As Promised...

Pictures from last weekend, and an update.


view of manuel antonio peninsula from hotel


some reptile outside my room


now down on peninsula, after wandering through aforementioned view


a few tourists


another nice view


a cool cricket

Plus, I'll upload three monkey videos as soon as I get back to school

This past weekend, I went with a group of 14 to Arenal Volcano, a spot highly recommended by my host sister because “it is very pointy.” We stayed at a hotel at the base of the volcano that boasted on-site horseback riding (I understandably passed), a spa (to get wrapped in chocolate), hot springs, a swim-up bar, and more. Clearly, no man was behind this type of advanced planning. The whole experience felt antithetical to everything we’ve learned so far this semester about the over-consumption of the North and the effect that has on the developing South’s disinclination to protect their resources from over-industrialization. But the swim-up bar was really cool.

Saturday we went to a river that starts with the letter P and went whitewater rafting for the afternoon. I was only one of three people who had done this before, so they put me in the front of the boat (like John Kerry in Vietnam). There were no major or even minor catastrophes on our raft; everyone rowed when ordered to by the guide, everyone was drenched, only one person was tossed from the raft and I was hailed as I saved her life (maybe an overstatement, but I did save her paddle) which entitled me to a free drink later that night. Regrettably, she was not a freemason.

Saturday night is only worth mentioning because our international human rights professor decided to make the trek to the volcano with us, and he was assigned to room with me and two other gentlemen. One of which, Ram (pronounced “rom”), is my host family roommate who has slept in every single one of our professor’s classes. This could have been an awkward situation, but it wasn’t. He ended up buying drinks for the Indian and playing pool with him until 2 a.m. This is a seriously cool hombre. In fact, this night was the third night I was out at a bar with my professor, that I ended up going home earlier than he did. This is patently lame. He has this deep, authoritative, but slightly lispy (he is from Bar-the-lona) voice that slew any woman from our class who stopped long enough to talk to him. Last weekend at a karaoke bar, he sang a convincing rendition of “Stranger in the Night” that I videotaped, but isn’t worth uploading because you can’t hear it very well over the hordes of screaming women. Freaking Euros.

Sunday’s highlight was a canopy tour through the forests surrounding the base of the volcano. I was expecting something along the lines of those cable cars that go from Tomorrowland to Frontier Land at Disneyland, but was pleasantly surprised to find something much more dangerous. A van drives us somewhere near the midway-point of the volcano, then leaves us with three guides and a photographer. We are all wearing a harness around our thighs, some kind of mountain climby clip thing at our waists, a helmet, and a leather glove. The way it works is we start at a platform atop a very high tree (one so high you can’t see the ground from where you are). There is a cable connecting your tree to another one anywhere from 100 to 500 meters away. The guide puts a pulley looking thing over the cable, clips your waist to it, then pushes you across to the next one. The only way to slow down is to pull down on the cable with your leather gloved hand. Some of the cables are taut enough that you can look down as you glide over rivers, through the canopy, and get leaves in your mouth. Others are very loose, and you feel like you might fall to your death until the cable tightens and you whoosh across into the face of the photographer waiting at the next platform. I wish I had brought my own camera for this, as there was a cool toucan sighting (bigger and louder than you think), and it would have made for a cool video. Maybe next time.

A few pictures I did take from Arenal and the surrounding areas.


about as close as I'll get to a river crocodile


a baby one


a butterfly trying to pass as a dead leaf


lake arenal, as you can see the volcano is obscured. d'oh.

Even Gene Kelly Needed Antibiotics

Since Monday night, I've been stomach-punched by a bad cold. I'm guessing it's the aftermath of playing in the rain so many consecutive days. It's probably the coughing and phlegm is undermining my value on this trip as one of the few spanish speakers. It doesn't make any sense; I have a superhuman immune system that only allows me to get sick once or twice a year. In response to this, I've conducted research that has found that Chloroquine (the medicine my doctor prescribed for me to not get malaria) suppresses the immune system and is sometimes used to treat auto-immune diseases. Of the 30 or so people here, I think I only know of one other person who's been taking this medicine, so my hope is if I get off the meds, my immune system will boot back up to full capacity and I'll fight these diseases off the way god and the christian scientists say I should. With prayer.

