Week 3

My home starting March 2nd

Coffee being toasted

I have now completed 3 weeks in Costa Rica! As before a lot happened this week. On Wednesday we went to a coffee plantation which was a tour of the factory, it was really really loud and I understood that it is important to control the humidity in the factory and that the beans need to be dried many times. After the coffee tour we went to a local alternative medicine place where they tell what is wrong with you by reading your energies with a stick... theres more to it than that but I am struggling to describe it. I of course volunteered to lay down on a massage bed in front of about 60 people I don't know and have my energies read. This was a bad life choice as it was discovered that the middle of my forehead contains an energy that relates to my reproductive glands so they stopped and asked me in front of all these people if I was having a hard time getting pregnant. I then got to explain to the people poking me with sticks, my classmates, and a canadian tour group that I am in fact on birth control so were I trying to get pregnant it should be difficult. It was awkward but they found parasites in some people so it could have been worse I suppose. The coffee trip ended with a whole bunch of coffee drinking which was fabulous.

this is the spider I found in my bed
its not dangerous but it is super creepy

Just the view from my house. 

This weekend I visited my field site for the first time. It was a mixed experience. Lets start with the good things, my new host family is very welcoming and well connected to fishing which is what I'm there to study sort of, the house is roughly 50 feet from the ocean (30 at high tide), they have 5 or 6 dogs and a cat that I suspect is part jaguar, and there are scarlet macaws that live naturally in the trees. In terms of bad things, my room is not connected to the house internally so when they lock the main house at night I loose access to the bathroom, there are spiders that are really way too large living in the house because they eat mosquitos, and there are chickens on the property that will be dinner therefore I as a member of the household will be slaughtering chickens. Also there are crocodiles.
On Saturday night I got quite sick probably due to the travel and different bacterias in the water. My San Jose host family seeing that I was about to get quite sick from drinking iffy water offered me

Crocodiles in Río Tarcoles

Lagoon located 1 mountain above Volcan Poas.

"alcacelcer"which turned out to be 1/2 a liter of salt water, I was quite displeased at being deceived by them however it probably kept me from getting even sicker so they have now been forgiven.
Sunday morning I was woken up at around 6 and asked how I was feeling, not well so I was packed into a car and taken to the volcano poas for some fresh air. Even though hiking on a very upset stomach wasn't the most fun thing in the world, the lagoon created by an old volcano at the top of the mountain was beautiful. The volcano is at a higher altitude than san jose so I was told to dress warmly or I would freeze, it was around 55 degrees at the top of the mountain.... there were people there in snow suits. Why anyone in Costa Rica owns a snow suit is beyond me but they looked chilly and told me I was crazy for walking around in a t-shirt and jeans. Unfortunately the volcano was spitting out sulfur smoke stuff and that with the clouds made the actual volcano impossible to see unless you were lucky enough to be looking at it right when a cloud moved, I was not so I did not seen the actual volcano. During my stay here I plan to visit at least 2 other volcanoes so hopefully I have more luck then.
That pretty much wraps up all the fun things I've been up to, my research proposal is almost finished and on Saturday I leave San Jose for Tárcoles where I will be living for 2 months. I am hoping to be able to post from there as I will have access to my e-mail so fingers crossed.