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| The band |
Wow. 17 days left in the program, not that anyone is counting. Thankfully, I get to spend a little more time in Costa Rica after the program ends. Some of my friends and I are traveling to Tamarindo for a week where I'll hopefully get some scuba diving in. I don't want to even begin to think about leaving Costa Rica. So much has happened since my last post. Where has the time gone? Since April 7th, I've been living with my home stay family, which has been a blast! My dad works at the local cheese factory, and my mom is a house mom. Boy, is she a mean cook! She definitely cooks better than the food we have at the station. I also have two brothers and a sister, who are all around my age. My brothers are even in a band, and play drums and bass. I lucked out in staying with a host family that shares a passion for music as much as I do. They even named their puppy "Tambor" (Spanish for 'drum'). American music is huge here. I've heard them cover songs from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, to The Killers, to Sublime. American pop culture in general here is huge. TV shows such as The Big Bang Theory, CSI: Miami, NCIS, Two and a Half Men, and various cartoons have all made it. Some of them have Spanish subtitles, while others are actually dubbed in Spanish.
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| My parents and older brother |
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| Younger brother and me |
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| The five juveniles |
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| Hagrid |
Academically, we have an independent project to carry out during our home stays, coupled with lectures at the station every Friday. Back at the beginning of April, my friend Jillian and I intended to do our project on the same type of lizard, the green spiny lizard. My project's focus was on determining if temperature affected foraging time. As we were catching them, we decided to name them after characters in Harry Potter (which, by the way, was probably the greatest thing to ever happen to our generation). Here's the thing. After a little too much time under the sun, her lizards died, and she decided to switch projects. Incidentally enough, her lizards were named after characters that died in the books (Albus, Hedwig, Cedric, Dobby). I didn't expose my lizards to direct sunlight. The lizards that I caught and named (Dean, McGonagall, Sprout, Hagrid, Malfoy, Dudley, Goyle) all survived. Coincidence??? Ultimately, despite not killing any lizards, I wasn't able to catch enough of them (they're extremely fast!) after two weeks, so I had to release them and switch projects. I am now working with plants which I had purposely tried to avoid in the first place. Coincidence number two?? When I'm not at the station working on my project, I try to spend as much time with my host family as possible to really embrace the Costa Rican culture, especially since home stays end on Monday.
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Hagrid, McGonagall and Sprout
(the females aren't as pretty as the males) |
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| Hagrid on release day |
A few weekends ago, three of the girls in the program celebrated their 21st birthday, so a bunch of us went zip lining to celebrate! It was a new experience for me. There were 14 cables in all, with one of them being a rappel down a tree and another being a "Superman" line. For this one, the harness strapped around our back, and we soared through the canopy much like Superman. If you've ever wanted to fly, do a Superman zip line. It's the next best thing. Finally, the last part of our zip lining adventure was the Tarzan swing. My favorite part, hands down. We were 120 feet above the ground, in a clearing, in the forest. After getting strapped in, we jumped and swung back and forth for a while. Not gonna lie, the first second after jumping, I questioned my decision of going bungee jumping at some point while in Costa Rica. But that was only for the first second. The Tarzan swing only strengthened my desire to bungee jump. The last few weeks we have here will be filled with final exams, essays, and oral presentations, but we'll see what happens.
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| Before the plunge |
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| During the plunge |
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| After the plunge |
