buenavista

well just checking in since im at the internet, but nothing has changed really. i got sick the other night and threw up a couple times but appear to have made a strong comeback. for some reason most of the volunteers im with are german, though theres a couple italians, a couple dutch, an english guy, and one other american. and we all speak english which is kinda weird. they all had to learn it in school. they also told me over half the music they listen to is american which surprised me a lot. they always know what im talking about when i mention movies or songs. theres one german volunteer who reminds me exactly of my uncle gene which was really funny/weird. and i realized it before he told me he was studying to be a teacher which my uncle is which made it even weirder. theres also a crazy italian guy named simon who wears everyones shoes and tries to take peoples shirts and doesn´t speak great english, which has lead to various very funny misunderstandings. christmas was celebrated with alcohol and a bonfire and was entirely unchristmasy. im also carving a chess set now and am half way done. making level bases for the pieces was an unforseen difficulty, especially with only a swiss army knife. my friend anna from seattle came to samara with her family yesterday on vacation so ive gotten to spend all of today with her which has been wonderful. a big relief to see someone i really know after all this time. thats all for now i think, hope everyones well.

gus

Playa Buenavista

i feel like im staying at a resort except we get to play with turtles on top of it all. theres about 18 volunteers here most of whom are german for some reason, and we're all in on big open-air house thats approximately 3 steps from the sand of the beach. and on the beach which is a few km long we are basically the only sign of civilization. so we have this huge tropical beach all to ourselves. we work a few hours doing maitenance stuff during the morning before its too hot, then have the rest of the day off to relax, read, tan, swim, surf, etc. and then we do all of the turtle stuff at night. there are two patrols throughout the night that walk the beach to see if any mom turtles come to nest, and there are constant shifts of volunteers monitoring the hatchery in case any nests there hatch. the idea is that when a mom lays her eggs, we find the nest, collect all the eggs, redig a new nest the same size in the hatchery, and put the eggs in. this is so that animals and people can't get to them. then when they hatch we take them in a bucket to where their original nest was and release them to flap their way back in the great big ocean. and they are frickin cute. the only downside of it all is that it messes with your sleep big time, but so far its been a lot of fun. theres no electricity so after dark its all candles, and we have to carry in any drinking water and food, though luckily i haven't had to do that yet. Its nice though im getting nice and tan and all of you guys are freezing your butts of in the snow of seattle. go figure that i'd be here the one time it snows feet at a time though! getting to experience that is one of my dreams! i can't really complain at the moment though. i get to watch the tropical beach sunsets every night for over 2 weeks after all. alllllright i gotta go cuz we have to walk back before high tide or theres a river that gets too deep to cross. so enjoy the cold! talk in a week, gus.

san jose

well im sorry if you can´t bring yourselves to believe it but my plans changed again. i came (alone!) to the office for national park volunteering today having been told yesterday that there was room for me at arenal. when they checked today however there wasn´t. which is a bummer especially because it means i won´t get to see the relatives that are coming here and are planning on visiting the park. So now im going back to the nicoya peninsula to a turtle reserve at playa buenavista, which is the next beach over from samara. I´ll be there for a little over 2 weeks at which point i hope to be able to go to tortuguero for a while and then maybe arenal as well. while im at this place theres no internet unless i get into samara which i think i´ll be able to do about once a week. so yeah i suppose i´ll just write then. as for now voy a la playa otra vez!

mastatal

well here is a brief sampling from my vast picture collection thus far, and i hope it gives everyone a nice visual idea of how its been! update: i was planning on going to ecuador but that fell through and with nothing better to do in the immediate future i came back to mastatal for a big dance they were throwing which was great fun. but kind of reminded me of my middle school dances. anyhow tomorrow i leave to have an orientation meeting in san jose before i go to volunteer in arenal national park. it is known for its active volcano. i´ll be meeting new people! seeing new things! woo! i dunno what my internet access will be like while im there, so if its sparse i hope these pictures can tide you over. buena nota!