Stranger in a Strange (Wet) Land

This past weekend, we went on our first class excursion to Manuel Antonio, a national park on the central Pacific coast. The best way I can describe it is that it was kind of like a four hour bus ride through Topanga Canyon, only with much more black exhaust in your mouth (I’m kind of getting the black lung here) and a girl who had to get off to throw up along the way. The paving was spotty at parts, there were these curious bridges that could only take cars going in one direction at a time (traffic laws are screwy here) and under these bridges were collections of crocodiles (we’ll return to these bridges in a few). I was stuck sitting next to one of the two gay fellas on the trip, who was genial enough and he smelled like an entire can of axe body spray, but then he fell asleep on me, and I couldn’t figure out a way to get him off my shoulder without looking like an insensitive homophobe (this characterization existed exclusively in my mind). He had fallen asleep with his ipod headphones on, with it tucked into the seat in front of us, so I slowly started to increase the volume on his ipod (I think it was playing N’Sync at the time) until he stirred during some song that wasn’t one of the singles I knew. I’m now wondering if my reputation has shifted from light-hearted bald guy to light-hearted in the closet bald guy. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Upon arriving, Manuel Antonio felt like resort town mostly composed of ambling, bathing-suited tourists, but I can easily understand why. Photos are forthcoming, but it was basically a small lush peninsula surrounded by a postcard-ish beach scene. After getting off the bus, I was praying for rain. This was the worst humidity of the entire trip, easily 90%+. I felt like I was in the devil’s crock pot (hell is probably a difficult place to cook over an open flame). It got a little lighter once we started hiking through the peninsula, but the weather can change quickly down here. More on that in a second.

The national park here is basically a trail through the aforementioned peninsula, full of bugs, birds, sloths, some kind of raccoon-relative, and monkeys(!). Time to close the book on the monkeywatch; they were in mating season and were making crazy noises, mostly unaffected by the humans snapping photos around them. The other animals were cool too, but I’ll leave that to the pics. The beaches themselves here are okay, but they’re apparently somewhat spoiled by the touristic influence and, at this time of year, the runoff from the heavy tropical rain (the water isn’t that clear near the shore, it’s immaculate further out).

The foliage cover from above was so dense, and the animal chatter was very loud at times, so it was hard to tell how hard it was beginning to rain. After looping around back to the entrance of the trail, I stepped out into the heaviest downpour of the trip, to this point. The human reactions were amusingly mixed. Some people were walking through the rain unaffected, some people went into national emergency mode, trying to valiantly direct people under awnings and trees using (mostly) unapproved navy seal hand signals. The true measure of the moment was somewhere in between. No small children were being washed into the ocean, but it was kind of serious. We first took shelter under a street merchant’s awning, made of wood and leaves that was lined with plastic, which promptly collapsed onto a group of us under the weight of the water it was collecting. No one was hurt, but everyone was drenched. I tried to cross to a bus stop across the flash-flooded street and the water was about halfway up my calves. After crossing what was once a grassy roundabout that was less 5-star scenery and more like trying to dodge the Viet Cong, we managed to huddle everyone in front of a brick and mortar restaurant a block up. Here, we were given Fantas and told we might have to leave tonight because the aforementioned one-way croc bridges we crossed might get swamped over if the rain didn’t stop soon. I like to think this was god’s vengeance, destroying this touristy temple for spoiling his creation, but we were just idiots for coming during the rainy season.

The shuttle to our hotel finally came back and took the soppy collection back up. Back at the hotel, the group grumbled back to their rooms to pack, but it was only about an hour later that the storm broke and we were reassured we’d have safe passage home by morning. Our room smelled like wet dog throughout the night, but at least we were able to go compare disaster stories at the bar that night. It was fun.

