My waterfall wedding

Oh wow, it’s been a while and I don’t feel like writing about everything that has happened since I last wrote. Hence, here goes another sporadic highlight reel.

1.              My Costa Rican family and biological family are obsessed with each other. Probably because of the ice cream maker my real family bought my Costa Rican one and probably because of the ridiculously amazing five course vegan meal my host family (with Marco leading of course) cooked my American family.

2.              My family is now just as obsessed as I am with platanos, tapa dulce, and lisano sauce, so much so that Starling is probably dumping out all of her clothes (worth about $2.50 anyways) and stuffing her suitcase full of Costa Rican food…and maybe she’ll squeeze in my host mother

3.              We ate at an AMAZING vegan restaurant in Heredia for approximately $4 a person for too much food for the Rauchwerk family (and we can eat A LOT)

4.              While driving very fast down a highway with my family in a car that smelled like feet due to the lack of access to washing machines, the inherent ability to retain bad smells of dry wick clothing along with the issue of not staying in one place long enough for anything to actually dry even with my father’s handy dandy clothesline he fashions above beds in fancy hotel rooms, the horrible ineffectiveness of Dan’s organic deodorant, and the refusal of most members of the family to take showers, I needed to spit so I did so leaning out the window. Somehow the spit found its way back into the car to land on Noah’s face. That, along with the hilarity of playing My Humps in the car without Sir Padre noticing anything when he hates that song more than anything I know, produced uncontrollable laughter, or, as Elissa would say, the best ab workout in the world. All of that was definitely tmi, but too bad, I’m leaving it here.

5.              I convinced my family, all but my mom, to rappel down waterfalls. Now we figured it would be one of those adventure type things regulated for sane, wanna-be-adventurous tourists, but we forget we’re in Latin America. Aka we rappelled down 7 waterfalls, one of which was 110 feet high after nothing but a five minute demonstration by one of our guides of how to do it. One guy was surely crazy-he asked me the same questions each time he set me up to descend another waterfall and continuously yelled “yeah baby!” and “yump!!” while I was coming down and the other one was pretty darn attractive and kept telling me I was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen while leaning over the 110 foot fall not attached to anything telling me no one knows when they’re gonna die but it wasn’t his time. He could also run down the waterfalls. While descending, your feet slip off of the wall, you slam knee first or elbow first or entire body first into the wall, water is pouring onto your head so you can’t see anything…wow, a ridiculously huge bug just flew into my room and kept crashing into the walls and the ceiling and everything-I think it’s drunk…and the guides decide to make your rope too short on one of the falls as a joke so you just free fall the rest of the way down, no big deal. But it was awesome and we survived and it was much harder than I had expected, especially after we had gone on a run that morning which was basically just 40 minutes of running up a vertical hill…and the guide continued to sweet talk me and taught me a joke in Spanish and kept calling my dad his father in law, and when we got back I made him tell my mom we got married on top of the waterfall…

6.              We went on a tour of the smallest chocolate factory in the world and it was so delicious and so creative and so homemade and it was led by a man from Wooster who built the entire huge building and his wife was this adorable Argentinian woman I would marry in a heartbeat who made truffles and there were vegan ones and it was so good.

7.              We ate in a restaurant where part of it was an airplane involved in the Iran Contra Affair. It was buenisimo.

8.              My father attempted to speak to the solely Spanish speaking people in English and had me translate for the people who were bilingual. Typical.

9.              We stayed in like the fanciest hotel ever in Monteverde and it wasn’t even that expensive because we booked it last minute. And it had its own canopy tour and its own tram service around the hotel and the rooms were spotless and beautiful with an amazing breakfast and of course we made it smell like wet dog.

10.          We went on a canopy tour and MOM did the tarzan swing which is basically like a 30 foot free fall drop and then you swing and her screams were the greatest things I’ve ever heard.

11.          My host family made my family dinner for no reason when they were coming over so we could make ice cream together and then my host mom made my mom popcorn so that she could sleep well because I had told her my mom eats a big bowl every night and I thought my mom was going to die of happiness. She made me translate that my host mom was a gift from God and that God sends people when you really need them and he had sent my host mom to my real mom. What a bonding moment. And Maria and Dan and Noah played music together and it was adorable. I especially love that my host family walks around the house singing “Cecilia” because of my brothers and that my host mom loves the song “Californication” having no idea what it means. And the other day my host mom made my family a plate of one of her specialty desserts just because she’s awesome. I swear if families could marry each other they would.