gus

Nicoya

While the title is Nicoya once again, I´m at a different internet cafe that is more air conditioned, and i haven´t actually been here for the week or whatever that has passed. Me and my traveling partner bodhi were on a hunt for her friend who has property in playa nosara. he inconveniently didn´t pick up his phone the entire day we were going there tho, so we had to spend a night in the town at a hotel that perfumed its rooms with urinal cakes. sweet. we got ahold of him the next day tho and what a place. hes owned the property for 20 years now but is just turning it into a bed a breakfast. he gave us a room and kitchen area for free, and we bought food to cook our meals with. i am now a master of tortillas and empanadas, a tico in the making! the best feature of the place, however, was the location, about a minute walk from a gorgeous stereotypically tropical white sand beach with rolling blue waves, palm trees, pelicans, and gulls. and sunsets, oh what sunsets. one of the best nights so far was watching the sunset on this gorgeous beach, groovin out to earth wind and fire, and drinking imperial beer. i honestly can´t think of anything that would have made it better. Playa Nosara actually consists of two beaches, and last time with the family, we stayed at the other one. so one of the days we walked to it to see what was there but also because i wanted to try to find the hotel and these super duper good sweet potato fries that i forget if i mentioned before or not. we batted .500, finding the hotel but not the fries. it was funny how much more i remembered about the place from before once i saw what the hotel was like again. I´d like to write more but we´re dying of hunger and have a bus to catch soon. im going to alajuela next though, so i should be back again soon. hope everyone is well!
gus

Nicoya!

How bout that! im not in mastatal any more! 5 of us-me, bodhi (the girl who was volunteering with me), aaron and greg (the two canadians volunteering at another place) and jorge (the 20 year old son of the tico family that runs the volunteering place where aaron and greg were at) - left from mastatal thursday morning for some fun in the sun at esterillos. we didn´t know where we were going to stay but at lunch ended up meeting a guy whose family rented out cabinas that we could get for 10 bucks a person. that sounded good so we followed his directions there except they were terrible and we ended up walking forever and asking like 3 more people where the houses were. but eventually we made it and when we got there they were like sike you don´t have to stay in the little cabinas you can stay in the big mansion next door for the same price. granted the front window had been broken the enormous jacuzzi wasn´t working, one of the showers didn´t work, one bathroom leaked, and there wasn´t a pot, but this place was honestly and truly amazing. oh and it was about 5 feet from the beach. so we ended up staying there for two nights and enjoyed the sun and sand and super warm ocean and life. then aaron greg and jorge, who had just come with us for a mini vacation, left back to mastatal, and me and bodhi were left alone to brave the unknown. our eventual destination is nosara where she has a family friend that she can stay with. we have yet to determine if theres room for me too haha. anyways so that first day we made it to puntarenas which was a very peaceful little port town on a mini peninsula. we stayed at a small hotel that had a guy at the front desk named fransisco who sung opera with the tv and who was supposed to wake us up in the morning but slept through his alarm. that brings us to this morning, when we caught the 6 am ferry out of puntarenas. the ride was gorgeous with lots of pelicans and sun and wind and super green islands. we then promptly missed the bus to nicoya because it for some reason left 2 minutes before we got off the ferry, so we had to taxi to jicaral and then bus from there to nicoya. and then we were super hungry but its sunday so not much was open and we ended up eating chinese food. it was good but just super weird to have it here. and now if everything goes to plan we´re going to bus from here to nosara at 3. its supposed to be a 4 hour ride which just kinda sucks. apparently on the bus ride here i fell asleep and my head was nodding off nearer and nearer to the girl next to me and she kept inching away haha. well i don´t really have any clue when ill have internet next, but ill write when i do. hasta luego.

