Casa Tucan Nicoya

... to our plans, anyways) in order to visit her volunteer placement with a turtle conservation group on Playa Buenavista (just outside Samara). Marcus and I had been talking about our spanish skills, and he had told me that you knew you could speak a language once you could have a phone conversation. Well, ladies and gentlemen, I had my first phone conversation; the cab showed up, at the arranged time and place, and took me to the river. Unfortunately, it had rained very heavily ...

Nicoya is a small, cute city which is close to where I live at the moment.
From Samara to Nicoya you can catch a bus a couple of times per day and it takes to about an hour to get there (and costs you only $1
As there are not a lot of shops in Samara, Nicoya is where I went to ...

... the opposite side of the lake. If we really cared where we are going we would have asked someone or consulted the GPS. Fortuna is a good town to experience the volcano but not the only spot, anywhere in the vicinity offers views but not today. Monte Verde sounds interesting so this is our destination for the night.  The road up into the cloud forest is rocky, rutted and pitted but worth it when we glimpse through the mist at the amazing view ...

... suspiciously above Catharine. Catharine suggests moving, but I am really enjoying my breakfast (and shoot, I wasn't the one peed on) and suggest that she just consider it good luck and get a new plate of food. I continue happily consuming my bacon, eggs and fruit. That is, until our lizard friend in the tree decided to "let go" number two on our breakfast table. At that point, Catharine described me as "getting vertical" as I jumped up and ran ...

... in February, and more temporary specials will be joining as well. I was excited to get there and see a friend I had met last year, he was serving as a temporary special in Ostional, later was appointed as a permanent special, and reassigned to Chira Island. I will let the photos tell the adventure of the boat ride to and from the island. Lets just say... the boat "captain" looked like Gilligan. Enough said.

... of locals who are heading home to San Carlos for the weekend and the bus driver managed to fit another 20 plus people, standing room only. There was a young man who also boarded the bus selling things from cold sodas to plantin chips then he walked out. Once we arrived at La Fortuna, we met a bunch of venders trying to sell us hotel rooms and tours while we were retreiving our luggages. From what I read in the tour ...

... a $1 a disc from some guy with a huge suitcase of them. They had spanish subtitles but were good quality and perfect for my dvd player. Back on the bus, we went twenty feet further and then had to get off again and pull our bags out for inspection. Inspection was a joke, since they just opened my bag, and then waved me along. i jumped back on the bus and started to watch a movie, only to find that liberia was much closer than i thought. Considering it took ...

... then I arrived at Liberia Airport (which is sooo tiny) and my cousin Jennah was late. I didn't have a working phone, or a telephone number or address or even name of where I was staying. Luckily she showed up after about 20 minutes so I wasn't in need of grabbing a cab to some random $2-a-night hotel. We're staying at the moment at Playa Panama where one of her parents' villas is located. But we're planning on changing to their main villa at Playa del Coco which is ...

... up spots in the aisle, barely inside the door.  After about twenty minutes of balancing precariously and trying not to elbow anyone else in the head while simultaneously moving our packs every time someone else needed to squeeze through in the aisle, we snagged seats for the ride into Santa Cruz. Santa Cruz, the folklore capital of Costa Rica, turned out to be a LOT smaller than I was expecting - for some reason, I had been thinking about the size of ...

... mark of respect. Other than that the classes are going good. At the beginning I was as much a teacher as a police man in the class room, discipline took up a lot of time, but slowly the children are learning European rules such as not to walk around the class, not to scream to talk to their neighbor and not to talk while I am trying to talk to them. It sounded normal for me that these rule would be respected but the Latin education is much more ...