12.          I got my first grade here! I had to take a quiz in Geosciences today because I hadn’t understood my professor that we had one last week so I had done nothing to prepare for it so he let me take it today and I studied super hard and I got 100! Or a 10, which for here is 100. Also, on my first lab I got a 9.8-maybe I shouldn’t have been absolutely terrified of this class after all!

13.          Manuel Antonio is GORGEOUS and we saw so much wildlife and hiked and stayed at this super funky hotel where our room was like a three story tree house with two balconies and a hammock but I got really angry because the windows were screens and I was woken up in the “middle” of the night by people screaming in the pool…but the “middle of the night” was actually 10:30 pm and I had just gone to sleep at 8:30…typical.

14.          I realized I actually eventually want to get married. Like I can actually imagine myself having the capacity to settle down at some point. Mostly because I saw a lot of honeymooners and I want to do that. So maybe I just want to marry someone, go on a honeymoon, and then be like peace man.

15.          I forgot to say this before but last weekend was so funny because Stacey and I tried to do homework in her house but we ended up slacking off and facebook stalking people 1. because we’re slackers and 2. because her host brother is in a screamo band and they were having band practice. Then I went to Maria’s and we rented movies (they’re like a dollar to rent for 4 days here for new releases!) and we watched No Strings Attached which I loved mostly because it was sickly adorable and I’m a hopeless romantic and I’m obsessed with Ashton Kutcher and baked chocolate chip cookies of which I ate so many that I couldn’t eat dinner.

16.          Not all powdered soy milk is good. Some tastes like old, strange, artificial cheese.

17.          There’s definitely more but I can’t think of it right now.

every one more scatterbrained than the last...

Wow so I know it’s been a while. But I was going to write when I got back last weekend but then I had I think exactly seven hours of homework to do. Well actually seven hours for me, probably two for someone who knows philosophical words in Spanish…Anyway, last weekend we went to Puerto Viejo which is a beach town on the Caribbean side of Costa Rica-aka filled with dreads, people casually selling marijuana on the street, lots of handmade jewelry, and a ton of hammocks. We stayed at arguably the most famous hostel in Central America-Rocking J’s where everyone’s common language is English, and the cost of renting a hammock just went up to seven bucks a night. We, of course, stayed in hammocks all three nights. Some of us were given one sheet. And it is extremely questionable weather or not those things are ever cleaned because many people returned covered in bed bugs…but not me!! So the weekend was filled the first night wandering around, meeting a beautiful Kiwi named Adam. With us travelling to Cahuita (a 20 minute bus ride) to go to the national park and see monkeys and a SLOTH and these ants that travelled in extremely organized formations all carrying plants to their colony just exactly like in a Bug’s Life. Molly and I were fascinated. That day it was just Molly and Zach and I because it was Friday and we came on Thursday because we all finished classes early. We also ate SO MUCH. Because the breakfast at the hostel was fabulous and really cheap, there was a woman on the street selling fresh fruit she would cut for you (I ate a whole mango, half a pineapple and half an avocado that day alone…) and then we found this SWEET tiny little café where they made me a gourmet sandwich of avocado, green olives, honey mustard, alfalfa sprouts, tomato on their home made coconut milk bread. So the beach in Cauhita was so beautiful and then we came back just in time for me to get my whole head braided in an hour for 20 bucks and a hair wrap for 6. And everyone else had arrived while we were in Cahuita so when I got back to the hostel I ordered a very late dinner which I thought would take enough time to make for me to take a shower while I waited and then since the showers are outside the man came up to me with my food while I was putting deodorant on standing outside the shower. Talk about service. So then we went out to this really cool place to dance and danced and sweated the night away and briefly met a very tall Israeli man travelling with a very short British man.