mastatal

nothing much to report aside from the fact that i am still alive. signs are pointing to leaving at the end of the week, and i can´t wait. the water has been out here for 3 days, meaning 3 days of working and sweating and not showering. so we finally went swimming today and - i just knew something like this had to happen - one of the girls claimed to have seen a snake in the water. this sufficiently scared everyone out of any desire to swim any more, so after no more than 5 minutes we left again. a snake in the water is about ten times scarier of a thing than on land, though, and i think its unfair of nature to allow them the ability to swim. they´re on the ground, so you cant escape them there. they can climb trees so you can´t escape them there. and they can swim so you can´t escape them there. and tunneling wouldn´t work cuz they could just follow you into the hole. it appears the only escape is in the air, but then they made that movie snakes on a plane, so they even managed to get to us up there. there is truly no way to escape snakes. what a bummer. i also really need to do laundry.

gus

mastatal

well im getting pretty antsy to leave one way or another again. whether its in CR or its ecuador, life hear is actually quite a bit slower than a turtle and its starting to get to me. yesterday a bunch of us took a day trip into puriscal and then to san jose. it was good to be in the city again, but half the time we were gone (6 hours) was on busses and it didn´t really feel like we did anything. and we had to get up at 5 30 so i was super tired all day. but last night we had an enormous beetle fly into the house-at least 4 inches long and 2 across, with long thick antenna and the biggest pinchers i have ever seen in real life. marcos said they eat through wood. and yeah termites eat through wood, but when i imagine that its little burrowed out tunnels through branches that leave trails of dust behind. when i imagined this thing eating through wood, it was snapping the branch in half and leaving little twigs behind. tonight we are planning on going to try to catch crayfish in the river. apparently the accepted method is to shine flashlights in the water suddenly and then stab them with a makeshift sort of spear. in my past experience with stories of spear fishing, the subjects have not been very successful, but i guess i´ll just have to see how it goes. we had a bonfire the other night in celebration of a birthday. it was a gorgeous clear night with stars and was all in all a very fun and compleeetely wholesome experience. we also had bingo a few nights ago and i won twice, earning myself christmas lights and a frying pan. and i went to my first catholic mass and all in all found it kinda creepy, what with all the wafer eating etc. but who am i to judge.
ill write again soon, gus

mastatal...still

I am currently in a situation where i have 3 things that are going to be happening at the same time and i want to do all of them. 1: last night my family informed me that i just had to stay with them and in mastatal until new years and christmas. and everyone else here is saying that december is the most fun here. so that is one enticing option. 2: over christmas some relatives are vacationing in CR, as well as one of my friends and her family, so i was wanting to get to see and hang out with them. 3: I am still wanting to go to Ecuador to travel with my friend bianca. she´ll only be there for about a month, from mid december to mid january, so this would be my only opportunity. So there is my big fat dillema. three choices, all of which would be very fun, but i can only choose 1. So crap. i mean i guess it could be worse-i could have no good options at all-but i still don´t feel so privilidged at the moment... Aside from all that, my time here is still very enjoyable. Yesterday a group of about 6 of us took a hike down to this gorgeous swimming hole at the river and hung out for a few hours there. and then i played soccer for the first time since i got here and it was muddy. And then they had chicharones at the bar at night! it may have been the highlight of the day since i so rarely get to eat hearty portions of meat her. every now and then at the bar they will just decide to make them and anyone who wants can buy a plate and then have as much as they want. Eating those fresh, hot, and in enormous quantity along with a cold beer was about all i could ask for. Today for work we moved cement blocks for about 3 hours and we all felt a little like we were in some sort of forced labor camp. its this weird mix of wanting to help out but then when you look back on it you think how absurd it sounds to be paying to do this sort of thing. but i have no regrets thus far. so bueno. i gotta run now, ill write soon.

