Hola amigos!
So it´s August 10th, and been over 5 weeks now away from home! At least 15 more left to go!
So what the hell have I been doing for five weeks, you ask? (Or maybe you´re not asking and you really don´t care, but I´ll tell you anyway.)
I spent the first three weeks at a CISV seminar camp with 29 other people from 17 countries - Canada, US, Mexico, Costa Rica, Colombia, Ecuador, Brazil, Spain, UK, France, Germany, The Netherlands, Italy, Denmark, Sweden, Israel, and Austria. For those of you not familiar with seminar camp - we 25 participants spent 3 weeks planning, managing and running our own camp, with the help of 5 lovely staff members. We planned our own activities and shared our opinions and our countries´stances on so many topics - the disparities between rich and poor, abortion, the Iraq war, and prejudices, to name a few. And then of course there was dancing and singing and shisha smoking and lots, and lots of laying around on rainbow coloured matresses. Far too much happened to write in detail, but ask me later on if you want to know more!
John and I - John Robertson was the other Canadian participant, he´s from the Victoria chapter. Turns out West Coasters can be cool - hah! I miss you John!
After camp there were far too many goodbyes... As the group became fewer and fewer we spent over a week in San Jose partying, bungee jumping (I still can´t believe I did that.), volcano-seeing (Poas and Arenal), touring rainforest canopies on ziplines, shopping, and we also went to La Fortuna for a night, a town I was at last time, near the active volcano, Arenal (We saw lava!).
Me bungee jumping! Alonso (CR staffie), Vinh (staffie-Denmark), Fabian (Austria), Salim (Israel), Elena (Italy), and I put aside our sanity and jumped off a bridge! :D
On July 31 I left the last couple CISVers and headed to Orosi to study Spanish. To get here I had to catch the bus in San Jose, then transfer in Cartago. Some thing that sounds easy enough, but my Spanish is terrible and people were sending me in circles (Or I just wasn´t understanding, but I´ll blame them.). So I ended up walking around downtown San Jose for an hour with my backpack, and finally found the bus as it started to rain. Telling you I was stressed out would be a minor understatement - this was the first thing I´d had to do alone so far on the trip, and for that matter really any trip outside Canada, and here I was doing a terrible, terrible job. But finally I made it to Orosi and found the family who I´m spending 3 weeks living with. We´d of course never met before - everything was arranged through the Spanish school. We stumbled through introductions... knowing maybe 20 Spanish words and not knowing how to put a sentence together never makes introductions easy. But I settled in I suppose, and have been here for a week now. My family lives in a small house just off of the main street (Mind you ´main street´Orosi makes Quinpool road look like main street NYC) and they have two boys - Luis, 11, and Aaron, 6. Orosi is a small town surrounded on all sides by hills and coffee farms - gorgeous.. I´ll have to post photos!
On Tuesday I walked to Cartago (a city 15 km from here) for the celebration of the Virgin of Los Angeles. I´m not Catholic and I didn´t really know what was going on, but I went anyway. My host father, his friend and I (the rest of my host family has been sick all week) set out at 7:30 pm for the long walk to Cartago. Approximately 2 million people made the pilgramage to Cartago from as far away as Nicaragua! I didn´t exactly know what to expect when we finally made it there (...after 15km of walking in the heat, much of it uphill and in the dark) but I was expecting some sort of religious ceremony and to be there for at least a couple hours... But instead, we belined for the church, walked rapidly through it (apparently without stopping for a prayer) and then caught the bus home. I won´t lie - I was confused. Two days later my Spanish teacher clearly explained to me the signifance of the holiday - a woman a long time ago used to walk to the river every day, and she would see, day after day a small rock shaped like the Virgin. After a while she decided to take the rock home, and the next time she returned to the river again there was a rock shaped like the Virgin, so I guess she called up the Catholic Church or something, and they declared it a miracle and called the river holy. And so now every year people walk there on the anniversary, the walk representing the walk the woman had made so long ago. The people walk to the church that now houses the rock shaped like Virgin (It´s small - maybe 6 inches to a foot) and to the holy river nearby. I hope what I´m telling you is correct. She explained it to me in Spanish, so this is what I understood... but please, correct me if I´m wrong!
So yeah, the past week and a half have been rather uneventful. Last week there weren´t really any tourists, though this week there some cool ones, but I´m too sick to hang out :( I´ve just been spending the mornings in class - 3 hours of one on one lessons each day, and then the afternoons I´ve been spending doing my homework, studying, at the internet cafe (I´ve spent far too much time at it.), resting, and playing with the kids. I´ve picked up a fair bit of Spanish, considering it´s only been a week, though I´ve yet to get past being too shy to use it. The kids are sweet, and I´ll post photos of them once I have burned my photos to a cd. And I´ll post photos from the rest of the trip when I can remember to bring my cds to the internet cafe.
Anyway, that´s about all that´s been going on here, let me know how your summers are going!!
Oh - a note for those of you who´ve been to my house and know (and love, of course) my dogs - Nikki, the 14 year old Boston Bull Terrier died on the 22nd, I just found out on Tuesday. Pretty upsetting news, though he´s been blind and his health had been decreasing for a while now, so I knew I probably wouldn´t see him again when I left. Ah, my house is going to feel so empty when I get home!:(
This is where I´m headed next:
www.latortugafeliz.com - Headed here on August 21 for at least 2 weeks
Then I´m headed to Panama for at least 3 days to renew my visa - 3 if I go alone, perhaps more if someone wants to go with! Though if I can find some cool places to volunteer, maybe I´ll spend time there.. I want to get out of Costa Rica at some point.
Then I´m planning on going here: www.la-flor.org I´ll probably spend 2 weeks to a month or so here. It´s not far from Orosi, so I suppose it would make sense to head there next, but the turtles are laying eggs this time of year on the Carribean Coast :)
Anyway, take care guys - I apologize if I haven´t been able to maintain individual contact, but I´ve been busy! I miss you guys like crazy, so you know, if anyone feels like jumping on a plane to Costa Rica, just let me know! :D
Much love,
Holly
A random shot from a bus in San Jose on an excursion during seminar camp
