Animal poop on your face

Well then I am getting really lazy with this blogging thing. Sooo the last few days with my family we spent going to Carara National Park right near Jaco and we had the best guide ever Armando who knew everything there was to know about every animal. We were lucky to make it there on the last day that trail is open until November because of the rainy season and the water gets up to seven feet at times…We used their rain boots and were up to our knees in water at times. The other guy who worked there was the grandson of a German Jew who fled to Costa Rica during World War II! Some super cool facts Armando taught us:

1. Scarlet Macaws live into their 70s in the wild. They are monogamous, and after they find a partner, even if he/she dies, they will never be with anyone again. Now those are some true believers in soul mates. They are also the most beautiful creatures ever, and babies go for about $100 here and for thousands in the US to use as pets. The scary thing is the population in Carara has remained completely constant for about 50 years which means that it’s possible that it’s the same group as 50 years ago and now they’re all older and haven’t reproduced…but they don’t know for sure. Also, there are some 1,000 something in Costa Rica in total, and 420 of those are in Carara.
2. Coatis are crazy beep beeps. The males try to kill their young after they’re born so that the females will have sex with them again so the females kick the males out of the group and raise their kids together without men. And the males wander off as their lonely little solitary selves. There’s a whole new definition of feminism…
3. Those ridiculously organized ants we keep seeing that we see massive lines of them traveling to their colonies carrying huge pieces of leaves are really cool. The queen ant is HUGE and the rest of the ants protect her in the colony. The leaves they carry they actually use to make a fertilizer which serves as a food source. They develop a bacteria that feeds off of the leaves and the ants eat the fertilizer the bacteria produce. Symbiotic. The ants clean the leaves thoroughly before bringing them into the colony so as to be sure not to bring any unwanted bacteria into their colony. Also, when the queen ant dies the entire colony dies. The survival of the species is guaranteed by the princess eggs the queen lays. There are specific rooms in the colony, and ants have different responsibilities.
4. White faced monkeys have a male leader who is the strongest. Another monkey can fight the leader to gain position as the new leader, and if he wins, the defeated leader has two options. He can remain in the pack as just an average bear, in which case he will often die of depression, or he can go off and find another pack and fight the leader to win control. When two packs of monkeys confront each other, they fight, and the winners get to keep the loser’s females. Not such a feminist situation here….

We also went to the crocodile bridge and saw about 15 very scary crocodiles. Then the other day we went to my family’s finca (basically a plot of undeveloped land with a river and trees and animals where they have built a beautiful little cabana) and ate an amazing lunch and my mom learned how to make platanos maduros and Dan and Noah played music and I danced with my grandma and my two sets of parents danced. It was adorable.

            This past weekend I went to Siripiqui with my program which is several hours North of Heredia and we went to a school and helped plant trees and paint a roof and went on a chocolate tour and learned how to make chocolate and I bought four handmade bars of chocolate to bring home as gifts and I’ve already eaten two of them…And then we learned all about bats and it was SUPER cool except I was really tired cause I had woken up at five and kept dozing off…and then the next day we went white water rafting and it was a BLAST and we purposely tipped the raft over and got to jump off of this landing into the water and were served fresh fruit and I only ate a tiny piece of pineapple because I kept going back to jump off the thing again and do flips and you know me, typical autumn stuff. And then on the bus ride home Justine helped me take out my braids and my hair felt like cotton mixed with straw mixed with an afro and I literally had to dump olive oil in it it was so dry…well I’m running super late right now so I’ll update you on the rest of my life and on this weekend (which is gonna be SICK) sometime in the hopefully near future.