gus

mastatal

well sorry its been so long. i wrote an entry a couple days ago but for some reason it didn´t post. anyways a bit has changed since the last successful one. For starters i graduated from spanish class with flying freakin colors. it seems kind of strange to me that i learned basically all of the spanish grammar that there is to know in a month. i asked marcos what he would teach me if i wanted to keep taking classes, and he said he didn´t know what else there was to teach me. so now its just practice practice practice. Since my clases ended, i had to make a decision whether to leave or to stay as a volunteer. I still haven´t quite finalized what my next step is, though its in the works, and i figured i might as well stay until i worked it out. so ive officially been a volunteer for three days, in which i managed to fall on a leaf of a spiny palm and get somewhat sick. the spine count in my leg from the palm borders on ninety. my entire calf just looks like i have a really bad rash. so that was unlucky, but aside from making my leg feel stiff hasn´t caused me too much pain. last night i felt like i had a fever and didn´t feel too good working today but i think its passed. as for the work, the past two days we were clearing an area in preparation for a future vegetable farm. and today we went to the river to collect rocks for the walls of a new house that they are going to build. its mostly just really humid but the work hasnt been too hard. also, there are two new people with us. one is the fiancee, whos alright but nothing special. the other is another girl from california here for the classes and she´s nice and all. its mostly just a relief to have anyone else at all to be able to hang out with. So yeah, hopefully in the next couple of days ill be leaving to go volunteer in the national parks. i requested cabo blanco but haven´t found out if i got it yet. and after that im still playing around with the idea of going to ecuador to travel around with my friend, but haven´t decided if i want to fly or bus yet. theres apparently rumor of danger in columbia, which id have to go through, but it seems like kind of a shame to fly there. not much adventure in it. as for wildlife i can´t think of much aside from a scorpion in my room and a sloth in a tree. the sloth was just this white blob hanging absolutely still, whch kind of diminished my initial excitement when we noticed it. things are going well with the family, we´re all having a lot of fun together. i guess thats all for now. ill write again soon.

gus (or gustavito, another nickname to add to the list)

mastatal

costa rican slang of the day: if you´re out drinking and someone knocks over a bottle or trips or does anything else related to being drunk, everyone who sees it yells "taxi!" insinuating that its time to go home. i finally got around to going swimming at the waterfall and it was terrific. i also learned how to make these rolls that Arabela always makes that are perfect for snacking. maybe ill make a collection of recipes to bring home. i haven´t discovered what exactly it is but theres some bug here out to get me thats a billion times worse than a mosquito. the bites itch like no other and last forever. Marcos´finacee gets in tonight and i asked around trying to get an idea of what she´s like. what i determined was that carol ábsolutely doesn´t like her, gabi thinks shes alright, and arabela said she had no words about it, i think meaning she had nothing good to say about her. isidro continues to talk too fast, low, and indistinctly for me to understand what the hell hes ever saying so i just avoided asking his opinion on the subject. i met a couple of canadian guys staying at a different volunteering place nearby who were funny. one of them comes for three months then goes back to make money and returns for 3 more months. i think hes been like 3 times on that cycle. i guess thats one way to do things...the other one is his friend just along for the ride. the other night the moon was finally out and i coulda walked home without a light but when i said that to marcos he said no cuz you have to worry about the snakes. i got to thinking and that really sucks. its like always having to worry about being jumped. apparently after a terciopelo gets you you have about 30 minutes in which you are still capable of walking. so maybe its worse than getting jumped. except they don´t take your valuables so i guess if you survive thats a bonus. anyways end result is im scared to walk anywhere at night with or without a light now. SO THANKS SNAKES. k later people

gus

Mastatal

until about 5 minutes ago the weather had substantially cleared up and the once-definite 2:00 rain storms had petered out. however now it seems im going to get very wet on my walk home. bloopers in communication: i was walking into town one recent afternoon and passed an elderly woman coming the other way carrying a box. we smiled at each other but rather than an hola or a buenos dias, she said caminando! which translates to "walking." i was very confused by this greeting and thus responded with my emergency-i-don´t-know-what-to-say answer of "si!" i can usually figure out what was being said in retrospect but this one is still iffy. maybe she was just commenting that we were both walking. in other news my teacher told me today that i learn fast but should talk more. its a little hard cuz i can´t follow a normal conversation since they talk so fast so i can´t contribute anything to whats being said. and because of this i feel like i haven´t actually learned so much, but he probably knows better. i cooked my first fried plantains! turns out there is no secret ingredient, its simply lots of oil and the plantains. i didn´t put enough oil on mine and they were a little dry, but im planning on redeeming myself. picture-wise i got a moth with enormous eyes that looked like some weird clown or something, and a nice big spider. bird-wise i got a few close-ups with toucans and wood peckers. in talking to my homestay mom i found out she doesn´t like cooking and loves to clean which pretty much blew my mind. i understand the need for cleaning, but i didn´t know it could really be an enjoyable thing. i have another ten or so days here and am working on where im going to go next. so far my sources here haven´t been much help. i have the next four days off from class so im thinking about taking another crack at the national park. not really sure what else i could do. much to my disappointment they only really play soccer here in the dry season. not sure how much im really gonna get to use my cleats...well thats the update for now, hope everyones doin well.

