Manuel Antonio

Hello all! I wanted to write and tell you about my absolutely fabulous weekend! On Saturday, Alex (another girl from Grinnell), Brenly (a girl from Hampshire) and I woke up at 4:30 to catch a bus to Quepos, a small town on the Pacific Ocean. Though it was incredibly early, the bus ride was actually very exciting, for it was the first time that I was out of San Jose and in the countryside. There was a harrowing journey through the mountains that I tried my best to sleep through, but the rest of the bus ride I didn’t want to fall asleep, because everything was so beautiful! It was interesting to look at billboards as we got closer to the coast – all of the billboards for local businesses and such were in Spanish, but the billboards advertising expensive oceanfront real estate and luxury accommodations were in English. Hmm. Once we had bounced about in the bus for four and a half hours, we made it to Quepos, where we caught a bus to Manuel Antonio, a town with gorgeous beaches and a national park. In San Jose, our taxi driver had told us that he liked Quepos better than Manuel Antonio because Manuel Antonio was usually full of tourists, but we didn’t have a problem with this because a) being tourists ourselves it’s a bit hard to complain and b) it isn’t tourist season, so almost all of the tourists who were in Manuel Antonio were Costa Ricans on vacation. The first thing that we did in Manuel Antonio was locate our hotel – one of the professors at ICADS had given us a coupon for a student special, a room for only $45 or so dollars. The hotel, Hotel Verde Mar, turned out to be spectacular! It was right on the beach and our room had a little kitchen and geckos. And right outside the hotel was a tree where sloth and her baby lived! I took a million blurry pictures of them. We spent the whole first day swimming, lying on the beach and exploring the tiny little town. Sunday morning, we woke up early again to get to the park so that we could go hiking. The jungle was breathtakingly beautiful, although it was about a million degrees with 100% humidity. We saw monkeys, lizards, more sloths, raccoons, unidentifiable giant rodents, and lots of lovely birds and flowers. The park also had three beaches, so we spent a bit more time swimming and lying on the beach. I’m proud to report that I was not eaten by a crocodile, shark, or snake, dragged out to sea by a riptide, or even sunburned (very badly). Mom – I was ever so diligent with the sunscreen! I applied on at least three separate occasions. We even made it back home safely, though online it said that the bus station that the bus from Quepos came through was in the red light district of San Jose and was known as being the most dangerous station in all of Costa Rica or something. So all in all, a thoroughly successful, most excellent weekend! This morning at school, we had a festival of fruits, and I wish I had had my camera with me, for the table that they laid out for us was truly spectacular. Every kind of fresh fruit imaginable, and many that I had never ever seen before. We all gorged ourselves – I have certainly never eaten that much fruit in one sitting before. Tomorrow, it’s Costa Rica’s Independence Day, and it seems to be quite a big deal, for people have been celebrating all day today (shooting off fireworks, shouting, general air of festivity) and all schools are cancelled tomorrow. We don’t have school, but we’re taking a field trip to the mountains to visit an organic coffee farm. It should be wonderful! Anyway, this has also turned out to be very long, sorry. Missing you all! Oh, also, it takes forever to post photos here so I’ll only do a few here of Manuel Antonio - it´s really confusing to post pictures, I think that the first is a monkey in the jungle, the second is a picture of Brenly on the beach that I accidentally uploaded and can´t figure out how to delete, the third is our hotel and the fourth is me on the beach - and most of the rest on Facebook. The ones that I posted last time are of the ICADS school (all the little rooms on the right-hand side are our classrooms) and the front of my house here. Yay!