Week 6: Testing Fate

My host brothers and I under part of the waterfall

Ok so week 6 started out very productively with meetings and approvals and long days actually working on my project so Monday through Thursday afternoon are not super interesting so I shall skip them. On Thursday night I was sitting on my log watching the sunset with the 2 dogs who do not get tied up when the little Chihuahua runs up and jumps on my lap and I am happy because he is the softest and that was fun. Suddenly my whole family joins me and is like were giving the dogs baths you should come. Giving the dogs baths means walking them into the ocean and letting them swim about then declaring them clean... they are not but thats ok. So after we put the dogs back in their spots to guard the house my host brothers and dad were all Emma or Eva which is how they say my name, you should take a bath too. I tried to be all I literally saw a crocodile 20 ft from here yesterday but they would have none of it and insisted that if there was a crocodile in the ocean with us it would eat one of them first because they are smaller. This didn't make me feel better but I decided that swimming in the ocean at sunset with my host family should happen so swimming I went. It was wonderful and not as scary because since it was high tide we never were in more than 2 feet of water so it was more like wading but I suspect that big fish that attract crocodiles don't go that shallow so sorta safe I think.
             Friday was a big day for the cooperative I work with, a large group of fishermen and women came from the Nicoya Peninsula (look at map of Costa Rica) to observe the coop with the hopes of starting their own. In this event I got to sit and be awkwardly not Costa Rican all day but it ended with a fishing tour! My host dad was the captian of the boat I was on so I got a special seat and the best of the bait which was marvelous. Because all the other people on the boat were professional artisan  fishermen we caught quite a few fish, I did not catch anything but thats ok. We stayed on the boat until it was quite dark outside which was cool because the ocean completely changes in the dark. From the light of my cell phone flashlight I could watch squid and shrimp glide along the top of the water and most amazingly and I am not going to get the chemistry right here but something about the salt composition in this part of the ocean makes it glow bright green when you are moving fast enough, so when the boat was moving I could stick my hand in the ocean and make streams of neon green light in the water. It was awesome and I was throughly amused until someone on the boat was like you need to be careful how much you do that or you will draw the sharks closer. After that comment I did not decide to dunk my hand back in but still it was quite worth the unknown risk.
             Saturday was a little riskier still because I decided to walk down to Playa Azul by myself because I wanted some blue sand and I got pretty far until I saw a strange looking log in the distance. I was convincing myself that I was just being paranoid because I was by myself but as I was about to continue said strange looking log got up and walked into the ocean, it was a crocodile, I about faced and walked as calmly as I could back to the safety of the fishing boats. This encounter did not stop me from swimming in the ocean that evening.

this is 1/4 of the entire waterfall

            Sunday was the riskiest day I've had here but it was the most worth it. The best way to describe it is that had I known how dangerous it was going to be I might have freaked out a bit more but ignorance really really is bliss in this case. My host family decided to take me and Lauren to the waterfall. It is the tallest in Costa Rica and I have been looking forward to seeing it since I got here so I was very excited that my family had agreed to take me. The waterfall is actually connected to a garden and costs 20 US dollars to get in. My host family did not want to pay that so we went our own special way. If you are ever going to this waterfall pay the $20 and you will be putting yourself at much less risk but you won't see the same amount of nature as we saw. Our way was walking on pig trails (trails cut by these smallish warthog things) unstream of the river Tarcolitos which is fed by the giant waterfall . It was actually a really pretty walk but it involved a lot of wading through the river rapids in which my feet got caught between rocks many many times and then walking through the jungle up very steep inclines on a path that was not quite the width of one of my feet. This was very dangerous as I found out as I slipped and fell down about 15ft till a tree caught me but it was still more or less an adventure so we went along with it. We came across some really cool wildlife as we were walking along there were a ton of very cool colorful birds, we caught a glimpse of a warthog, saw a very large black snake, and caught some bright green and black frogs. It took about 2 1/2 hours to reach the top but we finally found the waterfall, or at least a portion of it, the entire waterfall is over 200ft so we really only saw a quarter of it but the quarter was well worth the journey. We played in the waterfall for quite sometime and then headed back the way we came. Luckily we did not meet up with any more snakes. When we arrived home I was super exhausted and went to bed a happy camper.

