La playa, tech week, and site assignment!

Hola! I have really been slacking on my post writing, sorry about that! It is mostly because we have been very busy the past couple of weeks, going to the beach (rough life huh?!), visiting a volunteer, and preparing ourselves for finding out our sites this coming Friday.

Our exciting past couple of weeks started out at the beach on a Saturday with 20 of us. Our bus left San Jose bright and early at 7am (which meant we had to leave our houses around 5 am) to go to Playa Hermosa where stayed at a great hostel called Brisa del Mar. The hostel is run by two guys and one girl from North Carolina, they are just as cool as you would expect US surfers hiding out in Costa Rica for three years, very cool. It is a surfing beach so we got to watch endless surfing, which was amazing! The waves were huge and the beach was black sand (on the Pacific side). We had beautiful weather so I was very glad we got there around 11 am to hang out at the beach all day, swim, go out to eat for dinner, and visit a local bar. We were all pretty exhausted the next day, but that didn’t stop us from getting up early and going to the beach until we had to leave to catch our bus at noon! We got back to our houses, packed for the coming week, went to bed, and caught the bus on Monday morning in San Jose at 7 am once again to start tech week.

For tech week, we were split up into four groups, with each group of 10 visiting a different volunteer in Guanacaste (the HOTTEST part we could go to). The volunteer I visited lives in a small town about 5 ½ hours from San Jose right in the mountains. Her town has 350 people and we all stayed in 10 different houses with a host family, we are really learning how to be as adaptable as possible with different families! The volunteer scheduled the entire week for us so we did not have a dull moment. A common saying here is “si Dios quiere”, which translated means “if God wants”. They use this here for everything, for example…”are you going to my English class tomorrow” and they say “si Dios quiere”. So our volunteer was constantly calling people we had meetings with to make sure “God still wanted them to go”, it is a very good thing to know for my future site! So…the week actually happened as she planned! We taught English class (speaking only in English to students who know only the basics…very hard), made jewelry with the local women’s group, taught a computer class about PowerPoint, went on a 6 hour hike, interviewed micro-entrepreneurs, chatted with the local Empresa de Credito (they give small loans to the stakeholders in the community), and celebrated the week because it was the anniversary of the annexation of Guanacaste. Anyways, that week was fun and got us very excited to find out our sites!

After tech week we were all exhausted and had a nice relaxing Sunday before starting classes again on Monday. We had a normal week until Thursday; we got it off for one of Costa Rica’s most important holiday. It is the day they celebrate the Virgin Mary, it is celebrated all over the country but it is amazing because the big festival and mass is in Cartago, the old capital of the country. People walk from all over Costa Rica to Cartago to celebrate this holiday, some walking for a month or more! A couple people in my group walked 35 miles to get there, and they said it was just torture, but a good experience. I, on the other hand, decided to not walk and hung out with some friends grilling out and watching the Olympics all day (my host family didn’t walk so I figure it gave me the right to skip out), also, I can’t go out of our communities without a host family member, so its okay ;). Even though I didn’t walk 35 miles, it was a long day and we had to get up bright and early on Friday to…find out our future sites!!!

We met Peace Corps at 7:30 in San Isidro and they had two busses to take us all to this very nice country club that had tennis courts, pools, a hot tub, soccer field, basketball courts, and probably more. Peace Corps likes to keep us hanging, so when we got there they had a map of Costa Rica and had us all stand in a big circle, we played a game where you were given an animal and you had to close your eyes, make the animal noise, and find the other people who were the same animal as you. I was a monkey, so after some searching I found three other friends who were monkeys too! It turns out, these were the volunteers we are going to be in the same area as! I was very happy because my best friend here and I are very close to each other J also, we are by three other great volunteers from our group. However, the game wasn’t over after this. We had to send up one person from each group and they blindfolded each individually and put their site on the map with a post it sticker and we had to yell and help them point to their site, then they could look. It was very nerve racking but in the end was very fun! I am going to be in Fila Tigre, Puntarenas, Costa Rica. It is in the super south zone, very very close to Panama. My town only has about 400 people, but I hear it is very beautiful! I could write a lot more about what I learned but I think I will just have to write more later when I actually go!

After all of the excitement we got to swim, eat from an awesome fruit bar, and later have a great lunch, there was chicken, steak, sausage, fried plantains, black beans, salad, potatoes, and iced tea, it was perfect. We were then taken to a hostel in San Jose where a ton of Peace Corps Costa Rica volunteers were for the night. We all hung out, got to know each other, danced, and had a great time. I also got to meet three volunteers who are very close to us in the “super sur” (super south).

As you can see, it has been a VERY exhausting few weeks, so much excitement, nervousness, and being very busy can really take a toll on you! Which is showing now because I am lacking a voice. I think it was worth the sacrifice ;) I am hoping to update this more like before so I can tell better stories! I forget things quick when there are other things constantly happening J. OH! And I of course have new food to post!! I will try to post again soon, next Thursday we are going back to the place we had orientation week to meet the person from our sites who requested to have a volunteer and then Saturday they are taking us to see our future sites and meet everyone in the town, we will all be at our sites for a week. Okay, I need to stop typing and actually post this J I hope everyone is still doing great! Like always, if you have any questions or just want to chat, let me know!

FOOD!

-       Arroz con leche (milk with rice…very good dessert)

-       Pizza bread (I know we probably have this but it is especially good here)

-       Fried yucca

-       I HAVE THE RECIPE FOR AVENA! (The drink with oatmeal I talked about in one of my posts…here it is!

o   Boiled water, powder milk to taste (more powder will make it creamier), dulce liquido de tapa (I think kind of like sugar water but sweeter, use as much as you want for how sweet you want it), and of course, oatmeal.

-       Tamal duro (like a tamale, it is a special kind from Guanacaste that is harder than regular tamales and has black bean spread and hard boiled egg inside…it is very good).

-       Corn pancake kind of thing from Guanacaste

-       I will try to write these down throughout the next week so I can remember everything…I’m pretty sure I’m missing some!

Wow I wrote a lot…sorry for any typos, I didn’t really proof read this one! J The pics above are at Playa Hermosa, a long hike we went on, and me and my friend pointing to our sites on the Costa Rica map :) Hope to talk to you all soon!