Around the World in 100 Years
Tuesday, March 29, 2005
Monday, March 28, 2005
Greetings from Nicaragua!
Well, I´m one step closer to my 100 countries before I die goal. Megan, Chris and I decided to go to Granada, Nicaragua over Semana Santa. We needed to renew our visas for Costa Rica. You can only be in CR for 90 days in a row, then you have to leave for 72 hours so that´s what we did. It ended up being a little longer than we thought it was going to be because we couldn´t get a bus back yesterday. So today I´m missing 2 of my classes, which could actually cause me to fail both of them. Hopefully the teachers will be understanding. I´m sure they will, ¨tranquilo¨is th motto of Costa Rica. One that I hate very very much, as I am not a tranquilo kind of person. Saying ¨tranquilo¨to someone is pretty much the equivilant of saying ¨calm down¨. Nobody likes to be told to calm down. Okay, that´s my rant for today.
Tomorrow starts the 2 week countdown until I go home. Scary. I kinda don´t want to go back as much as I did before, it´s strange. I´m really really excited to see everyone but I´ve FINALLY adjusted to living in Latin America so it´s a little disconcerting to be yanked out of my now comfortable home to go back to somewhere I´m not sure I remember how to live in. The first time I have to pay $10 for a hamburger the reverse culture shock thing is going to kick me in the ass. Oh well, I´m pretty sure I´ll adjust to going home a little more quickly than I adjusted to coming here. And I´ll get to DRIVE. YAY!!! Just a little note, you might not want to be on the roads anywhere around Marenisco or Marquette the week I get back. I wasn´t that great of a driver before and I´m pretty sure 3 1-2 months off didn´t improve my skills all that much.
Anyway, about Nicaragua. This place is SOOO different than Costa Rica. The poverty here is rampant, I guess there´s an 80% unemployment rate. It shows. The first day we were here we got lunch at a kiosk in the park. Chichorones. Didn´t know what they were. Turns out they´re pork rinds. Interesante. I wasn´t much feeling pork rinds after my recent illness (which I realize I didn´t write about but let´s just say it SUCKED) so I didn´t eat them. Megan and Chris didn´t eat theirs either. This homeless lady walked up and asked if she could have them so we said sure. She proceeds to grab all of our plates and sit down at the table with us. It was cozy, just the 4 of us. We talked to a little, she even knew some English. I think everyone down here knows some English. Granada is supposed to be the richest city in Nicaragua. That´s downright scary.
It´s HOT here. Like, really really hot. Luckily we managed to find a room with air conditioning for $20 a night. Yeah, that´s like $7 each. I love Central America. Our hostel is on this road that´s a big market so it´s interesting to try to get around. You get attacked from all sides by venders trying to sell you cashews and cigarettes. I´m not particularly partial to either. The best thing about the city is Lake Nicaragua, the 10th largest freshwater lake in the world. I know I live by a couple that are bigger, but they don´t have archipelagos in them. There are 365 little islands all clustered together. We tooked a few tours through them, including a kayaking tour yesterday to see birds. I´d never kayaked before, it´s so fun. We got to see tons of birds too, a lot of the same ones we have at home because this is where they come for the winter. We say ospreys and egrets and all sorts of kinds of herons and some other Nicaraguan birds with Nicaraguan names. One other tour we did was up to a big volcano, that was pretty cool. I actually got to see a volcano!!! Third time is the charm, I guess. Hopefully we´ll be able to see Arenal when my mom and Cherie are here.
Well, it´s time to get going. I´ll write more when I get back to Costa Rica after my lovely 8 hour bus ride. Hope everyone had a great Easter!!!!
Thursday, March 17, 2005
Wow has school become not school. I love my class. Today we took our 4th field trip out of the last 6 classes. Today we went to an orchid garden that was like an hour and half away. There was absolutely no point to the whole endeavor and I didn't learn a word of Spanish but hey, I wasn't in class. Yesterday we went on an unsupervised field trip to the Jade Museum. Unsupervised=We stayed for 10 minutes, wrote down some info, and left. Afterwards Vanessa and I walked around downtown for a little while and she showed me this awesome artisan's market. Yeah, she shouldn't have done that. I went hog wild with souvenirs for people. I needed to get them anyway but getting them all at once kind of made it seem REALLY expensive. I also bought a sweet bowl set for myself for my future Milwaukee house/apartment. Oh yeah, mom, Cherie, don't pack too much, I need you to bring some stuff home. =) Or I can just buy another bag and send that home. Anyway, I bought a lot of stuff. It's okay 'cause it wasn't for me, right?