***

This afternoon, we went to a place called “The Butterfly Farm,” after it took about a week to find a cab driver who knew where that was. This place is actually a farm, about a hectare of land owned by some Dutchman who grew up in England who came to Costa Rica to grow tomatoes then changed his mind and decided he wanted to conserve (and later farm and sell) butterflies. The end result is a farm full of crazy foliage that you can walk through that is flooded with butterflies everywhere you look. I didn’t have my camera with me, but I’m planning on going back to this place, so pictures will be up soon. They export about 5,000 pupa per week to schools, museums, and other butterfly farms. It’s a strikingly organized operation, when you see all of the host plants they need to keep up in order to maintain the biodiversity of the butterflies. You can walk around and see dozens of species, in all their stages (egg -> larva/caterpillar -> pupa/chrysalis -> adult/butterfly). It’s a secluded place, deep in one of the Costa Rican central valleys, so there are very few tourists, but the staff is suspiciously friendly. What’s more, they gave us complimentary ponchos (it was raining again), coffee, a tour guide, and a 20 minute video on the history of this particular butterfly farm. My suspicions were for naught; this place was simply cool.

Tonight was a different story. The people I was with decided they wanted an American dinner, so they opted to go to the Outback steakhouse in Azcazul (sp?). If you think this is out of place or antithetical, you should know, there was a Hooters across the street. Anyway, I had a burger and even though my host mom’s cooking has been great, it was damn good burger. We stayed at this restaurant until around 7:00 when asked the hostess to call a cab for us. The cab didn’t arrive until nearly 8:00, which was frustrating until we went outside and saw part two of the other night’s rainstorm. Apparently, it followed us back to the outskirts of San Jose, because the taxi driver had about 10 feet of visibility and drove about 20 kmph the entire way home. What was usually a 20 minute drive back to Ciudad Colon took nearly an hour, as the rain wouldn’t let up. Making matters worse, as soon as we entered Colon (remember, the sleepy little mountain town), there was a bright flash of lightning and then all the power went out in the village.

There are no addresses in Colon; this is the place Bono was talking about where the streets have no name. You have to tell taxis driving you home, “turn right at the blue house with the horse in the front yard, and right after the bridge.” Problematically, in the pitch black darkness, we can’t see any landmarks to tell the taxi driver where to go, and he only has one working headlight. We essentially have to have him drive at a crawl and wait for lightning (which is striking about every 2 minutes) to give him directions. There were three stops to get all of us home, but he was getting irritated and was only willing to make the first two. This meant that the only person who was getting off at the last stop was going to have navigate through Colon at night, in the rain, by lightning. This person was wearing flip-flops, shorts and a brown polo t-shirt, and wishing he hadn’t left his complimentary butterfly poncho at the kitschy Australian-themed restaurant. This person was me.

Even in the abject darkness of a lightless village, I’m too proud to run in public, so I’m doing the old man power-walk through the mall thing, repeatedly dropping my foot in a mud puddle or in an unannounced marshy pit, literally trying to feel my way along the edges of buildings (when there are some). Every two or three minutes, a car would drive by and I could at least see that for the next 50 yards, I wasn’t going to walk off the gravel road into some peat bog. When the car was out of sight, I had to stop and wait for either lightning, or another car’s headlights to pass so I could pick out my next turn. It was kind of like when you get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, but don’t want to turn on the lights to make it to the bathroom, and you have to feel your way past your doorjam, to the cold tile under your feet, to the sink, to the seat. Except here, your bathroom is ten blocks down and someone is spraying you in the face with a super-soaker. FINALLY, I see Banco Nacional lit up in a flash, which means my house is three blocks to the right over the bridge. Now I’m kind of running, but it’s more like a homerun trot around the bases. I’m feeling vindicated, even though I’m wet through to my underwear. I walk in through the front door and see Rom playing Uno by candlelight with our host family’s 12 yr old cousins and they ask me what happened. I’m getting to the part where I’m standing on the rainy corner near our house like some pathetic loser in a Coldplay music video when the power comes back on, and the 12 year olds point and laugh at me, since now they can see I look like a bald rat that’s been through the rinse cycle.

So to summarize, I’m having a good time.

