La Casa Bonita y Volcan Poas

Oh my gosh... blogspot thinks I'm Spanish and changed all of my editing options to Spanish.  =X  Well let's see how this goes.

Last night on the way into San Jose, there were thunderstorms our pilot tried to navigate around and we ended up being delayed in the air for about an hour.  When I reached my host home, it was too dark to really see anything and too late to chat with my family so I just unpacked and went to sleep.  This morning, though, I got up early and walked around... their home is beautiful!  They have an orchid nursery that padre maintains (that weird looking gray dome is where it's at) and it's literally like a secret garden.  I would love to spend all day just sitting in the front yard listening to the birds and smelling the flowers.  My host dad was telling me about the national bird and we talked for a little bit about how Texas is around this time of year.  It was lovely.  And I found a cactus tucked away on the side of the house... you're never far from home.  =]

Then madre walked us to la universidad which is about 20-30 minutes away on foot.  From there, we met the rest of our group (19 of us in all) and hopped on the bus to head up to Volcan Poas y Lagoon Botos.  Let me tell you what, it was AMAZING.  Sincerely.  It's located in the cloud forest in the central valley around San Jose so it took about an hour and a half on a super curvy road up the mountain to get there.  It's an active volcano still so when the clouds cleared everyone cheered because it was a perfect, beautiful view.  After we spent some time there, we hiked around the different trails and visited the lake and spent some time getting to know each other.  We had  a lot of fun and on the way back down the mountain, we stopped to have lunch at a local soda (a restaraunt with a cafeteria-like line of delicious Costa Rican food) and just kinda putzed around for a while.

  

This is Jesenia, one of our program directors.  She's wonderful and in this picture she's telling us about "los sombrillas de pobre" (the poor man's umbrella).  Apparently, back in the day when people were first inhabiting the land, they would encounter some rain showers during the day in the rainy season and would just pick these huge leaves and use them as umbrellas.  They're very large and it's hard to tell in this picture, but Jesenia is smaller than me and these leaves are massive in comparison to her.

My brain kind of fried when I got home though.  My host family speaks only spanish and I speak only english... see where this is going?  My roommate is like Wonder Woman or something though, because she knows spanish well enough to talk to them and translate for us.  I need to step up my game though and learn this language so it's not all on her.  =P  (Easier said than done, though.)  Anyways, I need to get some rest, tomorrow will be a long day and it's starting EARLY.

So as the ticos say... ciao!

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*Note: this was supposed to post last night but I was having MAJOR problems with it.  So two posts tonight if you're reading them in order.  =]*