Around the World in 100 Years
Tuesday, April 05, 2005
For the past few days I've been chillin' at Costa Rica Backpackers in San Jose. Interesting experience. Somehow I'm the only American in my dorm so I've been talking with people from Holland, Montreal and Australia quite a bit. It's pretty sweet. I also talked to this Costa Rican lady that doesn't know any English. I thought I'd be nice and ask her if something was wrong (she looked sick) in Spanish and for some reason this gave her the impression that I knew the language. I think I've sort of adopted her now. Nevermind that she's like 50. This forces me to have actual conversations in Spanish. Ew.
I'm impatiently waiting for 8:00 tonight so I can go to the airport to get my mom and Cherie. FINALLY! It's been like 6 years since I've seen anyone familiar, I think. I'll be home one week from today though. That's pretty weird in itself. And pretty much a relief since somehow, once again, I have absolutely no money. I don't know how this keeps happening. Of course it might have something to do with the whole traveling around Central America thing but I'm not sure. I NEED A JOB!!
Okay, I'm really not into this whole typing thing and, knowing the computers here, this beast is going to shut down in about 30 seconds. I guess I'll go to a museum or something. Culture. Hmm.
Friday, April 01, 2005
I'M DONE I'M DONE I'M DONE I'M DONE I'M DONE I'M DONE I'M DONE I'M DONE I'M DONE I'M DONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I finally finished college. CAN YOU FEEL IT? I'm pretty excited about this, if you can't tell. No more classes, no more books, no more teachers dirty looks.
Yesterday I gave my thirty minute presentation in class (Yeah, that's like half a freakin' hour) and that was all she wrote. I somehow ended up with a 95% in the class. I'm not sure how. Maybe the teacher didn't notice that I don't know how to speak Spanish or something. Then I got my grade in Marine Biology. 99% . I'm kind of disappointed in myself, I should have had a 100. I'm sure that my Ecology grade sucked though, that teacher actually seemed to understand English so he knew that everything I wrote for that class was done no more than half an hour before it was due. Oh well, like I said (or did I mention it?) I'M DONE!!
Graduation is Saturday, May 7. Miss Carrie Miller and I will be having a graduation party that night at her house (in Marenisco). Everyone is invited!!!
I suppose I have to get a job now, huh?
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.