Cloud City to Colon, or How I Became Viggo Mortenson

Yesterday in class, the windows in my classroom were completely obscured as the heavy, white clouds rolled up the mountain. All I could think is that I was in Cloud City from "Empire Strikes Back", but I don’t think Lando ever had to put up with 90% humidity. It was in this weather that a group of 11 decided to walk down the winding road from UPeace to find the horse stables for a ride. It was about 5 minutes before I was drenched in my own sweat, only alleviated by the periodic downpour that would only last for a few minutes at a time. The stables were a short 15 minute walk from the university, but after arriving, they told us all his farmhands had gone home for the day, but that the horses would be ready tomorrow. At this point we had a choice. Wait an hour and a half for the 3 o’clock bus, or just walk back to town. After all, they told us it was only about 6 ½ kilometers (ended up being about 8), so how long could it take?

The answer to that question is 3 and a half hours. Admittedly there were a lot of stops to take pictures of the nature around us, but it was a crazy, stupid, steep (up and down) crawl. Along the way, we came across a man who lived in the middle of the mountain selling wood-carved souvenirs (seen below), but other than that it was 11 people with heavy school backpacks having a fun, but dehydrating march back to town on a road with no phones and no other way to get back. But, I finally have some photos to post from my trip as a result.


butterfly


catterpillars


some creek


end of the road, canopy below


after it cleared, more clouds coming from the south


***

Now, as for that horse ride today, here’s how that went.

The Ciudad Colon Crew managed to rally about 16 people for a horse ride down a trail about a kilometer south of UPeace. I got on the last horse, which looked white and scrawny. Let's call him "Asshole," for reasons that will be clear later. I started at the back of the 16 horse line, mostly struggling to get it to turn right and stay off the ditch to the side of the road (poorly aligned, maybe?). I managed to get about 60% of the horse direction wise, but it really wasn't interested in listening to my suggestions about speed. I gave it a few light heel bumps in the belly, and it would just stop to eat weeds. This went on for about ten or fifteen minutes, to the point that the guide at the rear of the line came back behind mine and hit my horse with a stick to get it going.

Apparently, this struck a chord with my horse because it began to walk faster, going from negative inertia to at least a modest trot. It slowly made its way to the middle, then the front of the pack, where it kept trying to get in the way of the only two experienced horse riders in our group of students. It would stand in front of them, then turn around and face backwards. Clearly, Asshole had some kind of superiority complex. Then, as the two better riders started to gallop, my horse started to get competitive and gallop with them. This was fun, but just as i was getting used to my ass bopping up and down on the saddle, a long green stick bug landed on my arm. By now, I'm accustomed to having unusual bugs land on me without warning, but this was no city stick bug. The horse had been regularly taking me through brush, so I figured it was probably just a branch, but when I saw its curious antenna touching and tapping at my arm, and realized that it stretched from my elbow to my wrist, I sort of yelped out like a schoolchild and brushed it to the ground. This was a poor decision and I now believe that horses do sense fear. The horse took off, as if I had whipped it in the ass and zoomed ahead of the pack. I went from a trot that I thought would leave my ass kind of sore to a speedy gallop. I felt like I mostly had it under control and the two good riders were able to catch up to me to tell me how to stop it, but yelling “ho!” and pulling on the reins only seemed to anger it. Eventually, they were able to ride up next to me and get their horses to stop, which seemed to cool my horse’s competitive juices, and he took about a 5 minute break to let the rest of the group catch up.

I took a minute to curse at Asshole, then spent the next four looking at where I was: waterfall to my right, vines all around me, bugs and birds louder than any I’d heard before, and an indescribable view of central Costa Rica. I didn’t have my camera, but I might go back again to capture that moment. For my first ride, I’m glad I didn’t have the camera, because as soon as I loosened my grip on the reins, the horse took off again. This time, there was no stopping Asshole. He was sprinting up a windy mountainside, completely obscured from the sun, with a long, leafy drop down the right of the trail that had no visible end. The other riders tried to catch up with me, but their horses couldn’t keep up. This Asshole decided he was the #1 horse back to the stable and didn’t really care what the “Ho!!!!”-ing rider had to say. I haven’t seen “City Slickers” in a long time, but this was kind of like that, only I was the stunt double and not a (still-funny at this time) Billy Crystal. It turned where it wanted to at forks in the road, didn’t slow down when darting in between a break in barbed wire fence, and I could no longer hear anyone behind me, or see anyone because of the winding road.

