I guess I´ll have to make this post kind of snappy. I managed to remember that I have a class at 4 at about 2:45...unfortunately it´s a half hour walk back to campus from this little internet cafe.
Anyway, I had an amazing weekend. It can be summed up in one word: WET. We went to a huuuuuuuuge waterfall that looked like something out of a Disney cartoon. It was surrounded by rainforest on either side and you could swim in the river just down from the base of it. It was so incredibly gorgeous. Pictures can never do it justice. We swam there and climbed around on the rocks for a little while before we started the ascent back up to the top which was, by my best estimate, 810 miles from the bottom. Our soggy asses climbed back on the bus and we went a few more miles to La Fortuna, a little town where we ate lunch. Then, once again, we got back on the bus to go to our hotel. When they told us that we were all staying at a hotel I pictured a slightly crappier Holiday Inn, not paradise. This place was AMAZING. It was about 700 meters away from Volcan Arenal (or so I´m told). There aren´t rooms, there are seperate cabins, some with one bedroom, others with two. I roomed with 3 other girls. On the hotel grounds there are two pools, one ¨cold¨pool and another naturally fed hot pool. Both had waterslides. There was lots of trails to meander around. The best part was that it had an alligator farm!!!!! It wasn´t really a farm, I guess, they don´t milk the alligators or anything, they were in these big fenced in pools. More on the alligators to come.
After we checked in we hopped back on the bus (again) and went to the Baldi Hot Springs. I was in HEAVEN. The hot springs are these huge pools filled with naturally hot water. They had a bunch of different pools of varying temperatures. There was even one that was almost too hot for me, believe it or not. It was pretty funny, the only people that would even try the hot pool were Jordan, Miles and me. We all go to Northern. I guess it takes a lifetime of sitting in snowbanks to be able to sit in scalding water. We were there long enough to become completely pruney, very dehydrated and totally exhausted so we decided to hoof it back to the hotel because the bus wasn´t scheduled to go back for another hour or so. Oh, have I mentioned that it was POURING the entire time? Like the pouring that we experience at home for a maximum of 5 minutes at a time.
That night was pretty unremarkable. We went and ate some pizza (no rice or beans in sight!) and then headed to a club. Because I was the 3rd to last person out of about 50 to get their pizza I was STARVING and had to wolf it down in about 2 seconds. Yeah, I wasn´t feeling so hot. Cory and I stayed at the club for oh, about 11 seconds, and then decided to walk home. I´m a brave girl but walking down a deserted road in the middle of a rainforest at night is not something I care to do again. Everything I heard in the bushes I thought was a snake. And who knows, maybe it was... I went to bed pretty early, which is good, because I also got up super early.
The next morning Val, Kat and I woke up at about 7:30 and went to breakfast. We were the first people from our group to get up and that ended up working out very well for us. Luis, our program director and one of the coolest guys ever, came to breakfast a few minutes after we did Since we were the only people up and ready to go he bought us all ponchos (yep, still pouring) and took us on a tour of the joint. We went to see the alligators and crocodiles, which was really cool...until we saw the crocodile with the puppy in its mouth. Yes, that´s right, a puppy. It was dead so there was nothing we could do about it. The saddest part of the whole experience is that there was a female dog following us around the whole time. What if it was the puppy´s mom?? It almost had to be, there were no other dogs around. Later we found out that someone had thrown the puppy over the fence. What kind of person would you have to be to do that??? This was a about 8:30 and by 10:00 our crocodile/puppy story had reached epic status. I had about 28 people come up and try to tell me the story. They started out with ¨there´s this rumor...¨. I thought it was pretty funny. We swam in the hot pool for a couple hours more and then had to pack to go home. *sigh* More school... But that´s okay, I got home in time to watch the fourth quarter of the Vikings/Packers game (en español, of course).

YEEEEEEEEEEHAAAAAAAAAAAW!!!! SUCK IT FAVRE!

Oh crap, time to walk to class.



- posted by Jaime @ 1:51 PM