Tomorrow after class I leave for Puerto Viejo. I'm going to be there until Tuesday when I regresar to San Jose, stay in a hostel for a night, and then head to Granada, Nicaragua on Wednesday. We'll be there 'til Sunday. I'm pretty pumped. I have to get out of the country for 72 hours and Granada is supposed to kick ass. It's a city right on Lake Nicaragua, which is a freshwater lake big enough to have bull sharks in it. Then it's back for one more week of classes and I'm done. YAY!!!!! I'll no longer be an undergrad!!! If they get my transcripts sent to Northern in time, that is. I don't think I'd like to wait for my degree until August. Not that I'll need it to waitress, which is what I'll be doing for the summer, I'm sure. Unless someone can get me a good day job, of course. HINT TO EVERYONE OUT THERE. Well, this is a pretty boring post so I'm going to go find something else to do. That something invariably turns out to be nothing.
Monday, March 14, 2005
Once again, I’ve been pretty remiss in my blog updating. And I guess I really can’t say it’s because I’ve been too busy. We’d all know that was a lie. Although last week was about as hellish as a week down here could get, as far as classes are concerned. I had a 10 page paper due on Tuesday and I had to give a 20 minute power point presentation on said paper. My subject was sharks so it wasn’t too terribly difficult. Thursday, however, I had to give the same presentation in Spanish for my Conversation class. For some reason I found it a lot easier to do in English. I WONDER WHY. I’d have to say that both of them went pretty well though. Thursday night I had to go to the theatre for class. We looked in the paper and, knowing nothing about any of them, we picked a play that looked cute and funny. I’m sure it was. The cab driver took us to the wrong theater, however, so we ended up seeing “Casa Por Carcel en la High Class.” This play featured a skinny, short, 80 year old man and his hooker girlfriend. Costumes included a neon green speedo, a purple speedo, and a cornflakes box. EW. I didn’t understand a damn word either. Oh well, it was interesting. By interesting I mean disgusting. I’m getting nauseous thinking about it actually. Time to go scrub my brain.
This past weekend was pretty interesting. I can say that now because I didn’t get eaten by snakes. In fact, I didn’t even see one! Our ecology class went to the tropical wet forest to learn about, well, tropical wet forests. We stayed at this place that our teacher and his brother built in the middle of the jungle. They’re trying to turn it into a model for sustainable development or something. It was a pretty neat place (did I just use neat?). It’s totally solar powered. There are two cabins. Since I had to wait for the third car load to bring us up to the house (and because of this ended up unnecessarily walking about a mile straight uphill) I got stuck in the cabin out in the boonies, far away from everything. There were two bedrooms with 3 beds each in them. Yeah, didn’t get one of those. I got a mattress on the floor NEXT TO THE BUS DRIVER. That was nice. Anyway, pretty much all we did was tromp around in the jungle in our rubber boots bought specifically for that purpose. It was so muddy. And let me tell you what, the rain forest STINKS. The floor is covered with decomposing leaves and other materials. Pretty much nothing grows on the rain forest floor, interestingly enough. It makes it pretty easy to walk around. We walked for about 4 hours the first morning and swam in a waterfall. I do a lot of waterfall swimming down here. It was so necessary. The humidity was about 400%. I can honestly say that I have never, ever sweat that much in my life. There was nothing you could do to avoid it. It wasn’t that it was even that hot in the jungle, it was all shady and stuff. Sweat was literally dripping off of face. My shirt was absolutely soaked with it too. I didn’t feel bad about it because everyone else was experiencing the same thing.
Saturday afternoon we went out hiking again. Well, those of us that could hack it went out hiking again. It seems that there is a high population of city girls in my Ecology class, some of whom declared, and I quote “I hate nature” over and over again. Um……..What did they think an ecology class was all about, exactly? And how do you hate nature? Oh well, it gave us non-city girls something to make fun of. Anyway, Jorge (prof) told us that we were going to hike up to see where the water used at his plantation comes from. Cool. He also told it that it would be a nice, easy hike and as it was directly post lunch we were all pretty excited about that. LIAR. LIAR. LIAR. We hiked up and up and up and up through some killer mud to….drum roll please…a big cement box. It was over the spring that supplied the water for the Jorge’s plantation. That’s it. A 8’ X 4’ cement box. ARE YOU STROKIN’ ME? I called Jorge out on his “nice, easy hike”. He admitted he was lying. Sneaky devil.
The next morning we each got to name one of his gallenaste trees. Mine is Roovis Vetticus because I thought it needed a Greek conqueror type of name to survive in la selva. I took a picture of it but I didn’t have my digital camera so you guys will have to wait to oooh and aaaw over the little gaffer. He’s the cutest tree of the bunch, if I do say so myself. Jorge said that he’ll send us pictures if we email him and ask him too. They grow like 20 feet a year or something ridiculous like that. I’m glad I don’t grow 20 feet a year. We also got to hike to another waterfall and go swimming. Unfortunately then it was time to go back to the Hose. Ugh. This week shouldn’t be too bad though. I don’t have any crazy huge projects due, although I do have to write a paper. We get a week off for Semana Santa after that and then we come back for one more week. Then it’s good-bye undergraduate education! That’s so crazy. Damn, I need a job.