Up until this point, I hadn’t been pulling hard enough on the reins. Before we left, most of my lily-livered liberal companions at the stable were going on about how painful it is for the horse. When I realized that if I didn’t stop the horse, it would probably take me someplace I wouldn’t know how to get back from, I went from mildly terrified to moderately angry. I grabbed the reins hard and yanked it back against my thighs like I was told and leaned over to yell “HOOOOOOOOO!” (like santa claus, if santa claus had a rope in your mouth) into his ear. Asshole didn’t come to a full stop, but it slowed to a gallop long enough to shake its head angrily and take off again. We went back and forth at this, me yelling louder and sticking my slip-on vans deep into the stirrups and the horse shaking its head and trying to shake its head and make that weird angry braying sound. And ultimately, I won. The horse stopped; I had been holding the rope tightly enough that I pulled a lot of skin off my fingers, but I broke that m-effer. I got him to turn around and go back the way we came and eventually I caught up with the group of 5 riders that had broken off from the slow horses at the back of the pack. Apparently, the horses know the trail and had been going the right way all along. So with the confidence that I owned this Asshole, the front-five galloped the rest of the way home, with my horse leading the way (with me about 80% in control). I was like Viggo Mortenson in "Hidalgo," teaching them Arabs a lesson. And that’s how Costa Rica made me the rancher my lineage had meant for me to be; on some rural Mexican farm, in a parallel universe, I would have been yelling the Spanish equivalent of “Ho!”

Now, there’s been a lot of hyperbole in this post and it kind of has the tone of one of those crazy fish stories no one can ever really corroborate, so let me put things in perspective, using math. The trail was advertised at just over an hour. I spent the first ten minutes getting my horse to stop eating before it decided to race. I arrived at the stables and checked my watch. The last pack of horses came in 25 minutes later. This means, my horse took me around a 1 hour+ trail in about 35 minutes, probably about half the time. I may have only been in control for the last ten, but that was the scariest, yet the best $10 I’ve spent… ever?

Bugs and Superpizza

It’s difficult, but I’m getting accustomed to the fact that there are bugs everywhere. On my books, in my bed, on the kitchen table, on my face. Not necessarily big beetles, but little, innocuous creepy crawlies that you have to bat away. I have to suppress my first instinct to smash them dramatically, as I don’t want to appear insensitive to my host country’s ecosystem. Walking home last night, I saw the single biggest cockroach I’ve ever seen; in width probably about the size of an apple. I promptly yielded the sidewalk and went on my way. As far as the inside the house bugs go, I’ve gone as far as to propose an unlikely alliance. Anyone who knows me knows that I have a semi-crippling spider phobia. I seek them out and destroy them (usually with the vacuum), I haven’t opened my apartment windows in months to keep them out, I smash them in a Kleenex which I light on fire then flush down the toilet. “Arachnophobia” at age 9 at 11:30 p.m. was a life-altering mistake.

Anyway…

As I was taking my clothes out of my bag to put in my modest closet space, I noticed in the corners there were some small, mostly undisturbed spiders living in there. I quickly moved all my clothes to the open bookcase on the other side of the room, but decided to spare the spiders and leave the closet open. My hope is that in exchange for my leniency, they’ll kill any malaria or dengue carrying mosquitoes. In addition, I’m a barefoot type of person, but not in this house. Earlier today, I was walking around barefoot when I stepped on a centipede about the size of my pinky finger. I now wear shoes everywhere.

