There's a snake under my bed!

Something happened recently that I thought I should share because...it scared the life out of me! Some people call Costa Rica "posh corps" because of it's beautiful beaches, etc...however, it still has many scary PC like things that we don't have to deal with in our country. These things include; spiders as big as your head, rats, flying cockroaches, poisonous frogs/toads, vampire bats and SNAKES. These are not our regular garter snakes we have in MN, kind of cute, not that big and harmless...these are venomous snakes, and big ones. Including terciopelos, coral snakes and more. Needless to say, finding any kind of snake here is a little bit terrifying since you never know if it is dangerous. Which leads me to my story of the day...

As many of you know, I am done with Peace Corps in one week from today, so this means I have been going through all of my stuff I have accumulated during the last two years and throwing out and giving away all I can to bring as little as possible home (which is surprisingly hard...I have weird attachments to things I would never have had attachments to before). The other day I was doing just this, I was throwing out things and my little host sister was helping me. I was sitting on the floor of my one bedroom cabina with my feet under the bunk bed when all of a sudden I felt a cord or something on my foot, I moved a little because it tickled, but then I looked at my foot and saw something slither off of it! It was a snake!! In my mind, this was probably the biggest, most venomous snake Costa Rica has and I was about two seconds away from death, so, naturally, I screamed and jumped on my bed where my 10 year old host sister comforted me. Then we went to get my host dad to see if he could find this clever little snake and kill it. It turns out, he couldn't, as snakes are very good hiders. So my host dad left me with a flashlight and machete to fend for myself in case of a snake attack (maybe I'm a little dramatic). This just added to my fear, so the rest of the day I walked around with shoes on looking with a flashlight in every place I stepped. It didn't appear again. I had many nightmares and felt many snakes crawling on me that night and the night after.

Today I was finalizing my packing and looking through the bag of things I am going to leave at the Peace Corps office for any volunteer who might want something I leave, when all of a sudden, what do I find? The ENORMOUS snake that was hiding from me in this bag. Could you imagine if I had brought the snake all the way to San Jose only to have a poor PC volunteer find it in the shoes I was giving away? So I yelled for my host dad that I found it and he brought the bag outside with the machete and started emptying out the bag. It turns out this snake was not the six foot long terciopelo I was imagining, but a pretty small non-venomous snake...he thought that was pretty funny, because I was beyond scared. 

The lesson I learned from this terrifying experience? Your mind can really make things worse than they actually are. Although, I think I was justified in being scared, it was a snake, ON MY FOOT. I nearly died this week.

See you in a week! I think Costa Rica is sending me signs that it is time for me to leave, the snake, rat (haven't told you about that) and ant infestations are becoming all too frequent ;)