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.