Clever and his poison dart frog

This is a baby version of what we saw

             I did not fully understand how dangerous our journey had been until this morning when my host mom woke me up to watch a show on animal planet about deadly animals. She woke me up because last week we watched the movie Anaconda and anacondas killing people was the third super deadly animal on this television program. We watch a lot of these programs because they usually feature Costa Rica which is fun because most of the crocodile footage is shot not too far from here so we were waiting for Tarcoles to come on the program when instead the next two extremely deadly animals were this giant black snake that looked very similar to the one we had seen about 3 feet from us on the river. It was the same snake and it is ranked among the most poisonous and deadly to people in the world and usually doesn't hesitate to strike. If bitten the person usually dies within 20 minutes I am ever so happy I found that out after we had already returned from our trip to the waterfall or I probably would have freaked out on our way back which wouldn't have helped anyway. The next deadly animal on this program was the poison dart frog, kills within 3 hours and is deadly when it feels threatened and covers itself in a poison saliva that can seep into your skin but is most deadly when it actually enters your blood stream. I was watching this program with my host brother Clever who spent a good half hour playing with these frogs, I seriously don't know how none of us got hurt but we didn't Pura Vida. I will most likely be more careful in the future but I guess what I've learned here is that Costa Rica especially the Pacific coast of Costa Rica (it gets its own episodes of these types of deadly animal shows) is a pretty dangerous place to live and freaking out and worrying about it probably won't help much. I am now more aware of the danger and can avoid it maybe but the fact of the matter is that even though I meet with at least one of the planets most deadly animals every day that no one here has died in the last 5 years so I'm not going to waste my time fretting about it and neither should you.

Week 5

Sunset Picture from my front yard

Ok I have good news! I will be back online, the ACM has agreed to pay for wifi within the consorcio that I work in so I should have facebook for like 2 hours a day, the consorcio is supposed to open at 8 and close for lunch at 11 then open back up at 12 till 5, yesterday it opened at 9:30 and closed at 11 and didn’t open again at all so Pura Vida, also the wifi wont let me sign on so this is being written in a word document with the hope of posting it to my blog later this week. So that is where I am at on the internet front! Being in Tarcoles is an experience, upon arrival I had the largest now what moment of my life so I just kind of sat around and watched, tried to talk to people, bothered my host family, got frustrated with the wifi, walked about the beach, found a dead sting ray, watch chickens cross the road (because my life is a joke now) but I really did all those things.  And this morning I found out that I have been doing it right I’m just supposed to watch things happen and observe them happening, figure out when people are on the beach and why and then watch what happens when there are fish and when there are not and look at things that wash up on the beach and such so with a little more talking to people I’m all set. That said I find I’m used to a bit more structure and am a little frustrated by the lack of things going on in my life but its all going to be fine.

On Tuesday afternoon my family took pity on my situation, which they call “esperando por el gallo puso” which means waiting for a rooster to lay an egg and is used for people who don’t do useful things with their lives. So we walked to Playa Azul named for its blue sand, unfortunately there are only spots of blue sand left because of pollution and garbage that comes down the Tarcoles River but apparently large clean up efforts have been put into place and the beach is much cleaner than it was before. The large amounts of garbage probably keep tourists from seeing it so it is rather unused even though the blue parts are really very cool. After seeing this beach my family showed me a river that is fed by a waterfall and is therefore pure, crocodile free, and ok to swim in. This is an epic discovery because now I know where the giant waterfall is, giving me something to do with my free days, and now I can swim when I really need to which is all the time because it is hot here.

In other news I have had questions regarding my 8 legged friend, she is still there and wants to cuddle but I now have a mosquito net which encompasses my bed, my spider friend simply cannot outsmart it but earlier this week I did wake up to a spider above my head so she keeps close in case I slip up but I feel that I have won.

Just a crocodile in the ocean

            On Wednesday morning I was sitting on the beach observing things like I’m supposed to when my friend and I noticed something in the ocean that was large and appeared to be moving, it was a crocodile. It was about 4 meters long and about 20 ft away from us. I am never ever ever swimming in that ocean ever. When I freaked out about it to my host family they were completely unfazed and explained that it happened and they very seldom get out of the water so its fine. They also explained that in the wet season (starts in April I will be here) the drainage ditch fills with water from the rain and crocodiles like to nest there and its fun because you can play with the baby crocodiles but when they grow up it gets awkward because the come up to the house and try to eat the chickens and dogs. As if I wasn’t appaled enough by this news my host mom turned to me and was like Emma your legs are so pale that a crocodile might mistake you for a chicken so you better watch out. So there is always that, unfortunately this has made my long walks on the beach less fun because now I think everything is a crocodile. The real problem is a lot of the time I am probably right.

Yenni

            In terms of good news, I have 6 dogs their names are Donkey, Pinto, Caballero, Negra, Balon, and Yenni. I do not have a favorite but Yenni and Negra are not tied up so they get to walk me places which I enjoy, Yenni also reminds me of a blond merlin because he crosses his paws when he lays down and has some lab in him. Negra is super old and can’t see very well, I found out yesterday that she is Caballero’s mom tho which is nice. Donkey likes to chase cars so he does not get to roam around very much but he likes belly rubs and gets very excited when I come home. Balon is a Chihuahua and is freaking adorable, the family treats him more like a pet rabbit than a dog but that’s ok, he lives closest to the house so when I read outside we sit together unless the chickens are about, he’s afraid of them. Also the chickens are not for eating, they are gardeners! Apparently eating chickens are bullies and tried to beat up the small children so my family sold their eating chickens to their neighbors so I shan’t be killing them!   