till next time,
gus

mastatal

well it was a slow weekend. most days here follow the following schedule: wake up around 9 for breakfast (ie pancakes, juevos a caballos, beans and rice, ham, plain eggs cooked omelette-shell style, etc, and juice and coffee), shower, have class from 10 - 12, lunch a little after 12 (beans and rice always + usually something from the breakfast list), then have the afternoon free until dinner at 6 (ie soups of local veggies with rice, chicken, rice and beans, tortillas, homemade hummus, fried plantains), and then free for the night. a lot of the time im just relaxing around the house or reading outside. the way it is here, its not so much choosing what to do, its choosing where to sit around for a few hours until you have a meal or something. ive been reading for a lot of that, but have spent a couple afternoons with my homestay family from my last trip here. at night i haven´t been doing anything at all. the other night i actually made card houses while the family watched the dancing show i previously described. the house is far enough away from the central area here that you can´t hear or see if anything is going on. it gets dark before six but nothing happens there at night until around 8, at which point we´ve already been sitting around for a few hours and i haven´t found myself in a mood to go out exploring yet. so that is my tranquilo life in mastatal in a nutshell. not exactly a wild adventure, but i have plenty of time for that to come. news on the carved gecko front: possibly complete. it is fairly crude. it is obvious i am not an expert carver. but you can tell its a gecko. and i only cut myself once. so all in all id say it was a victorious venture. next time i write i hope to have something more captivating to share. until then, pura vida.

gus

mastatal

Well i successfully embarked upon my first costa rican adventure and survived, although it wasn´t what i expected it would be. I had class early so that i could have the afternoon to hike in the nearby national forest, la congreja. i left at one, walked 40 minutes to the trailhead, and then went in. marcos told me it was a loop trail and it could take up to 2.5 hours if i stopped to find animals etc. i was taking my time taking pictures and enjoying it all, its really the jungle here. vines connecting everything and weird mushrooms and enormous ferns, kinda like being in a huge greenhouse. about an hour or so in i came to a big intersection of four trails which i hadn´t expected, and only one of them was marked. it said cascada 200 m, so i decided id check that out first. the trail continued past the turnoff for the waterfall but it looked small compared to the other ones at the intersection and i figured it wouldn´t take me back around. so after seeing the waterfall i went back and tried a different one, which dead ended at the river. so i went back and tried the last one which was really the one i thought was most likely to lead back as it was by far the biggest. so im on it and it occurs to me after a while that its more like a dry river bed than the man-made trail i was on before, but i had no way of knowing one way or the other so i kept going. i started to get a little worried after an hour had gone by, but by marcos´estimation of the time it would take i could presumably still have been on the right path. eventually i came to a big river, the rio negro, at which 4 guys were working on building a bridge across. i stood on the bank laughing to myself knowing that this couldn´t be right any more, and eventually shouted to the guys. they motioned for me to come across on a tree connecting the banks, which i did. then through the language barrier we determined that i was alone had been (maybe still was) walking in the park, and was trying to get to mastatal. they told me the the path on their side of the river would lead up to the main road back to mastatal, but i still didn´t know actually how far away i was. so i walked out and when i hit the road i saw a bunch of people playing soccer who ended up being english irish and scottish volunteers. they got a crack out of my situation but were sympathetic and informed my that i was about an hour and a halfs walk away, but if i hurried to the main road i might be able to catch the bus. i had no money on me but at that point it was about 4 30 and if i walked it it would be dark long before i got back and there aren´t many street lights here. so when the bus came by i just got on, and luckily some other volunteers from mastatal were on it and spotted me. so i made it back safely but dirty and a little sore. of course the correct path back was the one past the waterfall, and it turns out i walked about 10 km in total. other than that not too much has happened. the spanish is getting better. wildlife-wise there have been frogs and hundreds of small lizards, one large bright green hummingbird and a treeful of small brown ones, a spiny green caterpillar, and a very large koati (kinda like a big racoon with a longer nose). also poison dart frogs! and a moth as big as both of my hands. that about sums it up for now, ill write soon.