The next day we rented VERY crappy bikes for $5 and rode the hour butt-numbing ride to Manzanillo. There were some very serious hills and most of us did not have gears, some not even hand breaks, but I did have a basket! At Manzanillo we went to the most beautiful beach on the planet, played Frisbee, wandered and discovered this cliff overlooking the beach, and got some good food. That night to save money when we returned to Puerto Viejo I decided to buy a mango for dinner but then couldn’t resist buying the home made loaf of carrot bread from a woman standing in front of the supermarket. Ya’all know me and bread. I ate half of that full loaf. That night I met a bunch of Canadians, played night Frisbee, dipped in the ocean, and was slightly disturbed by the 40 something year old owner, in a toga, following people around in constant attempts to top off their jungle juice. The next day a group of us spent at a beach right next to Puerto Viejo that we walked to. It was sooo nice. Molly and I had a 2 hour run/walk down the beach during which we talked about life and found SO MANY perfect sand dollars to make jewelry out of. Most of them broke on the journey, but I still have about five. We came upon a little lake and decided to be creative and float on a log through the lake. Once we got to the middle, realizing we couldn’t see very deep in it and we weren’t sure what lived there, Molly brought up the possibility of crocodiles. I was like, naww this is salt water. Then I tasted it and realized it wasn’t, screamed “freshwater!” and flopped off the log and have never swam so fast to shore…

So then we left that day after getting ice cream (sorbet for me) in home made AMAZING waffle cones from a tiny little stand near the bus stop. On our stop during the bus ride I got mixed dried fruit-basically the first time I’ve seen it here-after almost buying a bag of dried bananas that I soon realized was overflowing with bugs. And that was in a restaurant. YUMMM. So the next day was my birthday and Mother’s Day and wow I’m terrible with paragraphs here and my host mom LOVED the little bracelet I got for her in Manzanillo and kept showing it off to everyone and I wrote her a card and we went to spend the day with my host dad’s side of the family. And Marco cooked the meal which was, of course, spectacular, and he made me my own beautiful sautéed vegetable wrap because everyone was eating chicken and this awesome Aztec soup and then this jello dessert that I had to eat because they didn’t know that I didn’t eat gelatin and I couldn’t be rude and I felt so bad. And then they sang to me with this adorable DELICIOUS heart shaped cake that my mom made and it was really cute. A really nice day. And then this week I’ve just had classes and done homework and hung out with friends and had long conversations with Marco and my host mom and worked out and in 15 minutes I’m leaving to go see a free dance performance at the school! Oh, and I had told my host mom how my mom makes spinach with garlic and oil and she wanted to try it so yesterday we did that and put carrots and onion and peppers in it and put it over rice and it was so yummy and she was so excited to try something new. Oh, and today we had a conversation about love and relationships and physical versus emotional connections and easy girls and creepy guys and premarital sex and it was actually not awkward and got me thinking a lot, especially because her views are so similar to my parents’ and so different from most of my friends. And my family gets here tomorrow and I AM SO EXCITED TO SEE THEM!!! Gahh and they bought my host family an IPOD TOUCH when I had suggested an older style cheap I pod as their gift because no one has I pods here because they’re too expensive…anyway, they’re going to love it! And I’m going on adventures with them and Marco is cooking an amazing vegan meal for everyone on Sunday night and my family is going to fall in love with him because we love food and I helped him brainstorm what to make last night and he just constantly mentions meat and how great meat is and blah blah blah but he can actually cook amazing vegan food. Anyway, I’m going to go because I have to leave for this performance! Pu-eaceee.

sometimes my thoughts make a hell of a lot more sense in my head...

Okay, so aside from finally changing my facebook to Spanish, other big things have been happening in my life. Well not really big, but I did find another class to replace silly ecology (which, it turns out is actually a 300 level class here and not 100 level with a bunch of crazy prerequisites that I didn’t take…good thing they didn’t tell us any of that…and thank goodness I got out) which is Science, humanism, the Environment, and the Sustainability of life.

