Have I mentioned that I LOVE my homestay family? This morning at breakfast I told my fam that I was going to Bar Amigo tonight, and mi padre was like I don't know how I feel about you going...Are you going to be a good girl? I told him of course I was, and so he gave me his permission. It's okay if you're jealous that I have the cutest tico dad ever. They made fun of me again this morning for not eating enough. Mi madre called me a little bird because I only had one [half-plate] serving of gallo-pinto and one tortilla [the size of my plate]. Then I went to leave the house and had my weekend bag with me and mi padre was like why aren't you staying here this weekend? I told him I had stuff planned all weekend with my program and he was bummed. Then mi madre and Kevin told me to have a good weekend and sent me on my way. Mi padre was working in the driveway when I left so I yelled at him, "Adios Papa!" Homestays are great.

I was looking a HOT mess when I got to campus this morning. We were supposed to be leaving campus at 9 to go to Gilbert's farm, and I left my house at 8:37. So I had 23 minutes for my 30-minute [uphill] walk and I had my weekend bag with me in addition to my backpack. So panting/ sweating was increased tenfold. I still can't figure out why I thought it was a good idea to shower this morning. I dropped off my stuff in Abs' and my new room (D1) and ran back to the comedor to fix my packed lunch. Geovanny came up and asked me how I was doing. I was still sweating and red in the face and gross, so I told him caliente but not in the way he was thinking because I couldn't remember the right way to say it. He laughed and told me 'con calor' and gave me a cookie for my lunch. Love him. Then we sat down with Lindsay and she told us she can tell we are all freaking exhausted, so she's going to ease up our schedule. So no more crazy-full days like yesterday. Woo woo!

We walked over to Gilbert's farm in Finca la Bella at like 9:45 with Lindsay and Lucas. We spent the morning listening to Gilbert tell us the history of Finca la Bella, and then he showed us his coffee plants and fed us delicious oranges. We ate our lunches there (more pb&j--so good) and then headed back to campus for a free (gasp!) afternoon. I wrote a paper for Deany and was hoping to spit out another before dinner, but that didn't happen. Oh and apparently there was a fat landslide on la trocha (the main road to Santa Elena) and so there will be no going to Bar Amigo tonight. Sad times! Cayman and I told Geovanny that we will just have to bring Bar Amigo to us. It's more likely that we will get some quality One Tree Hill time in, but who knows things could get crazy.

I was feeling sick to my stomach all afternoon so I was pretty nervous about eating dinner, but Geovanny talked me into it. We had pasta with alfredo and rice. Love me some starches. I just had some salad, beans, and pasta with the sauce. Then I went into the kitchen to get some more water and Geovanny was scooping ice cream for dessert. I knew I shouldn't have it, but I was like Geovanny, how good is the ice cream? Like even though I have been sick to my stomach all day, should I eat it? He just handed me a bowl. Then I ate it all. Crap.

Then Cayman and I ate the bread they had out. It's like a cornbread but with cranberries in it. So good.

Now I kind of feel sick again. Why do I have no self-control??

peace love and free afternoons

I slept horribly last night. I woke up like 10 times with cramps in my stomach. I think I OD'd on dairy products yesterday. Between cheese empenadas for breakfast, a latte after our hike through the reserve, cheese on my panini at lunch, cheese samples on the cheese factory tour, ice cream after the tour, and a chocolate spoon after the bat tour, I was in bad shape. Not to mention the fact that I ate virtually nothing of nutritional value before dinner. Let's not talk about it anymore.

Yesterday morning a taxi came and picked us all up for our ridiculously full day. We started with a guided hike at the Monteverde Reserve at 8:30. There were 12 of us with Dean, Kathy, Jeff, the K/Carlas, and Cheesecake (Sarah 2), so we divided into two groups. Jeff, Dean, Kathy, Tia, Ann, and I went with Oscar. Oscar is a rockstar. The man knew how to make calls for every bird and monkey in the reserve. Like good enough that they would talk back to him. So cool. We ended up seeing a yellow-bellied trogon, a male quetzal, a female quetzal, 6 spider monkeys, and like 100 hummingbirds in the hummingbird garden. The quetzals were really cool because they are super rare and you could tell it was a big deal because Oscar was freaking out making sure all the guides brought their groups to see them. Plus they are gorgeous and the national bird of Guatemala, my love. We followed the spider monkeys for a while. We spent a lot of our time right beneath them and I just knew that if someone got crapped on, it was going to be me. No one got crapped on, though, so I was graciously spared. After 3 hours of hiking in the reserve, we ended up at the hummingbird garden slash fancy coffeehouse. I figured why not indulge when I can and ordered a latte. Too bad it was straight up milk with like coffee-esque flavoring towards the bottom. You can imagine my disappointment. Then we walked across the way to a restaurant for lunch. I got a panini. I was really sketched out ordering it because the meat looked vile, but I figured turkey was a safe choice, even if the display made me want to vomit. The panini ended up being delicious. Considering I had been hungry since like 10, anything probably would have been delicious but the lacking-rice-and-beans factor didn't hurt either.

