Such Is Life in the Tropics

Hi Friends. So much has happened since I last wrote, and it’s only been a week! Let’s see if I can remember it all.

I believe I left off last on the eve of our first day off. We have classes or field trips 6 days a week on my program, so our Sundays are much anticipated. For our first one we went to the beach, of which was about an hour and half away. We woke up early (breakfast here is served every day at 7am, even on our days off! I have become quite the early riser) and took a taxi into Atenas to catch the bus. This costs about $2 for as many people as you can fit, so we do this often when we don’t feel like walking. The buses come through town fairly often, but they are almost always crowded. We didn’t get a seat on either ride, and I have to say, the bus was the least pleasant experience I've had here thus far. They are the charter-type busses that we have in the US, but no air conditioning and the drivers pack on as many people as they can manage. The roads are bumpy, curvy, and all-around carsickness machines. We ended up sitting in down in the aisle on the way there so as not to vomit, but on the way home there were people pressed in all around us so that was impossible. Other than that, the beach was great and totally worth the hassle of gettting there (as I've since decided, most things are in Costa Rica). We had gorgeous weather, the waves were perfect for floating on, and we just laid out in the sun and got tan. What more can you ask for?

Let me tell you a little more about life at this field station. Every day we have a Student of the Day, which sounds like an honor but basically you just have more responsibilities. You fetch latecomers, are in charge taking pictures with the group camera, write out the day’s schedule, enforce quiet hours, and lead RAP. RAP is every morning at 8am, and the SOD has to think up something for a Reflection, ask for Announcements, and teach a Physicality. SOD rotates alphabetically, so I was SOD one day this week. My RAP involved a rousing game of Wild Wild West, which my friends are big fans of now. Another thing we have here are our pandillas (gangs). Weekly chores rotate among pandillas: meal set up, meal clean up, bathrooms cleaning, organizing social activities, and “moral support” (aka week off). My pandilla, the Pumas, was on social this week. This entailed baking a cake for a birthday, organizing people to go to this really bizarre but excellent concert, and arranging for everyone to have a secret Valentine. The Valentines were a pretty big hit—we convinced our director to buy us a bunch of candy to give each other, made cards, and then spent the day guessing who their secret Valentine was. It was pretty cheesy, but we all had fun with it.

Another hit was salsa lessons—not a part of the social pandilla, but actually our culture class. This happened in the outdoor classroom one night, with a ghetto boom box. One of our teachers and his sister taught us a few steps, and soon we were all looking real fine and spinning each other like pros (ok, maybe at least slightly awkward amateurs). This was SO much fun. We are now in search of a salsa bar in town to show off our new skills.

Our field trip this week was to a few different places, but had a general theme of agriculture/land use. It was a dramatic contrast to last week’s trip to the rainforest, since most agriculture is biologically considered a green desert due to the total lack of biodiversity. It all started with a 6am breakfast and a 3 hour drive south. We visited the largest sugar cane plantation in the country in Juan Vinas, chewed on some sugar cane (as modeled below by my favorite roommate Miranda and I), and then drove a little further to a co-op sugar processing plant that has over 800 small farmer members. It was amazing to see trucks towing huge loads of sugar cane at one end and refined sugar coming out the other end. Surprisingly, the plant was extremely sustainable. Their two sources of energy are the crushed cane (which comes out totally dry and like sawdust after all the sucrose has been extracted), which they burn, and the steam that they get from heating up the sugar juice to concentrate it. I also added a picture of a sugar cane field, and you can see the natural forest behind it for contrast. After examining this monoculture system, we drove across a very sketchy bridge that barely fit our bus, and toured a pejivaye and banana plantation. This is a very little known fruit, but you may have heard of peach palm? Probably not. This setup uses the mature palms for fruit, the baby ones for heart of palm, and others for their wood. This part of the trip was really cool (even though it was raining), and we witnessed some crazy machete skills that provided us with heart of palm straight from the tree! We also visited CATIE, an international agriculture research and development institution, where we sat through a few really boring lectures and one really cool one about analog forestry. Analog forestry was developed in Sri Lanka, and is a model that helps farmers convert their monocultures into a forest using biological succession and plants that they can still harvest and turn profit from. If you ever happen upon a label that says Certified Forest Garden, you should buy it. Oh, also we went to the Botanical Garden run by CATIE, where they had all kinds of plants. We had a really cool tour and ate lots of fruits that we had never even heard of and others that we had never seen on trees. They had a small grove of cocoa plants, the pods of which I attempted to eat (see left).

We spent the night at a hotel in Cartago, and got to go out for dinner. Because it was Valentine’s Day, we were specially allowed to have extended curfew, which led to a fun night. On the way home the next day we stopped at the national Cathedral, where they have the La Negrita statue, who is the patron saint of Costa Rica. The legend has it that an indigenous girl found this statue on rock and brought it to her priest, who put it in a cupboard in the church. The next day the statue was gone and the girl found it on the same rock that she had visited earlier. This happened a few times, and the statue is believed to perform miracles. They now have the statue at the front of the Cathedral, covered in gold all except her face (you can kind of see a black dot in the middle of all that gold inside that red arch in the picture to the left). Thousands of people from all over Costa Rica make pilgrimages to the Cathedral, especially on August 2^nd. Anyway, the finale of the field trip was getting stuck in traffic in San Jose, which was absolutely ridiculous.

Saturday night we went to the concert I mentioned earlier. We found it randomly in the local paper, and since it was nearby we decided to check it out despite having no idea what it would be like. The band was Malpais, which might be described as a Latin Grateful Dead. The concert cost about $8, took place in a bullfighting arena, and was a bizarre mix of a high school production, circus, and really excellent music. Between the songs there were some pretty amateur fire dancers (who dropped their gas-soaked batons a few times), people in huge masks and giant costumes, and some kind of storyline about a smelly guy giant who was in love with a woman giant. Everyone else in the audience belted out all the words to every Malpais song and was super excited, so that was fun to be in the middle of even though we had no idea what was going on. They also were selling caramel-filled churros, which are amazing. Overall the concert was a little weird, but a cool experience.

This brings me to the second day off, which was Sunday. Miranda and I organized 8 people to go to some waterfalls that we had seen evidence of on a sign on the way to the beach last weekend. After some sketchy taxi negotiations and 4 or 5 u-turns, we got to a hut by the side of the road nex to the trailhead. We had to pay the man $15 (very pricey here) to pass, but it was totally worth it. We hiked about an hour down a really beautiful forest valley and got to what claims to be the highest waterfall in Costa Rica. We pretty much had the entire valley to ourselves, it was beautiful, the water felt great, we saw some sweet bugs, and frequently exclaimed about how incredible the whole thing was. The picture to the left is me and Miranda again, and the waterfall keeps going down more, about as much again as you can see in the picture. It was huge! The hike back up to the road was pretty much straight uphill, so that sucked. But about 50 seconds after we made it to the lookout at the top, a pair of scarlet macaws flew out in front of us! These birds are the one thing I really wanted to see this semester, and they were absolutely beautiful. It was like watching a rainbow fly, they’re that colorful. We didn't get any great pictures because it happened so quickly, but I put up the best one.

Now I’m going to attempt to get a full night’s sleep before embarking on another, equally promising week. I’ve gotten the early to rise part fairly down, but early to sleep is still a challenge for most of us. There’s also some really obnoxious yappy dogs on our street that enjoy barking at about 4am. Hope you all are well and enjoying American food, which I am craving. Buenas noches!