So Thursday night I went out with what ended up just being Chatham and Chris, oh what bonding time. We had a nice little heart to heart, awkwardly watched the male dance crew that came to the club for ladies night, and really obnoxiously and unsuccessfully tried to push girls on Chatham. Pretty funny. Friday night a bunch of us went out with Tracy, but then some of us left for ladies’ night at FoFo, and Maria and I made some friends. Mostly because we wanted to sit down and the only table was with these two lovely gentlemen. We chatted and bid them ado and then ran into them again later and Maria, Tara and I decided to go with them to dance at Mira Flores. Now just about the second we got there and started dancing a drag queen and a midget chose couples to be in a dancing contest. Maria ended up with Alex (who, by the way, is about 8 inches shorter than Maria…) and Tara and I with the other gentleman. Tara ran away because she didn’t want to be in the competition, and by the way, it’s awkward to have a couple made up of three people. When Maria and Alex introduced themselves during the contest they said they had been married for two years and had met at FoFo (a local bar). They lost pretty quickly. I, on the other hand, although know nothing about dancing technique and virtually nothing about Latin Dancing, cannot stand losing. So I milked everything for all it was worth. I yelled “Yeah Jersey!”, translated things from Spanish into English, and flailed my body wildly in order to garner applause. Somehow this got my partner and I into the final two couples. The other couple consisted of a boyfriend and girlfriend in their sixties. At the end, I had to be Rose from Titanic standing on the bow of the boat with the wind in my hair, and my partner, not fluent in English, had to say endearing things to me in English. He said things such as, “You will be marry me?” And “You are beautiful”. And then Maria and me and Maria’s partner were given free re-entrances to Mira Flores (worth $4!!).

Saturday a group of us went to San Jose to see the DeVinci exhibit which was MAD COOL and took about 4 hours to go through. Because DeVinci was absolutely brilliant. How does anyone use both sides of their brain that flawlessly? Fun facts that I learned: 1. It’s really awkward when you’re having an in depth conversation with your friends about one of DeVinci’s anatomy sketches that depicts two people having sex and saying how demeaning it is to women because all of the male’s internal parts are drawn and just the uterus of the female is there. What a statement that makes. And then where are their legs? And you’re pointing at the picture and a museum worker comes up to you while you’re doing this and at no other time during your four hour stay and tells you if you have any questions at all or want anything described or explained he’d be glad to help you… 2. DeVinci once worked extremely hard on building a statue of a horse and then in the middle of it the metal he was using had to be melted and used to make cannons. Sure shows our world’s priorities of art vs. war 3. Some child threw rocks at the Mona Lisa when he went to see it and permanently damaged it. Also, someone stole the Mona Lisa and thought they could get away with trying to sell it to another museum years later without either them or the museum getting into trouble…guess what? Not true. 3. it is very mysterious as to whether DeVinci had the complete first design for the bicycle; he designed a parachute that, when tested, functioned years later. He designed a tank. He designed this ridiculous thing you attach in front of horses pulling a carriage that’s a spinning blade spiral that will chop up anyone coming towards you from that end. It will also chop up your horses if they make the slightest wrong move, so maybe more trouble than it’s worth… 4. I want to make a tiny work of art that people will say it’s crazy for anyone to be able to buy it for $10,000 and that it’s worth something more like $200,000 or the price of over 133 of Elissa’s old mini vans.

Then, Ana and I went to Tranquilo Backpackers hostel http://www.tranquilobackpackers.com/contents_en/location.html (getting lost several times of course, typical of Ana and me. Never let us go anywhere alone, even with a map). The hostel is super duper cool and funky with some pretty sick people. It ended up being Ana, Chatham, Stacy, Maria, Molly, and me at the hostel that night and we ate dinner and befriended a German guy with a British/Australian accent and dreads named Dominic and some guy who made the sickest jewelry and a guy from Berkeley who stopped going to the University of Montana and built a house and it was pretty sweet.

