Wow I can’t believe I’ve been here over 3 weeks! And I’m 21! Ahhh it’s crazy, but it’s also amazing.
My Spanish is definitely coming along. It’s becoming more natural for me to speak in Spanish and have a real conversation. Meeting with Reinier and hanging out with the ticos help a lot…and I am also attempting to spend more time everyday just looking up words I don’t know and keeping a long list of useful words.
This weekend was AMAZING. Friday I went on a field trip with my cultures of latin America class. First we went to a sugar mill. It was awesome but the tours of places here are definitely a lot different than in the US. Our professor knew a guy that worked there so we basically just walked around right where the workers were making the sugar and the guy just talked about the process a little. I got to taste raw sugarcane which was delicious actually. You just suck the juice out of the cane and it’s like candy. We also got to taste the sugar after they cooked it and that was delicious too… really rich but it tasted totally different than the sugar we eat because it’s not processed or anything at all. After the sugar mill we went to a coffee plantation which was also kinda behind the scene and not officially a tour haha. It was really cool. We say all the steps to make the coffee beans and it’s way more intricate and the beans originally look different than I ever imagined. Then we got to jump into a pool of coffee beans! It was like this giant tank full of beans and we got to play around in it for awhile!
Then 7 of the girls from the field trip took a bus to San Jose and met up with 6 other USAC girls at this Hostel called Hostel Pangea. One word to describe Pangea…insane. I wouldn’t describe as myself as a hostel person I guess haha. There were tons of people there, mostly foreigners… I was in a room with a guy from Austrailia and a girl from Finland. The hostel was wicked nice for a hostel though. We paid like fifteen bucks. They had internet and a bar and a restaurant and a movie theater/room and a pool table and it was actually really clean. But I think I got like 3 hours of sleep the whole night. You could hear anything and everything that happened in the hallway all night. And I had 6 roommates that all came in and left at different times throughout the night. Haha…it was definitely an experience. I give Ben credit for doing that basically every night for a month.
Then Saturday we woke up early and took a 2 hour bus ride to Irazú Volanco! It was amazing! The biggest crater was over 900 feet deep and over 3000 feet wide! Then we climbed this trail up and up and up and reached the highest point on the volcano which wasover 9200 feet above sea level. By the time we got there the clouds had come in and we couldn’t see the volcano anymore. But the clouds were really cool too. It was so cloudy. We were basically standing in the clouds haha. It was a lot colder and the altitude made it a little harder to breathe 9200 feet above sea level!
Then we took the 2 hour bus ride back. Then another 2 hour bus ride back to Puntarenas. Overall, it was an amazing 2 days!
haha thanks for the shout out laura! hostels are deff interesting..... i have stayed in my tent about 10 nights, but the rest have all been in hostels..... some sketchier than others, and others just big party scenes, often with a bar in the basement, and the bass thumping to all hours of the night, but then there are some really quiet and quaint hostels run by like families, that like make you breakfast, give you tea and coffee or have really nice spas (hot tubs)... but i have met soooooooo many people from all around the world, its crazy, you never know whose gonna be in your room, most of the time co-ed and even the bathrooms and showers are co-ed sometimes! haha.. thats a bit interesting..... overall though, i think the nz hostel scene is pretty legitimate and its a unique experience for sure, like right now, im in a super quiet hostel with FREE internet!!!! but i have some random biker dude as a roomate, slightly afraid to go to bed. but exhausted, cuz i did about a 60k bike ride today and a 2 hour hike! i was lied to about the total distance..... anyhow, ill post a real blog tomorrow before i catch the bus again! see ya chica!
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