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  Acosta, Costa Rica
Thursday, August 17, 2006

The volunteer visit was a lot of fun. My volunteer lives only 1.5 hours from San Jose so it was really convenient for me to visit her. We met in SJ and had lunch at this cool pizza place on the central street. In downtown SJ, there are a ton of pizza vendors/restaurants. But taht doesn't necessarily mean that the pizza is good...

The bus ride to her site was nice- she lives in the mountains and it's just gorgeous... A lot prettier than my mountains. Her town is pretty well-to-do. I'd say upper middle class. Large houses, SUV's, clean running cars (no plumes of black exhaust out the back), lots of people have cable tv.

The house I stayed in was amazing. There were plants all over the house, and on one of the outside walls were decorative butterflies of all different kinds. In my room, I had cable tv- American movie channels galore. It was great. Also, they had hot water. :) The mother was really nice and an amzaing cook. Better than my host mom... But that's a secret.

The first night, the volunteer and I went to a dance. Lots of high school kids and loud regga-tone. (Regga-tone is really big here.) I got to meet a lot of high school kids. Sunday, we went hiking in a private park on the mountain with another vol who lives in the next town over. The trail was easy to follow and the forest was really nice. We even saw a snake! Also, there was a dead tree that had a face on it- eyes and a mouth! The pictures don't do it justice. (Sorry for not posting pics- it's hard to get them loaded considering the bad internet connections. One of these days...) That night, we went to a neighbor's house and he showed us some dance moves- merengue, salsa and some other names I can't remember... Mon/Tues the vol took me around to meet the different groups and businesses she works with. All in all, I had a really good time.

Tomorrow, we find out where our sites are. There is a lot of chisme (cheeze-may- gossip) going around about who's going where, but really, no one knows. I'd like to be near SJ, for convenience, in a cooler area, and a larger town (population ~3000). I don't really have my sights set on a specific place, and there's not anything I can do about it anyways. Just wait and see.

On a side note, I cooked for the first time here last weekend. My host mom was visiting relatives with the son, so it was me, my 16 year old host sister and host father. Saturday went okay. I made fried rice- can't really mess that up- and sandwiches with french fries. But Sunday... we were making pasta and since we didn't have sauce, I wanted to add veggies. I went digging around in the fridge and came up with a tomato, onion and green beans. Then, I found IT: an avacado. I like avacados. I could eat them all the time. I thought, avacados are good, and you can put them in just about anything, why not pasta? So I did. The pasta, when it was done, smelled GREAT. And we were starving. First bite... uh-oh... unfortunately for me, the avacado was old. I thought that the slight brown was okay, after all, it was a little bit green, too. Nope. It was old and BITTER. The bitter avacado flavor permeated the entire pasta dish. I ate all of my serving as an obligation to myself. But the aftertaste lingered for an hour... It was terrible. After that, my host sister made a pot of rice for lunch with eggs. You can't win them all...