After lunch our taxis took us over to the Monteverde Women's Co-Op. Whoever scheduled our day allotted an hour and a half for a small grocery-like store, an even smaller coffee shop, and a couple of rooms full of knick-knacks. No one was less thrilled than Dean. He just sat outside the coffee shop and muttered about how dumb it was that we had so much time there. He makes me laugh. We saw the cutest dog ever at the grocery-like store. It was so teensy and clumsy. I wanted to steal it. I had a much more satisfying cup of coffee at the coffee shop. After we pissed away an hour and a half, we walked over to the Monteverde Cheese Factory. I was PUMPED for the cheese tour, because I figured there would be samples (fatty). I was not disappointed. We tried monterico (their signature cheese that's like a mozzarella), a swiss, a smoked something that I didn't particularly care for, a super mild cheddar, and caramel. I was pissed because they didn't give us samples of choco-cheese, but Dean and Kathy bought a block so we can all try it at our next high tea. They think of everything. After the tour we all got ice cream. I tried choco chip. Deliciousness. Tia got a mint chocolate chip milkshake, and then let me eat the chocolate chips from the bottom. Love her forever. Abby pointed out the fat rat-tail fest that was going on at the cheese factory. There were maybe 10 other people in the whole place and 3 guys were rocking rat-tails. Ew.

Once we'd sufficiently stuffed our faces, we walked over to the bat jungle. It had started raining at this point, but I was prepared with my rain jacket and my umbrella-ella-ella-ae-ae-ae (download Marie Digby's version of the song asap). The bat jungle was pretty cool, and the rat-tail fest continued. Our guide had a fatty that was all wrapped in string and everything. Barf-o. He also had a funny accent and I really wanted him to say toot de fruit. I can't figure out where that's from, though. Charlie? I feel like you should know. There was this one part of the tour where you sit on a stool and "experience a bat's sense of hearing." So Tia was one of the first ones to sit down and we were all whispering stuff to see if she could hear, and Cayman and I heard Dean say, "Tia, I want your body." We were dying laughing, especially after Abby informed us that we had heard wrong. So then we went into the actually bat exhibit, where they have like a hundred fruit bats. It's this really dark room to simulate the night so the bats will be active. At one point, I heard Ann say, "Dean, did you just bite me?" Bahaha I did not mishear this time. Dean loves trying to freak us out. He told Ann, "Oh my gosh did you see that giant escaped bat on your shoulder?! I just saved your life!" Haha the man provides endless hours of entertainment. I am dreading him not being here in a couple of weeks.

Other fun facts about bats: there are more bats in Costa Rica than there are birds. Bats eat and poop continuously when they are flying. A fruit bat eating a papaya poops out pinkish organge guano. Bats hang upside down because they drop to start flying, whereas birds have to jump up. Bats are most closely related to monkeys, not mice/ rodents. A colony of bats can eat up to two tons of insects in any given night. Bats can be as small as a bee or up to 6 feet in wingspan. Bah!

Upstairs from the bat museum there was a gift shop, a super nice chocolate shop/ restaurant, and the Quaker museum. I didn't even go into the Quaker museum. Apparently it's this super ghetto display of papers tacked to the walls, and the back room is all blank walls. Not really my thing. Instead I bought a chocolate spoon and enjoyed myself. Very much my thing.

Then I went to my homestay familia. I was freaking exhausted before we even sat down to eat dinner. And not hungry at all. But mi madre made me a plate of food, so I felt obligated to eat some. I ate the chicken and the potatoes, but I couldn't force-feed myself rice. I felt really bad leaving a half of plate of rice, but I would have felt worse puking all over the dinner table so yeah. After dinner we watched TV. I have noticed that the same handful of people is on every single show we watch. Patito Feo is like an actual show with story lines, but the characters are also in music videos during commercials and in competitions with each other in different time slots. Then there is this one woman who does the celeb news and also judges competitions and hosts other random things. It's bizarre. But we were watching TV and mi padre was like Sarah, are you okay? You look so sad. I told him I was just tired, and then a few minutes later he called me out because I was having a really hard time keeping my eyes open. I caved, and excused myself for bed. Mi madre was like but I was going to teach you to dance tonight!, but I was so tired, so I told her rain check for Monday night. It was like 8:30, but I passed out as soon as my head hit the pillow. Then came the aforementioned horrible sleep. Good times.

