Old photos n' new news

Here are some pictures from our beautiful weekend trip to Manuel Antonio, a beach that is about 4 hours away from San José. The ride was long, full of bridges that crossed giant deep jungle rivers, and other rivers that seemed straight out of photos of the African savanna. But we finally got there, and happily had left at 7am from ICADS - so were on the beach and in the water by 11 am.

The Pacific was so beautiful! The waves were so huge, and so warm! I learned how to swim with big breaking waves and get carried on top of them, and also that if you go just barely underwater when a giant wave is about to crash on your head, it flows right over you without pulling you at all. I learned that after a weary hour of battling against the waves though. I think it's safe to say that this one had never really swam in the ocean before..

After a couple hours I grew hungry though, so went and ate the cheapest meal at the little beach restaurant (Costa Rican traditional food, luckily! Arroz con pollo and lots of beans and salad and salsas). I also got some semi-tropical drinks that I had been joking about with a friend, which were packed with tiny cubed lime bits, and later some more beers. It was just the beginning of the shortest but most soaked-up and appreciated weekend holiday that has ever been had.

I played in the ocean for hours, while friends napped, tanned (it was cloudy - but most of us still came away with a burn), and surfed. Later, when it looked like rain clouds were moving in, four of us decided to go around the beach and explore. Beyond the many stops (for me) to look at all the wild little shells that had washed up on the beach, and for another friend to climb trees and get lost in mangrove forests, we ended up on a giant island of volcanic rock jutting out into the sea, around which the waves were splashing in a very Titanic-esque way.

Despite none of us having shoes, we climbed first to one level of the mountain, then to the next, and up and up until we were at the very top, about 30 feet above the sea. On the ocean-side of the giant cliff, hundreds of deep blue speckled crabs were scuttling to the water. It was all very beautiful, and I'm sad, but also content that I didn't have a camera to take any pictures.

But it did hurt our feet, and so slowly but surely we climbed down. I explored more of the shells washed up on the beach, and we all began roaming in separate directions down the last stretch of sand. While some friends spoke to a local working for a hotel on the beach, I played with the many hermit crabs sneaking along, and just contentedly spaced out, staring at the ocean. Someone has to do it.

After following a river up back into the tree line however, I got called by a friend to go back and see a sloth. It only actually looked like a giant fuzzy peach butt, but I'm happy to say I've seen a sloth sleeping now. It was pretty cute. At about the same time, it truly started to rain, and so we decided to head back. Lightning crashed right behind us after I'd just come back to cover from running to wash one of a coconuts we found off in the ocean. I think convassing this summer has made me immune to the fear of getting struck by lightning. If I look up some statistics I could easily bring myself back to where I was though, I'm sure.

Anyways, when we got back to the hotel, we grabbed a knife and cracked open a couple of the coconuts. It was pouring rain, and I was rinsing sand off myself in the gutter, and hacking at a giant fresh coconut I'd found in the woods with a knife. It was a really great moment. Coconut water itself has a terrible flavor, I personally find, but I chowed down on the fresh insides. The rest of the coconut water we put into a bottle of rum, which was a warm and thick drink. Not as tropically delicious as it sounds. But I've heard that coconut water is incredibly good for you. So perhaps it was healthy.

The hotel served some uninteresting food, but it was easy for us to stay in one place and not have to deal with group transportation yet. Organizing the bill was a pain - it always is with young folx. I'm very seriously considering refusing to eat with people my age and ever share a bill again, because it drives me insane how disorganized and yet rigid people become when paying together. If you're going to be an asshole, pay by yourself. End of story. I ended up getting so frustrated that I payed whatever extra was mysteriously missing and peacing out. For my good deeds and anxiety-caused, excused myself to sit out on the porch with a beer to watch the lighting storm across the beach.

The night that followed was a mysterious and bizarre train of events, leading us from club to club, or rather being led by a suspiciously friendly man one of us had met on a bus. As a group, we ended up doing all the things ICADS told us were unwise (as our parents and common sense have as well - but who listens to those all the time?). However, since we were in a group we also helped each other realize how wild the situation had become. And that was when we ended up in the 3rd or 4th bar, where this man was introducing us to his sister (an old prostitute who was planning on singing us her favorite song), and two friends who had also been following us from club to club. I was watching a doorway, through which I could see a line of women getting ready to go out and find men to buy their time. It was a surreal thing to realize. Especially since the room they were in had a big poster of Snow White on the wall. I remember thinking about how prostitution is legal here, and being undecided about whether I was being an uptight American tourist, or whether this bar really was slowly appearing more and more shady. But it was large, and open, and one of my friends was even dancing with this random guy who had decided he was our tour-guide for the evening.