gus

mastatal

vocab of the week: while in english a llama is a large furry horse-like animal, in spanish it in fact means fire, resulting in the tv news headline "en llama" set over a house ablaze

things are slow as ever here, and its safe to say spanish is squarely kickin my ass. while i have all of the grammatical and structural information needed in conversation, it has been quite hard for me to transfer it into actually talking. i know i just need to talk to people, thats what everyone and their mother tells me. i feel like kina an inconvenience when i try tho. and its unbelievable to me that anyone here understands each other, they all talk so fast and slur all of the words together so much. i like to think that in english there are spaces between words, although i don´t know how it sounds to a foreigner, but this is just like one long endless river of noise that somehow has meaning. on the bug front i have seen 3 extremely strange ones and have pics to prove it. the first was this bizarre beatle with weird clumps of red stuff all over it and a really big nose. the second i guess was a locust but was bigger than i imagined locusts to be and an irridescant green. the third and most exciting flew directly at me last night. aside from its legs its body was extraordinarily flat and bright green and it had a head kinda like a hammer head shark. i got my camera and started taking pictures and then i looked at the one id taken from the front and realized it had arms and was in fact a preying (praying?) mantis at which point i got kinda scared cuz i have no clue if they can hurt people. so i went back to my chair but it was pointed and looking directly at me so i moved to another chair, and it angled itself with me so that it was still looking right at me, which creeped me out even more, like it was stalking me or something. so i went and brushed my teeth and when i got back it was on the wall above my bedroom door haha so i ran in and shut the door and went to bed. it hasn´t been as rainy lately, but still in the mid-eighties during the day. ill write again soon, my times up.

gus

mastatal

i have come to report i found out what people here do when they have to be inside. well, at least what my family does. they watch tv. for hours. its mostly really bad soap operas that they inexplicably love, but last night there was a dancing show, kind of like dancing with the stars. except on this one neither person is a professional dancer so they´re both very unskilled. as if things couldn´t get worse there is also very poor reception. the end result is that i have now, in 5 days, finished to 400 page books. livin the costa rican life woohoooo. No, i dunno, i´m working on finding some way to spend my time that wouldn´t be readily available to me in the u.s. Ive taken a couple hikes, both in an attempt to find a waterfall i remembered going to. i was successful the second time. but on both i was kinda scared that something large and/or poisonous was going to get me. the second time i was blessed to have a dirty stray dog follow me the entire time for protection. the showers continue to be too cold to stand under, and aside from rice and beans we haven´t had the same main course again yet which is wonderful. i just realized that unless you have been here or somehow found pictures online, you probably don´t know what Mastatal is like at all, so: There is a bar, called the cantina, and a very small restaurantish thing called a soda where you can get hot meals. there is a craftsman. there is a communtiy center, which is just a large building with one open room. it has two basketball hoops in it but from one to the other is probably about half a normal court. there is a soccer field thats really muddy, an elementary school, and a one room building called the high school. most kids go to the regional high school in la gloria which is much bigger. there is a small police station, and the internet place, which is a room with 4 computers in it or which only 3 seem to work. and then there is the Ranch, which is a sustainable living establishment for volunteers. the population here is a whopping 150, and the houses are very spread out along a dirt road. the scenery is unbelievable, its in the middle of the mountain rainforest, and if you walk 30 seconds off of the road you´d have no idea that there was civilization nearby. its humid and around 80 during the day, but more comfortable at night. last night was by far the hardest rain ive ever experienced, and the lightning lit everyting up. one thunder was so loud it actually made me jump, which arabella and carol (the mom and sister im with) just thought was hilarious. ive seen an armadillo, tarantula, one definitely non-poisonous baby snake (marcos told me), and one maby poisonous baby one i saw when i was alone but either way did not bite me. i also think i saw monkeys but they were really high up in the trees and dropping things onto the ground/me. i ate picarillo i think its called yesterday and it was delicious. its potato-like in taste and i think comes from the palm trees. well thats all i can think of for now, hasta luego!
gus