Tuesday, March 08, 2005
So yeah, these horses were just chillaxin' on the beach in Puerto Viejo. I guess it's better than wandering down the main road, which is where they were the night before.
Wednesday, March 02, 2005
Alright, finally I have time to write a blog. Although I should be researching a little more for my shark paper, I think. I so thought that I was done writing papers when I finished that last essay last semester but I have two due in the next couple weeks. Bleh. Although I must say that writing papers about sharks and sea snakes is about, oh, 8 million times better than writing about the nature of the Russian Revolution. And it’s not like I have anything better to do.
So this weekend was, uh, interesting. Megs and I decided to go to Mal Pais (The Badlands). Miles, Megs and I were going to go to Puerto Viejo but it’s been raining and I didn’t want to deal with rain. Peace Corps Chris told Megan that we should go check out Mal Pais with him ‘cause a bunch of other people were headed out there for the long weekend. Cool. Not so cool with Miles. Megs and Miles had a thing, there was a fight, Chris and Megs now have this thing. Miles was being retarded so Megan and I went to Mal Pais with Chris. For some reason Miles had to follow. Ugh. Needless to say after some serious rudeness on the part of Miles and some serious rudeness in return on my part we are no longer friends. I was staying in a cabin with Megan and Chris, which I didn’t think would be a problem because they had been on like one date. NOT SO. AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!! The second night I gave up and slept on the hammock outside the cabin. That was not a good idea. Hammocks should probably be classified under “instruments of torture” than “sleeping option”. I didn’t fall out but it probably would have been more comfortable if I had. And the bugs LOVED my delicious gringo ass. I even had a bug bite on my forehead.
But other than those things the weekend went well. We headed to Mal Pais on Friday because we got Friday and Monday off because it was the end of our second Spanish class. Getting to Mal Pais is rather interesting. Our trip was taxi, bus, taxi, ferry, bus, bus. It took about 8 hours. Mal Pais is an cute little town though. It’s a huge surfer hangout. Probably because surfing is about all there is to do there. We checked into Frank’s Place, grabbed some dinner, and went to bed.
The next morning we were contemplating how to get around in our secluded little town full of nothingness. We decided to rent ATVs for the day, which is actually really cheap. We rented 2 between the three of us for $30 each. So we took our rides to Montezuma, which is a tourist town a few kilometers away. It was sooooooooooooooo fun. I was lovin’ me some ATV action. We decided to go to the waterfalls in Montezuma because, well, that’s just what people do there. OH MY GOD. So we climb to the first waterfall. It was quite a hike but it was pretty and worth it. Then we decided to go to the top waterfall. Erg. It started out with us climbing up a rock cliff. Turns out that was the easy part. We climbed until I was literally dizzy from exertion and then Chris decides to inform us that we went too far and we had climbed like 39 miles straight up a mountain for nothing. Great, thanks. The “trail” that we missed was straight down a rock wall that would usually require rappelling rope. One wrong step and you would die. I know that I exaggerate a lot but I’m being completely honest about this. Oh yeah, did I mention that I was wearing flip flops and a bikini? Megan and I were not impressed. Oh well, I lived. Although Chris almost didn’t survive the wrath of Megan and I.
After riding around for awhile longer with our fantastic four-wheelers and rescuing a drunk driver who had decided that cliffs were better viewed when pointed down them in the cab of a pick up truck we decided to hit up the bar scene. This included one bar within walking distance. After some boringness we decided that walking a few kilometers was better than going to be so we headed down to the Yellow Parrot where there was live music. When we got there 8 hours later it was HOPPIN’. Wall to wall with high and happy Ticos. ***FYI, Ticos is not a derogatory terms, it just refers to someone that is from Costa Rica.*** The band played for about 10 more minutes and then was done for the night. Time to go home. Dammit. We headed home on our sore feet and after walking for about 50 feet I decided that I had had enough so I stuck out my thumb. Lo and behold 30 seconds later a couple Tico gentlemen let us climb into the back of their pick-up. My first hitchhiking experience, I’m so proud. I ended my Extreme Saturday with my friend Mr. Hammock.
To make up for all the action on Saturday we did NOTHING on Sunday. It was boring but nice boring. Monday we headed back to the Hose so I could go to my Ecology class. Yippee Skippee. We started our new Spanish classes this week. I’m in Intermediate Conversation. I’m forcing myself into a position where I actually have to speak the language. So yeah, that’s what I’ve been doing for the past week or so. Damn this is long. Time to go.