That was about the same time my plastic chair collapsed under me, which was quite a spectacle. One of the legs just bent and I went sliding across the floor. After that, I didn't feel comfortable drinking or even staying, and since most of my friends were on the same page, we left, though the man ended up following us to another club. I didn't have enough money on me to pay the entrance fee, and wasn't convinced it was worth having someone cover me since I was already exhausted from being thrown around by waves all day. The over-friendly man was talking to the bouncers, trying to translate for us, and told us they were closing in 15 minutes, and that we should go back to the other bar (they were not actually closing for another 3 hours). But he was also being too flirty and too touchy, asking for hugs and kisses, holding my arm to tell me I was beautiful and next thing saying I was his lover and wife - but that's not especially bizarre here I was told. I edged further and further away, told him no, and sorry but "life is rough," to which he responded "but that's how I like it". Aaaand at that point my patience for the situation flipped, and I realized I was being a very stupid young tourist, and we grabbed the next cab - and a couple of the more out of it friends who hadn't made it inside and sat for a harrowing taxi ride up the mountain home.

A good thing too. In the morning my friend Paul (who had stayed in the club for another hour or two) came into our hotel room and told us that when he'd gotten out of the club a few hours later, the man was still there (his friends had been inside), and as Paul got into a cab with the last stragglers of the group, the man grew enraged, demanding money and punching his shoulder. I'm sure there were a million miscommunications that happened. Perhaps, when he first introduced himself, he offered to guide us around. If that was the case, and he'd heard the things we were whispering (to get us out of the sketchy bar faster, one drunk member of our party lied to us about having seen the man's friends knives..), it's understandable that he was upset. It's so hard to gauge intentions, and since I live in a relatively safe bubble of a world, I always forget exactly how much relying on other's better judgment and drinking are two things that really should never go hand in hand.

I spent the rest of the night taking care of a friend who had drank too much, and despite having only had a couple drinks myself, woke up with a terrible hangover the next morning. Going over the details about how stupid we had been didn't make me feel much better. But the nondescript hotel breakfast, accompanied by cups of lovely Costa Rican coffee and then a $10 dollar massage on the ocean did, providing the fastest hangover cure I've ever experienced. The masseuse cracked my back by plucking at the skin around my spine - it was wild. After packing up our rooms, we went swimming in the pool while waiting for those friends who'd gone to a nature preserve to come back. I was happy to have stayed and appreciated the ocean however, and relax more. It was a weekend that gave me a lot of time for introspection, and to make myself content. I certainly left a little wiser to what an idiot I can be (I wonder how I could have forgotten), and also with a clearer picture of why I am here, and who I want to be here, and in general. There's more to it than that, of course - there always is, but that's all for tonight I think! That's my wild story. It's been almost a week since then, but I figured I should write it down so that I don't forget it.

And the moral is not that people should not be trusted. But rather, that going with your gut is not the bad thing to do in most situations, especially at night when intoxicated in a country where you don't speak the language, don't have a cell-phone, and don't even know the name of the street you're on or what's around the next corner. If I were a 200 lb man maybe this would not be so. But that isn't the case, and I'd be an idiot to believe anything to the contrary.

This is all very poorly written.. But I was in the blazing sun all morning watching Independence Day parades, and since have been writing a paper and am really out of it. Oh well.

Sleepy nothing

Upon waking up this morning, I already knew I had a mega-migraine, and resented everyone for existing. It's wild to me how very early in the mornings I can feel such intense hate without even opening my eyes. It slowly dissolves, but never totally dissipates. At breakfast, I think Ana sensed how deeply I was dreading the day ahead, and made extra effort to cheer me up. Which was kind, but I still had dropped my mascara brush on my nice shirt, and ran out of shampoo and conditioner in the shower, so my bubbliness wasn't as forthcoming as per usual. My greatest fear when coming to Costa Rica was the affect that my own cynicism and perma-melancholy would bring to this experience. That I fear my own inability (or ineptitude?) to control my emotions says a whole lot, none of which seems too interesting to write about right now.

To put my mood in perspective though, I've had a very long weekend..

On Friday, I woke up at 6 am and rushed through my morning routine, running up the hill to ICADS with two pastries and a small Costa Rican pear in hand. Our class took a busetta over and through the beautiful mountain ranges surrounding San José and into the foothills, where we stopped first at the finca of Don Enrique and the AFAORCA (Associacion des Familias Agricultoras Organicos de los Cerros Caraigres), an organization of 22 Fair Trade family farmers with small plots of land who farm organic coffee. We learned about how, fifteen years ago when AFAORCA first began to farm organically, there was little incentive from within Costa Rica - and how little has changed, though now more farmers are seeing out AFAORCA's help since their own farms, pastures, and health have been so brutalized by the chemical pesticides that are still legal here.