Life is so great.

peace love and guano.

Hey.

This morning I woke up at some ungodly hour because a bug was crawling across my face. I don't know what it looked like or exactly how big it was, but it was big enough to make me FREAK out. I plucked it off my face in a half-awake daze before realizing what was going on and then I shot up and chucked it across the room, which was dumb because it was still alive and well somewhere in my room. Then I was all panicky and freaked out so I couldn't get back to sleep for a while. My covers ploy had failed me! So I covered my face with my arms in addition to the covers. I'm probably going to end up suffocating myself with all my feeble attempts to avoid bug bites.

Yesterday morning in Dean's class we watched this movie called The Silence of the Bees. It's a PBS thing about how the honeybees are disappearing and no one can figure out why. They have found a variety of different things that are causing CCD (Colony Collapse Disorder), but no single culprit to attribute the mass disappearances to. This one segment was about how in Beijing, they no longer have enough bees to pollinate their crops, so people have begun to pollinate by hand. I kid you not. It is the single most ridiculous thing I have ever seen in my life. They use toothbrushes to brush pollen out of flowers, then let their meager pollen collection dry for a couple of days and then use little homemade feather dusters to individually brush each blossom of their pear trees or whatever it is they are trying to grow. This must be some sort of joke. This woman with the ecology program is a bee person and she was telling us that there are loads of other bee species, and some bat species, that could be pollinating plants. We just don't want to invest the time and money into figuring out how to do it on a mass production level. She thought the movie was really melodramatic because it was going on and on about how if they honeybees die off we won't be able to eat fruits, vegetables, or beef anymore; our diet will consist solely of corn, wheat, and the like.

Today Cayman put this stuff in her water called "ZipFizz." It's what she brought to replenish her electrolytes. This stuff has 833% of your daily recommended dosage of Vitamin C, and 41667% of B12. That's more than 41 days worth of B12. We decided that if you fed that stuff to a corpse, the body would come back to life. Needless to say, Cayms was tweaked for the remainder of the day.

After classes Tess and I had English lessons with Jennifer and Susan. They wanted to study ghosts, so I made a power point on scary things. It was just strange to have this lesson in between lessons on food and the rooms of the house. But whatever, that's what they wanted to do. My power point nonsense only provided a half hour of material, so then Tess did a lesson on question words. She's my hero.

Tess and I walked home together around 5, and when I got home my fam was MIA, which sucked because I was starving. I didn't freak out this time and walk around in the dark and rain. Instead I just read for a bit for Environmental Sociology. Olivier's parents came around with Olivier's nephew Lucas to feed the chickens shortly after I got home. So I went and helped them (I use the word "help" very loosely here). Lucas showed me that one of my babies had died. I was so sad. The poor thing was all gray and smushed-looking. Apparently they die because they all try to huddle together for warmth, but a lot of times they huddle on top of each other. So if there are like three layers of chicks, the bottom layer is out of luck. Olivier told me later that one time he had 11 chicks die in one night. I don't think my heart could take that. So they hung around and chatted for another couple of minutes before leaving me in the empty house again. Mi abuelita told me Marielos and Olivier would be back soon. Tico "soon" is not an equivalent of American "soon." Kevin and Kaylor came home at like 6:15, and they took care of me. Kevin made gallo-pinto, eggs, and plantains. I talked to them a fair amount, the most I've talked to them thus far actually. Mis padres came home at like 6:45. They felt bad that I'd been hanging around since 5 and hadn't eaten yet, but I told them it wasn't a big deal. Then Kevin fixed me the biggest plate of gallo-pinto ever. It was delish, but I could not finish it. He made sure I had my fill of eggs and plantains, too. I love my fam.

I don't know how many of you have been keeping up with Latin American Idol, but last night Maria Jose Castillo made it to the finals. Very big deal. She's tica. So I sat and anxiously awaited the results with the whole fam, and then jumped up and joined in the celebration when it was finally announced.

I went to bed at like 9 last night, and had a really hard time getting out of bed this morning, but we have a big day today so I need to get moving. And eat. I'm hungry and I hear plantains being fried.

Later.

peace love and maria jose castillo

Good morning!

Ms. Linda, I apologize for my Spanglish. I will try to stick to English from here on out.

Last night Cayman ended up staying on campus with me because it got really dark really fast and she had this fiesta that was at some casita that she'd never been to. So I had someone to sit with at dinner. Yay for friends.