Then Sunday we walked around, bought sliced mango for a dollar, 6 avocados for a dollar, and some lunch. And we met some friends who were high school students making a movie for English class and we had to speak English for the movie and Spanish to them (first time that’s ever happened). And they really liked us and took pictures with us and got our facebook info (we’re all now friends and we’re in half their profile pictures J). Also, I have a new admirer. One of them taught me how to say that he had a crush on me and said how beautiful my hair was and my eyes…the cutest things ever. He was pretty cute too…if only he was older jaja. And then we went to see Carmen in El Teatro Nacional with a bunch of other people from our program. And we had ten dollar, pretty awful seats, especially because it was in Italian with Spanish subtitles and most of us couldn’t even see the subtitles. But then in intermission Ivana worked her magic with the super cute usher and he found almost all of us seats really close-Julia and I were main floor like 10^th row for the second half!! And the show was about three hours long, and the acting and singing was wonderful, but I didn’t really love the plot. It’s dumb that people think being with someone is more important than life and that Carmen was so arrogant and prissy and that people were madly and passionately in love when they didn’t even know each other. The word “love” is taken entirely too lightly. Anyway, enough of my typical ranting.

Last night I had another several hour life chat with Marco. It’s so nice to have a good friend living in my house! I think my host mom is scared something might happen between us or something, but that’s not going to happen, and I hope she knows I respect her too much to do that…anyway, that’s a whole nother can of worms along with some other drama here that makes me realize that no family is perfect or without problems but at the same time a few problems don’t make a family bad. Actually, they’re often still wonderful.

Today I ran this RIDICULOUS hill with Marco (we were supposed to meet up with Tara and Chris but it ended up being a huge miscommunication) and then beat him at the end-chicka yeah I love those days, but then I’ve been pretty sore all day, and I’m running again tomorrow. Oh, also, I went to $3 yoga class at this gym Friday and it was pretty good. It was in Spanish, so thank God I know yoga…but a lot of people didn’t know what they were doing. But I corrected some postures and the teacher is super flexible and pretty cool and I’ll definitely be going back along with trying another yoga class at the Palacio de Deportes here. I also had my geosciences class today-I still am really awkward and friendless in that class and it’s going to be kind of hard because it reminds me of a 300 level environmental science class except it’s in Spanish and I don’t know so many of the words he’s using (different words for elements and minerals in Spanish and gahhh) but I’m excited to have a class that will intellectually challenge me and help me out a lot with improving my Spanish. And the professor is super understanding. Then Introduction to Tridemension was missing the beautiful boy today but I made some friends, thank goodness for one of them being so super friendly! and they told me he doesn’t ever do work…might have been why he asked to be in my group, because no one wanted him in their’s…oh well, my dream was good while it lasted. But it’s going to be kind of hard and a lot of work at home. It’s kind of like architecture and right now we’re building the simplest thing we’re going to build and it’s hard! It’s a cube made up of 37 exact 15 cm x 15 cm perfectly cut planes each separated by 3 mm and the whole thing is made out of cardboard. And I’m using an exacto knife type thing with other random tools I’ve never seen before, and trust me, it’s so much harder to be exact and neat than it sounds! And the end product won’t be as pretty as ceramics, but I’m hoping I’ll learn something in it…Anyway, I should probably do the Spanish homework due tomorrow…

shortest one yet

So yesterday my blog was super long, so how is it possible that I forgot something? Well guess what. I did. On my walk home at five am, exhausted, I realized how lovely it was to be awake so early. It was the perfect temperature and so calm, with a surprising number of people out and about compared to the US, but not too many. It was light out, and I just had a lovely walk. A woman whom I didn’t even know stopped me to ask if I had been to Cartago, and we had a nice little conversation. There was a band playing in the back of a pick-up truck (presumably to celebrate The Day of the Virgin) as it rode down the street. I smiled at them, and they smiled right on back, playing their instruments and feelin’ the breeze. I did encounter a dog on the street that had the saddest eyes I’ve ever seen. Now usually I feel like it’s weird to say that, because sometimes you really can’t tell anything from someone’s eyes, but oh man, with these you could, and it made me want to cry.