                 Also the sunsets here are beautiful. Also my Advisor showed up today fixed the internet and now I have things to do Yay!!!

My Research

Before I head off for 2 months I decided that I will let you in on what I will be doing with my life on the beach. I have written a 25 page research proposal but I doubt anyone is really interested in reading all that so I shall try to recap. I will be working in Tarcoles on the Pacific Coast, my research focuses on a responsible fishing area and how this area is affecting the economic situation of the people who live there. The local cooperatives ( I will be working with 3) of fishermen were the ones who fought to create the area in order to conserve fish and shrimps for the future. Right now there is a regulation that forces the big shrimp trawlers to not shrimp with in 15m depth of the shore, unfortunately the local fishermen cannot shrimp there either, because the big trawlers have no problem moving farther out and the local fishermen do, they are the only ones being screwed over by their own regulation. But, if they dont conserve the shrimp and fish now their way of life will die out due to overfishing.
           My project is going to focus on this interaction and try to show just how much the fishermen have lost out, I also will be conducting interviews with the fishermen to see how they are feeling about it. In addition to this I will be tracking all the fish that come into the cooperative to see how much money is being made overall, I will then compare it to 2009, right before the area was enacted. Also I will be creating projections for what the future looks like for them in a variety of different situations such as the area goes away and the shrimp boats come back and eat up all the progress that has been made etc. Also I will be looking at the environmental impacts of the area to see if the zone is even effective in conserving the populations that it was designed to protect.
              If i ever get all that done, I plan to use the information to give these fishermen a clearer view of their economic situation and help discover the best alternative for moving forward. This is even more important now because the responsible fishing area goes up for government re-evaluation in August, my research could help the cooperative make its argument to the government about the area stronger. Which is exciting because I get to do something that will actually matter outside of academics.
             Unfortunately the paper portion of my project is kind of a mess because I have like 4 projects within my project which do not exactly cover a specific discipline but we will worry about that in May. I will be attempting to post once a week from this point on however I am sharing a dial-up internet connection on a very old computer with an entire cooperative so we will see how that goes. If you are used to communicating with me through skype or facebook, that will be going away.

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.

Week 2

Cacao fruit, only the white part is for eating
the middle is the part gets made into
chocolate

Sloth!!!!!!

A lot happend this week, most notably during the week we had a dance class in which we learned salsa, a dance I can't remember the name of, and regatton. We have 2 more classes over the course of the semester so hopefully I will improve. This weekend we had our first outing as an entire group. We left very early friday morning and drove to Puerta Viejo in Limon provence. In Puerto Viejo we visited a cacao farm. Cacao is the plant chocolate is made from and this farm is one of the most productive in Costa Rica. Additionally cacao farms are known for encouraging biodiversity and sloths like to live in them. Consequently, within the first 2 hours of our adventure I tried cacao fruit which is unlike any fruit I have ever tasted but is quite delicious, and I got to hold a sloth!!!! It was adorable. We ended our visit to the chocolate farm with a tour of their refining factory in which cacao seeds are turned into chocolate liquor (the stage before the chocolate is refined into what we know it to be in the states). I purchased 1 kilo of this chocolate and am trying to think up what on earth I am going to do with it.

Following the chocolate farm we went to a banana plantation. This particular plantation was owned by Dole. The banana tour was fascinating  we watched the packaging process of taking the bananas from the bunch and cutting them into appropriate bundles etc. The most interesting part for me was how much was done to make the bananas look pretty, the people at the farm explained that measures such as placing cushions in between the bananas while they are growing does nothing for the flavor or to protect against bruising, it is simply so the bananas look absolutely perfect. Its extremely labor intensive and made me feel a little bad for only selecting perfect looking bananas. The banana trees themselves were amazing too, the entire life cycle of a banana tree is around 40 weeks so once the fruit has been cut off they cut down the tree and the now dead banana tree is fertilizer for the offspring which immediately takes its place. The whole experience felt like being on one of those tv shows that show you how things are made and I enjoyed going behind the scenes in banana production.

The longest bridge in Costa Rica, Tirrimbina

Immediately following the banana tour we drove 3 hours to Tirrimbina, a biological reserve in la Virgen in the north of CR close to the border. At Tirrimbina we had a bat tour in which we learned to disregard the bad reputation bats have and got to see some of the bats that had been captured by researchers earlier that night. The bats were actually super cute.