However, the process of becoming certified organic is an incredibly expensive one for most Costa Rican farmers. The USDA leases out its own name and title to inspectors, who then relay the costs to small landowners. Beyond having to wait two years for the half-lives of most pesticides to pass during which time the sale of ones goods is fairly impossible, farmers must ensure that their land is entirely separated from neighboring lands that may use pesticides. This is extremely difficult, since most farmers already cannot support their families with the income their farms bring in.

For coffee, this created an even larger problem when the United States attempted to provide South Asia with economic stimulus through the coffee bean - destabilizing world markets and causing the price of a 100-weight bag of coffee to plummet. Fair Trade, developed as a consequence of this, certifies that small-farm workers were paid according to set price standards for their coffee, though currently the label is under strain since large agri-businesses such as Walmart have been attempting to grow, purchase and sell fair trade coffee on a much larger scale.

Within Costa Rica, there is very little market for organic coffee - in fact, it is primarily from the United States that this market has materialized. However, Don Enrique and his family support a more widespread network of fincas integrales (comprehensive and self-sustainable farms which provide food security). Don Enrique and his wife live on one of these farms, and we held our next session of the day in one of his cattle pastures on the top of a mountain.

After studying soil content, erosion, and related topics for several hours while clambering up and down the mountain side faster than the cows that live on it, Don Enrique's wife prepared us all a massive and delicious lunch, much of which came from her own garden. When my pictures are finally online you will be able to see her different tank gardens, her bio-fuel pigs, chickens, and her truck-bed manure system. They also live on the top of a mountain overlooking a valley - - all in all an incredibly kind, generous, and beautiful family who have created a wonderful home for themselves.

The harrowing turns down a million mountain sides were lessened on the way back since I'd realized that from my seat I could spot many different kinds of fruit trees. Seeing oranges, lemons, and limes still is so exotic to me, and hasn't stopped being thrilling. More so than the windy roads.

But they were worthwhile, since we ended up at the restaurant where Don Enrique's sons serve AFAORCA coffee - creating and solidifying a market within Costa Rica for the best coffee that has traditionally been exported to wealthier countries. We were shown how coffee roasting works (the difference between a normal roast and a French roast is only a matter of 3-5 seconds!), and how true coffee tasters test the quality of the beans. Much more complicated than wine tasting!

Again, once I upload my photos, everything will be much easier to understand. But it was a wonderful end to the day, even though I'd forgotten my own wallet and went without a coffee of my own. I still had an amazing time, though was completely exhausted by 7 pm when I finally arrived back at my home.

It's funny - the exhaustion of traveling is easy to parallel with the exhaustion of mono that I suffered from my second year of college. As soon as I come home, waves of tiredness wash over me. Some nights it is easier than others to keep my eyes open - some it's not even worth the struggle. Usually Ana saves me from my blank stares at the unfamiliar shapes of words in my tareas, and I can sit still and eat delicious food and avoid thinking about the work that remains. The family comes and goes in the kitchen, at a slow but erratic pace that easily entertains.

Friday night, Rosie and I spoke in greater detail for the first time, and I learned more about the five orphans she was going to visit. She shared with me their deeply sad story, which shook me more than anything else here has. They are the children of two families of abused women whose father's have both committed suicide, and two young siblings from these families have also died in recent years. The mothers are very poor and live with their own grandmothers, and the children have little access to school (since it is two hours away, and for one family the four children's only option is to herd cattle or pile on to their deaf and mute aunt's motorcycle). Rosie is their godmother, I believe, and told me she wants to bring me someday soon.

Rosie also told me that I am a good ICADS student - though she phrased this by stating that I am either the 10th student they've had, or that this is their tenth year hosting a student, and that I am high on the list of favorites. After a week, I'm happy! What accolades! I'm well on my way to becoming these two ladies best-friend-for-life. It is interesting though how I feel like I'm swaying from being treated like I am in a bed and breakfast (and a part of the income - which I am) to being just another body in the busy house of my hosts.

I am so tired! I have so much work I should do, I can't write any more..this blog post wasn't very interesting at all.. Oh well, next time! I had a wild weekend that will blow your minds, so in anticipation for that - and the beautiful photos I have stored up, goodnight.

Oh, here's a picture of me happy on da beach taken by a friend who's put up her pictures!