Today was my first day at the University for Peace. Host mom started the day by making us pancakes and packing us snacks in Ziploc bags (pineapple slices and a banana); she’s been awesome. A few people have had less hospitable experiences (one person’s getting a hotel room because kids keep blasting into her room while she’s changing), but for the most part the reviews of the host families have been excellent. The bus ride was about 15 minutes zooming up a curvy, jungle road even further up the mountain. When the road wasn’t obscured by tall trees and vines, you could see miles of waxy, green coffee plants latticed all the way down the side of the mountain. When we were near the summit, we turned off to the university campus. It’s small, only about the size of my high school. All the classrooms and offices are windowed, there’s barely a concealing wall anywhere on the campus. This is probably done to take in the unbelievable view from the top of the mountain. In every direction, there’s a thin cloud cover across the middle of the green mountainsides. I went for a walk and had an Andy Griffith moment as I failed in trying to catch a wild frog. The university is somehow connected to the U.N., as their flag is all over the place. There are other international students there from all over the world, just having completed an 11-month masters course, something about peace studies. Last night, we went to a going-away party for a few of these students at a place in town called Superpizza and they were very friendly and liberal (politically and with their pizza).

The town is very hospitable to tourists, as it’s very common for local families to host students studying at the University for Peace, so among the locals you see a good number of bohemian (read: dirty) looking visitors.

Originally for tonight, we had planned to go a place called the “Shakespeare Bar” in downtown San Jose, but instead are opting to go bowling with some of the graduating UPeace people. Hopefully, I can leech some Costa Rican wisdom off them before they leave.

Should Have Brought an Umbrella

It rains HARD here, so far every afternoon, around 1 p.m. The mornings are heavy and humid, so it's a relief when the water finally comes, but then you're kind of stuck where you are.

Last night, my roommate wanted to eat out some traditional Costa Rican food, so the daughters (ana and pilar) took us to some traditional family style Costa Rican restaurant they had never been to before that was empty and terrible. On the bright side, Mayela’s (the matron of the household) cooking is very good and that promises to be a bonus of choosing to stay with a family.

Rom (sp?) the roomate and I were feeling equally restless yesterday afternoon after discussing the possibility of spending most of our nights in this Ewok treehouse watching Man vs. Wild dubbed in Spanish, but our concerns were slightly assuaged after Ana drove us around downtown San Jose and showed us some of the highlights. There are a couple of cool looking national museums, parks, and theaters downtown, but it’s kind of on the dirty side and doesn’t inspire a lot of walking around. We drove by a narrow street that had a cluster of fun looking, well-attended bars near a university down there, but I don’t know if I’m ready to go out at night with a button up shirt that only has the bottom two buttons done. Actually, the attire here is patently American. While you don’t get as much of the nonstop branding, the styles are essentially the same and you still see your fair share of Gaps and Volcoms walking around. That makes it a little easier to fit in. Unless if you’re walking around with a 5’7 Indian guy named Rom. But my first impressions are he’s easygoing like myself and likes baseball (albeit the Braves), so we’re good so far.

Downtown aside, the real action in this country is when you get outside the city. My MONKEYWATCH 2007 is just getting started, but I’m not going home until I see one. I think once we get to the university Monday and start some of the deep jungle excursions, I’ll take a picture of me with one in a big yellow hat.

First Day in Costa Rica

I've arrived safely in Costa Rica after a crazy red eye from LA. The flight was about 6 hrs, then another hour after connecting in Panama City. As I waited in LAX to board my flight, I saw a group of friendly, seemingly affluent white 20-somethings gathering for my same flight. At first, the sight made me scornful, knowing my friends and I would never successfully orchestrate anything this huge, but as the group grew in size, I knew there could only be one explanation. Mormons. Sure enough, one landed in between me and an old jewish guy who told dirty jokes the whole way down and implored us to skip the legal prostitution in Panama City (too many underage girls) but to hit up the casinos. The mormon fellow was very polite, in the face of the vice I'm sure he was heading south to snuff out. Good luck.

On arriving in Costa Rica and taking a cab to my host family's house all I could think was that I was living among the ewoks on the Endor moon, if the Ewoks fancied pastel colored homes. I am in the middle of a green, lush, jungly mountain, unlike any I've seen before. The house is plopped in the middle of it somewhere; I can't see the top of the mountain because it's obscured by heavy rain clouds. The town center is a 5 minute walk away down a gravel/sometimes paved path and over a pretty strong creek. There are less strays here than there were near the airport, but there's a couple weird breeds sniffing about. The cab directions to this place were "ciudad colon, 300 meter east of musmani (some kind of grocery store) and 75 meters south, house on the right." this guy's a pro, though, and he found it. I am unsure how I would get back here if I were to get lost, as I outright reject the metric system and it's tenets.