Today Rachel, Anna and I again waited outside our ecology class, and again the professor didn’t show. Some guy sitting outside the room said he got an e-mail that the class had changed days and that he had gotten an e-mail. How lovely of them not to send it to us. Now I have to change my schedule and wait for a response from my AU advisor to see which courses I can get credit for and let my advisor here know by Friday (the end of the add/drop period) and then go into the class two weeks late…but what’s done is done and it wasn’t my fault and now I have the morning off today and Rachel told me today that my Spanish has already gotten much better!!

i can be so much more grammatically correct than this

Okay, so Friday night was kind of funny. We were really tired from waking up so early to head to the park, so after making plans to dance the night away, we settled on going to see Captain America instead. Maria said we should meet there like an hour early but I thought that was ridiculous and had to eat dinner so we met like 20 minutes before it started and it was already sold out. Hence, 100% my fault. So then they wanted ice cream and we sat in the mall contemplating our night. Eventually, we decided to go to a bar (thankfully in the mall-no paying for taxis!) after much insistence from a quite sun burnt and exhausted Chatham who had done the walk to Cartago during the day. I ordered a vanilla caramel martini-how delicious does that sound? Well it was the grossest thing I’ve ever tasted. I will give you a synopsis of what probably happened to result in it being so disgusting (I’ve translated from Spanish for your sakes).

Waiter (in his head): Ahhh this stupid gringa (me) might look like she’s Latin, but her accent is so bad that I can’t even understand what she wants to order when she points to it on the drink menu…let’s see what I can get away with here…I bet she’s rich; she definitely hides a lot of money in that giant hair…(to bartender): Combine the cheapest alcohols we have and whatever old things you can find laying around, stick it in a martini glass and give it to me. We need to spend as little money as possible to milk all we can out of this gringa.

Bartender (in his head): Hmmm…well this person didn’t take the entirety of their tequila shot, I’ll put the rest in here…oh and a splash of this 3 week old flat beer…oh, and there’s some mud on this floor from when that manure worker tracked it in here, I’ll add that…Oh, some pickle juice sounds good…and maybe a splash of Tenley vodka. Hmmm but wait, it needs a yellowish tint. (Sees a homeless person peeing on the side of the bar) Says to homeless man: Wait! Stop!

(Man looks afraid that he’ll get in trouble for peeing in public)

Bartender: Here, isn’t it nicer to go into a cup? It doesn’t splash on your feet that way.

(Homeless man is so overwhelmed by this man’s generosity he isn’t afraid to let it all out into my drink)

And that is what happened to lead to the delightful flavor of my drink and is the reason why it took so long to get to me. And guess what. I drank it. Why? Everyone asked me. Because I am a poor college student and also because in Latin America and in the Rauchwerk family you finish what you’re given. Anyway, the bar ended up being really fun. Marco showed up lookin’ spiffy with a fresh hair cut even though he had to wake up at 4:30 the next morning to work, and we all chatted and even went to the place next door to dance a bit before leaving.

The next morning I woke up and helped the fam (including cousin Louis who is about the same age as me, studying civil engineering, and has long blonde hair, wears skinny jeans and screemo band t-shirts aka looks way too American) prepare lunch. Which consisted of me attempting to make the juice and misunderstanding and doing the completely wrong thing. At around 11:30 we headed out to Castillo Country Club which is this place with a ton of picnic areas, a huge indoor pool and game area, soccer fields, basketball courts, tennis courts, and a lot of grassy area. I ate some mad good salad (my host padre loves to put everything he can find into salad, just like me. It’s bomb), amazing refried beans Louis made, and some tortilla chips, and then this tiny little chocolate thing that tasted like ice cream but wasn’t cold. I also watched the cousins play soccer with Maria, tossed (or tried to) a football, played some basketball and ping pong, and then watched/took a nap for the Costa Rica/Spain soccer game. On the way home we stopped at Raul (host dad’s) parents’ house-first time I met them. They are both so adorable and energetic! We ate some home made roll things, drank tea, looked at family photos Raul’s sister took out (some at the abuelo’s birthday with pictures of them with the ex President of Costa Rica!), watched the little puppy pee all over the floor, I tracked mud all over the carpet and Raul’s sister took me outside and scrubbed my shoes, and we all had a very nice time. Raul’s dad is great and adorable and loves joking around and when I was leaving he walked me to the car with an umbrella even though I was wearing a rain jacket, handed me a flower (which I pressed) and told me to come back every Sunday. At night I watched the karate kid with Marco.