The next morning we went on a chocolate tour!! on the tour we stopped and went through every step of the chocolate making process sampling each stage of course. At the end I was gifted 15 chocolate seeds which would have bought me a chicken or something back when chocolate seeds were used as a form of currency. After the chocolate tour was over we went for a walk in the rainforest, ate some termites (they taste kinda like pepper and kinda like carrots), and hiked about until about 1 pm when it was time to return to San Jose.

Pretty Orchid

Today I slept in for the first time since Ive been here and went to an orchid fair with my host mom. It was ridiculously pretty, orchids are the national flower here and some truely unique ones grow here including one that has giraffe spots! After the fair we stopped by the local park to listen to a band play. They were a beatles cover band who didn't speak english so some of their lyrics really made my day such as their rendition of "Where is her son" as opposed to "Here comes the sun" We then returned to the house for afternoon coffee and a catch up on my new soap opera "El Clon" which is so incredible that I intend to dedicate an entire post to its glory when the season finale plays.

Week One!

I have officially been here for 9 days!!! I am a master bus taker and have completed one adventure! This weekend I went to Manuel Antonio National Park which is in the south pacific of the country and should be marked on the map that I posted earlier. It was absolutely beautiful!! 12 of the people from the program went and we stayed in a hostel for two nights and went to the park all day Saturday. Manuel Antonio is known for its wildlife and beautiful beaches. I found both of those to be true in terms of wildlife I saw white-faced monkeys, howler monkeys, sloths (pellerozos in spanish which translates to the lazies which I find apt), a very nice iguana ana two very bold raccoons. We woke up way too early (5:30 am) because a guide book said that all the cool animals were up then. I was not disappointed but very very sleepy. A group of us hiked about a mile to the closest beach and set up camp for the day. 8-2 on Saturday was spent swimming, sleeping in the shade, and exploring the park it was a pretty perfect first weekend. I had been warned previously but the animals are really quite bold in the park and two raccoons came up to our stuff while we were sitting there and tried to take someones bag. They were rather persistent and the bag needed to be taken out of their hands before they admitted defeat. I observed a similar episode occur with monkeys. Now that I am back in San Jose most of my time will be dedicated to my research project which is proving rather difficult I am obligated to have an outline of it written by Thursday so I will be able to inform you all in a more eloquent manner later but I will be working with a fishing cooperative on the Pacific coast and will be preforming some sort of economic analysis involving the environmental restrictions but on the fishermen there. Tomorrow I am taking a dance class and this friday I am visiting a chocolate farm!!!!

First Day of Classes

Today was the first day of classes. I am a half hour by bus from my program site which meant that I had to wake up at 6:00 this morning. The bus left at 6:45. This was quite the experience, the bus was so full that I was in charge of holding the doors closed so that no one fell out. After a couple stops it calmed down and I was able to sit down. I'm very glad that my host mom was there because the bus system here is very tricky, everything is marked by colors and if you look very closely by what town you want to get to there are also no assigned stops only buttons that you press when you want the bus to stop. Due to this fact the bus stops every hundred or so yards and moves at a ridiculously slow pace. After the bus we made our way to the ACM building.
               I said goodbye to my host mom and awkwardly sat with everyone. For a precious few minutes we were allowed to speak english but class began rather quickly, the first thing we did was sign a contract promising only to speak spanish on ACM premises, with each other, and with our families. Everyone in the program seems really nice, there are fifteen of us altogether. Because my program is through the associated colleges of the midwest (ACM) all of us come from small liberal arts colleges like Grinnell so we have things to talk about which is nice. Around 11 we took both an oral and a written exam to determine our spanish level which was really no fun at all but, after we were done with the written portion we got to drink coffee which I'm sure I will be addicted to by the end of the week. Lunch immediately followed coffee time which didn't make much sense to me but thats ok. We went down to the university of costa rica campus for lunch which was rice and beans because I could not afford anything else. The lunch vendors only accept colones and the 10,000 bills I brought which are like $20 are outdated and no longer accepted in Costa Rica so I only had about $4 for lunch and I needed to save 1 for the bus back. The good news in this is that I can have a decently filling lunch for only $3 but the bad news is that all my costa rican money is useless. My program director and I are going to the central bank tomorrow to see if I can exchange it.
                The rest of the day was spent getting to know each other and learning about social norms. It was very nice but I am super exhausted. By 4 I was ready for the day to end however my host mom and I needed to buy a cell phone for me which took an hour. But now I'm back at my house trying to figure out how to use it. I'm trying my best not to cheat and switch the settings to English.
               I'm noticing that I've been describing everything as nice, this is because my spanish vocabulary is currently limited and my best descriptor for everything is que linda which translates to how nice therefore when I think back on my day the adjective for describing everything is nice.