Most of the homes here are somewhere on the spectrum between shack and mcmansion. On a scale of 1-10 where 1 is the shack, this probably hits as a 4. It has very nice touches (lots of skylights letting natural light in all day) and some weird ones (some rooms have no roof intentionally, which means it rains in the house, also no hot water in the shower). It's hard to explain, but it's more than suitable and the family here has students staying with them almost year round, so they make us feel very comfortable.

The weather is humid without being overbearing, maybe because it doesn't seem to have cracked 75 yet. It's going to rain every afternoon for a few days probably, which is fitting for a rainforest. It's not just a clever name. In the back of the house, the family runs a bakery. Some guy apparently comes by every few days to buy bread for the local grocery stores, so I should have good smells in my immediate future, as well as an extra 10 pounds.

On the negative, my toiletries bag was holding a shampoo bottle which exploded en route, and I'm currently trying to figure out what can be salvaged. The damage was limited to the bag and my clothes are good, but I may have lost my malaria medication and other meds in the process. Oh well. I may have to dress like a beekeeper from here on out.

I have another student staying here as well, and he seems like a cool guy. As we were sitting around getting to know each other over lunch, he kept asking "what are we going to do tonight?" I had no real response, as I don't know what to expect of ewok nightlife. There's not much to do here, as it's pretty remote and not exactly touristy like the northern or caribbean beach towns. We may go see "live free or die hard." That's a fitting Costa Rica experience.

For now, I sleep.

Catching Up

I've been noticeably absent the last five weeks, but that's because it's been the summer of J(Ge)orge. I thought that for my last few weeks of my last Summer Vacation^TM, I might ride in a hot air balloon or discover a new use for iridium or something. Instead, I've spend a lot of time with amy, rediscovered how to read for fun, eaten out at new restaurants, caught up with old friends, went to Magic Mountain for a friend's birthday, went to (and watched on TV) lots of Dodger games, played Guitar Hero II (as well as other virtual exploits)and just relaaaaaaaaxed in an air conditioned condo. It's been great. A week from today, I leave for Costa Rica to start my month-long Central American adventure, and I expect to update this more often then as there are more novelties to report and pictures of parrots to post.

Tonight, I'm going to the Hollywood Bowl to see the Decemberists play with the L.A. Philharmonic with amy and a picnic packed, in a previously unmatched night of yuppie-ness. Bourgeoisie or not, I'm really excited.

As for my to-do list, tonight I'll take the time to officially cross off...
- See Two Concerts: the Decemberists tonight, at the Horrors a few months back at the Echo. The Horrors were surprisingly fun, for a band composed of men with expensive haircuts.
- See a Show at the Hollywood Bowl: check.
- Read 3 Books for Fun: "Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs" by Chuck Klosterman, "The Blind Side," by Michael Lewis, and "Letter to a Christian Nation," by Sam Harris. Klosterman I now love. Lewis I continue to love, after changing the way I look at baseball with "Moneyball" blew my mind in this book about how high school kids are recruited for collegiate sports. Harris I don't love, but he did help cement my burgeoning religious cynicism.
- Teach Parents to Use the Internet: my mom now can send me very long run-on sentences asking me if I'm coming over for dinner, as well as book her own airline tickets. I'll leave it to my brother to show them where the porn is.
- Go to a Las Vegas 51s Game: last month when visiting amy's grandparents in Vegas, I was able to go check out a AAA dodgers baseball game. It was decidedly small town for a city like Las Vegas, but still cool to see the young guys who might get called up to the big club. Also provided major bragging fuel for my fellow Dodger fanatics.
- Go See The Doctor: my cousin finally booked me an appointment with her doctor, who is the first doctor I've ever liked. He gave me shots I needed, in case I get bitten by a monkey in the tropics next month. He also made sure I didn't have testicular cancer, which was made less awkward because we were talking about how weird Mormons can be.