Mastatal

Both bus rides were successful, the entire thing smooth except for the small realizations during each that i had absolutely no way to recognize when i was supposed to get off. luckily things worked out and i found my way from san jose to mastatal. by the time i got here it was already dark and i therefore didn´t recognize much. it was also once again pouring which it seems to do pretty consistently after about 1:30 pm. so far its resulted in a lot of reading because i really can´t understand anything anyone says so any attempted conversation is pointless and for the most part uncomfortable. i had my first spanish lesson today though, and it was fine. unlike most classes I´ve been in i am really eager to learn the subject in this one. when i was here last time i was with american kids and only got to know the costa ricans that spoke english. alone this time, its really pretty bad not being able to say anything. anyhow i found lili, my homestay mom from last time, and she didn´t recognize me at first until marcos asked if she did and then i told her my name and it was like you could see a physical lightbulb switch on in her head as she remembered. the housing is basic, the showers are cold, and the food has been good. mosquitos also aren´t bad in the house. i have yet to find out what everyone here does for entertainment while it rains. my times up, ill write soon.
love gus

san jose

my first post! I left seattle at about midnight, got into san jose, CR at about noon, and got about 3 hours of sleep in between. the flights were smooth and i was comfortable enough with how everything was going, but that feeling was promptly gone upon landing here. firstly there weren't any signs for where to go to get our luggage so everyone was just standing around outside the gate looking left and right (our only options) and having no idea what to do. eventually someone went right and that got us to customs. that was fine and easy, and then i got my bag, and then tried to get money but the atm was broken. so then i got directions to the bus stop but to get there i had to get through the gauntlet of taxi drivers one of whom told me it was too dangerous to walk from the bus to my hostel so that was uplifting. i went to another atm first and accidentally got more american dollars but then successfully got some colones. at the bus stop, i told one of the guys where i wanted to go, and he said hed tell me what bus to get on. and so i waited as about ten similar looking buses all of which seemed to say san jose passed by, until one stopped and he told me it was the one i wanted. so i got on and there was throw up on the first seat i went to so i chose another one. about ten minutes in it started absolutely pouring outside, and i had from my estimation at least a 20 minute walk ahead of me. which reminds me! when i checked my bag i thought i'd hafta pay extra because it was so freakin heavy but it was only 48.5 pounds (the limit is 50) so that was lucky. in any case, after a while i realized i had no idea where i was supposed to get off so i asked the guy next to me and he said he was getting off there too so he'd show me. he also said i should take a taxi since it was raining so hard which seemed pretty reasonable. so we got off, i got in the taxi, got to the hostel, may have exeedingly overtipped the taxi driver I'm not really sure, and then i was in the hostel! after that it was all gravy, i got my room and it was all as i expected it to be. they have signs everywhere here with rules on them, the last of which is always "and be tranquilo!" the night was uneventful as i fell asleep at about 7 since i was so tired. it was also still raining. i didnt meet anyone too amazing here, tho it has its diversity down. the 4 people i talked to were from italy, holland, and norway. two were from norway. so now after a breakfast of pancakes i am about to leave for the bus out of here and i have no idea how its gonna go and very little confidence that it will be smoothly. but here goes! talk soon.

love, gus