We woke up early this morning to go milk the cows with Geovanny's papa. He's so cute. We got up at 5:20 because last time we just missed the milking when we got there at 6:08. But when we got there at 5:30, he wasn't even there yet. So we went and got some rubber boots and came back. He was just putting the saddle on his horse and when I asked if we could help he was like yeah, but it'll be about 15 minutes. I don't start til 6. Whatever better early than missing it entirely. So we hung around the stables until he came back with the cows. There were two big ones and a teenage one. While he was getting the black and white one ready for milking, I petted the brown teenage one. Too bad it turned out to be a punk. I stopped petting it for like a second to turn around and say something to Cayman and it butted me with its head in my stomach. So I kind of kept petting it to appease it but I stood as far away from it as possible. Then I escaped and stood really close to Geovanny's dad. He had just finished cleaning up the udders and tying the tail in this rope hanging from the ceiling, and once he got the udders going he offered me the stool. So I took a seat and started yanking. Udders are gross and weird. Geovanny's dad said I was good, though. I mean I had it going with both hands for a little bit and was going at a pretty good pace, but my hands got really tired really fast. Cayman sat on the other side and it took us so long to get like a quarter of the bucket full. Then Geovanny's dad helped us out. He is ridiculously fast. The worst part was when I accidently squirted the hot milk on my hand. Ew. Geovanny's dad explained that if you don't get all of the milk out, it will turn into cheese and will mess up everything. So he like full-on massaged the udders to make sure it was all out. When we thanked him after the first one, he was like you don't want to stay for another? And I told him my hands were really tired and he laughed at me. I like him.

Then I took a shower in the public showers because they told us that the public showers have hot water. LIES! It was ICE cold.

It's time to Dean it up.

chadios.

peace love and udders.

que pasa?

This morning I got up early to go spend some quality time with mis bebes. I think when I get back to Athens I am going to buy myself 100 chicks because they make me so happy. But then when they get to be about 3 weeks old I won't want them anymore. I will just trade them in for 100 new chicks. Problem solved.

When I came back inside, Marielos was just finishing up making breakfast. This morning we had gallo-pinto con salsa lizano, plantains, and that wonderful coffee. Her plantains are so greasy and delicious. I had like 5. I figured I would need the extra calories to make it to school. We had some more good convo over breakfast. Olivier is hysterical. I like that I know when to laugh at his jokes. It makes me feel good about my life. After breakfast I packed up my bag and told them hasta manana because they are going to San Jose tonight for the doctor's appointment in the morning. And so my journey began.

I made it all the way up the hill without stopping for a breather today. Go me.

I did not make it all the way up the hill without panting and sweating. Cayman, Abby, and Tess were all making fun of me when I got to the student union. They think they're funny. They're not.

When I was on the last stretch of road, this guy stopped his car and asked if I wanted a ride. So I got in. As I shut the car door, I realized wow, this is probably a really bad idea. Then I kind of started panicking, but I didn't want the guy to notice so I went ahead and carried on conversation with him. He asked who my homestay family was, and when I told him he said they were his friends. Good sign. I was like frantically looking around the car for the UGA emblem in hopes that he worked on the campus or something. No such luck. When we got to the very first entrance of campus, I was like okay this is good! And he was like oh okay I was going to take you to the main entrance, but he stopped. I sighed a great sigh of relief. He had told me his name was Olivier, so all day I was asking people around campus if they knew who he was. No one knows who he is. But, hey, I'm alive, right? Sorry, parents. Hope this doesn't frighten you too much.

Classes went well today. I got a 92 on my Spanish quiz. Go me.

The staff kept the basket of snacks full all day. Go them. It was zucchini bread again, and I had 3 pieces. Don't judge me.

Still can't make a bed.

I just realized that I have been wearing the same pair of socks for two days. Possibly three.

Oh my gosh last night when I was in that spot just before sleep, a moth flew right into my fleece. I freaked. It was disgusting. I caught it by awkwardly contorting my arm behind my back, then I just set it free. Which was dumb because then I was just paranoid it was going to happen again so I pulled the collar of my fleece tight around my neck and slept with the covers pulled up over my head again. I need that netting thing that you put over beds. Add that to my list of things to buy. And also peanut butter.

This afternoon we had computer lesson orientation with Sarah and then we walked over to the library, which is our project. Someone has already cleaned it up, so all we have to do is catalog and shelve the books, and then organize a community-wide event to let everyone know that the library is re-opened. It's a teensy library, so it won't be hard.

I'm glad I'm staying on campus tonight because I have so much homework. Ugh. I guess I should probably get started with that or something..

peace love and twinkies and chin bumps (so much love for meems. so much.)