant very interesting but I liked it. After that, we changed clothes and for those of us that wanted to went horseback riding to the La Fortuna waterfall. The horseback riding was one of my favorite parts of the weekend. We had about 25 people who rode, which was really fun, and it was the first time that I was able to ride on a horse while it was galloping. It was really hot, and a few people got bad sunburns from it. After 30 minutes of riding, we got to the path to walk down to the waterfall. It was an extremely steep pathway, and there were other American tourists there. The waterfall was beautiful and amazing, crashing down into a pool that we were allowed to swim in. Once again, something that would never be legal in America. The water was cold but very refreshing, and I drank a few gulps of it hoping that I wouldn´t get sick. After playing in the waterfall, we went back to the hotel and quickly ate bologna sandwiches for lunch. Then, we drove to this hike to see the lava rocks from the 1968 volcanic eruption. It was really cool and had a nice view of Arenal lake, which was created after the volcano exploded and covered a nearby town in lava. After the hike, we returned to the hotel, but there was a power outage so we went to the grocery store which must have had a generator and got ice cream. We all hung out outside of our rooms with candles provided by the hotel and could see the top of the volcano because molten lava. It was extremely faint, but it was definitly red at the top. Pretty scary stuff.

Monteverde

We got up early Sunday morning and got in vans to drive to this boat that took us across Arenal lake because it would supposedly have taken us hours to drive around it. We then took different vans up some awful road to monteverde but had beautiful views. There were many points at which I thought I was going to die. The roads are pretty much the worst thing ever, and we might as well have been driving on a grenade filled battlefield that curves around like a snake up a mountainside that has no guardrails. We got to our hotel, in the national park, ate lunch, changed clothes, and went to go on a rainy zip-line canopy tour. It was really fun, especially in the rain, but I didn't take many pictures because of that. Our clothes got soaked and really dirty from the grease or something on the ziplines, and we went back to the hotel to change. We got pizza for dinner which was AMAZING because we hadn't had American food in forever and we also got ice cream b/c it was Rob's birthday. After, we were all exhausted but it was only 7pm, and we had a night walk in the rainforest. We all wore our wet clothes, which was miserable, and we only saw a couple of animals but one was a tarantula and a tree frog which was neat. Slept soundly.

Early morning monday we had another nature walk. We saw the famous Quetzal bird, supposedly some famous bird people come from around the world to see, and we saw the male and the female so I guess we were lucky. We had a long drive back to San Jose, and in the afternoon it didn´t rain and we went to downtown sketch marketplac and made some deals with local sketchy people for their stuff. Hit the sack at about 9pm monday and it felt great.

Manuel Antonio

Tuesday we had another early morning to leave for the beach at Manuel Antonio. We had a long ride on a Jetsons-esque bus and it rained the whole time. It was not anything like the paradise I hoped it would be. It was a sketchy and there were weird people there, and there weren't any resort-type hotels or anything. The beach was clean which was nice. But we still had fun playing in the ocean with some of the biggest waves I have ever seen, considering I almost never go to the beach.

It rained again Wednesday but we made it to the national park at Manuel Antonio, almost got killed by this huge falling tree branch which caused howler monkeys to scream and at that point we realized they were all around us but we could barely find any of them. There were some pretty views, but that was offset by the fact that it was still raining. We also saw a whiteface monkey and some weird rodent animals. We had a super long drive back to San Jose due to traffic.

Today (thursday) we had about 9 hours of class, including a very tough midterm.

Currently experiencing a tropical depression. I need to see the sun soon.