Yesterday I woke up and ate breakfast and talked to Marco about life and love and relationships for like two hours and I barely left for class on time. When I got there, I was of course lost, and some man who looked to be in his late twenties and dressed very spiffily asked me if I needed help. He told me he knew where the classroom was and then proceeded to walk very close to me, touching my arm unnecessarily constantly and asking me questions. Including if I had eaten and telling me we needed to eat together next time and have a conversation. All the while he was asking every person he saw where this classroom was. Then when he dropped me off he asked for my number, and I should have told him I didn’t have a phone but instead gave it to him, thinking it couldn’t hurt especially because I wanted Tico friends. The class wasn’t horrible; I understood a descent amount of it, and the teacher seems fair. But I didn’t exactly make friends, and it wasn’t my favorite experience. However, my next class was Intro to Tridimension which is like making sculptures with paper and everyone in it is an artist aside from me and this other American girl with a different program. We were going to switch out of it but then I found out that we get out a half hour early every day, the teacher is super understanding, and the most beautiful boy in the world asked to be in my group...it's probably mostly just the beautiful boy part though…bah why do I always think with my estrogen? Then, on the cab ride home (too dark to walk) I get a call from a mysterious number asking me if I was busy…it turned out to be the man who helped me find my class earlier…CREEPY. I told him yes and added his number to my phone as “Creepy Man”.

I had time to come home, eat, change my clothes, pack a backpack, and then head to the University to help out with cleaning up trash for the pilgrimage to Cartago http://www.usexpatcostarica.com/2010/07/annual-pilgrimage-to-cartago/. The walk takes about 4-5 hours from San Jose (about 16 miles) and more from Heredia. There are people who come from further and spend days walking and nights in hotels or people’s homes. Anyway, they took us to Cartago in a bus with this volunteer group of UNA students and they fed us (chicken and rice and potato chips…I said I didn’t eat meat, they said it was chicken…then they gave me an entire plate of potato chips and an apple) and gave us soda and water bottles (plastic bottles when it’s an eco group…okay…). We then were paired up one American with one Tico and sent to stations. Now I thought we’d be walking through the streets picking up trash, but we were just supposed to sit at our station which was positioned along the walk and instruct people on which receptacle in which to deposit trash…probably about 10 people came to our station in the 4 hours we were there when we would have been able to pick up about 15 bags of trash walking the streets but whatever. That’s what frustrates me about a lot of community service wherever you go…there are a virtually endless amount of things you can do to help but the way it’s organized somehow finds a way so that you do the least possible…or nothing at all. But it was fun because I made friends with the really tall man George working with me, and I am going to be his English tutor, and also with this really super nice guy Kevin who is studying biochem and absolutely loves it. Which is pretty admirable. And they are both great. Except for there was also this guy in the group (not in my station) who just didn’t ever stop talking. Now I know that sounds like me but 1. never put two people on the same bus who love to talk about everything and refuse to shut up to listen to anyone else because then there is no one to listen to them 2. I would like to think my talking is at least endearing/comical sometimes and that at least some of my stories are interesting and that I listen to other people sometimes 3. He was speaking in really rapid Spanish so I’m not even really sure if he was entertaining or not. Anyway, we finished at a little before 4 am and walked to the church which was SO COOL because there were thousands of people camping out surrounding it and every store on the street was open and we of course went into a panaderia and got dessert and it was beautiful. We got back at a little after five, and oh good, it was light out so it was safe to walk the mile and a half home on no sleep…And then I slept until 12:30 and when I woke up I helped Marco cook lunch (meaning I mostly just cut things) of this sweet potato like thing that we mashed with juice from the mandarins I picked from the tree outside and a wine reduction sauce and then a salad of tomato and cabbage (I actually really like cabbage in salad now) with little thin fried plantain chips on top and then zucchini and carrots and mushrooms and pepper and onion cooked together. And he just made it up. And it was awesome and fancy. Not even fair. I then hung out on my computer and went for a run and went back on my computer and then ate vegetables and rice with my family for dinner and they hadn’t tried some of the vegetables before like brussel sprouts which they call, directly translated, “mini squash” and yellow squash and then I had peanuts and oh no they have them here Oreos. And I need to make them zucchini bread because they’ve never had it. Now to sleep because I have class at 8 and want to wake up at six to run tomorrow! Look at me, I actually enjoy running now-WHATT is this who am I?