Pura Vida Hotel Alajuela

Now that I have been in San Jose, Costa Rica for nearly a week I have plenty to write about! I am living in an area called Vargas Araya, just a short bus ride away from down town San Jose and less than a 10 minute walk to Universidad Latina where I have class. My "host mom" is 75, adorable, sweet, a great cook and has been hosting international students for 24 years! Her daughter who is 49 lives here too, she ...

... pushy and demanding from strangers she doesn't even know. I am glad she settled down as I was about to get involved. The arrival in Dallas-Fort Worth brought us to gate C-11. We checked the connection monitor in the terminal for our next flight. It was scheduled to depart from gate D-29 at 5:45 p.m. We walked around the DFW Airport, looked in a couple shops, got a soda (yes, a diet coke) and then just sat and waited ...

... and famous (tobacco and coffee was responsible for this) but the only beautiful buildings that remain are the theatre (beautiful but in Europe there are hundreds of this kind of buildings), the post office and the Grand Hotel. You can also find some old colonial houses. It only 8 pm but we fall asleep the moment we touch our pillow. After a fantastic breakfast, we leave and take the bus to La Ensenada, a wonderful lodge in the Nicoya region.

... I could tell you the rule about luggage being left unattended but it is bringing nightmares thinking of it. I{m on about three hours total sleep this past night and four the night before. Miami was cool. I am at a Hostel now that is a mini city. It has its own pool, restaurant, bar, t.v. room, billiard room and an outdoor second floor balcony that has a clear view of the volcano if it wasn{t so cloudy. I will be sleeping in, I hope and ...

... is really unusual. The hotel in Miami had continental breakfast and we felt like we were already in another country with all of the different spoken languages we were hearing. We then got on a fairly short flight to San Jose. Amazingly enough we had no major flight delays and smooth rides the whole time. And our bags were checked all the way through so we didn't have to deal with ...

... spend an entire Saturday night's worth of tips on a pair of shoes, but then, I am cheap. No matter how obnoxious it was, I will probably soon forget the dissonant symphony of barking dogs every night, or the humidity that turned my cough drops into a pool of cough syrup at the bottom of my medicine bag. Almost every afternoon the dampness gave way to rain, which sometimes fell with such force, the drops bounced a foot off the ground. Occasionally it stopped before sunset ...

... three-toed sloth in the trees. He was so well camoflauged that pictures don't do justice. But it was neat to see him lounging in the trees. With our afternoon free, we wandered around the main square in Alajuela and attempted to visit the museum but it was closed. We dined at Pizza Hut and then headed back to the hostel to book a bus to Monteverde for early the next morning. Hopefully we'll see a lot of wildlife in the cloud forest!

... busom, ki se je ustavljal vsakih par metrov, sva kmal ugotovili, da ne samo da sva EDINI beli na avtobusu in da ITAK nihce ne govori anglesko in ko smo se vozili skozi razsute predele, sem dojela, da american dream resnicno velja samo za nekatere. Pa zal mi, je, ker nisva kupili napihljivega 3 metrskega bozicka ali snezaka, ki ga ima vsaka hisa v tem razsutem delu na vrtu :) danes greva naprej v Arenal, sam nimava pojma do ...

... though, because it took quite a while to find more. <br><br>Searching for caterpillars is like searching for a straw in a haystack! Many are very well camouflaged. I found one that looked like a brown stick hanging from a stem. Others blend in with leaf coloring and morphology. Some build shelters by curling a leaf around themselves. So we also picked open many a plant leaf. Unfortunately, many spiders do the same thing, so we were often greeted by unhappily exposed spiders! <br ...