Liar, liar, pants on fire

Clearly, I'm a liar. I claimed I was going to get better at writing these blogs and stay up to date. And I failed miserably. So no more promises from me. :) I'll just say that I'll do my best to write as much as I can.

The ants have become my arch enemies in my apartment. I kill about 50 a day. Maybe more. I often find one or two on my toothbrush (ALWAYS check before you brush), I find a handful crawling on my clothes in my laundry bag, I find them crawling out from under my keyboard on my laptop (it really disturbs them when I type), I find them inside tightly ziplocked baggies of food (how did they get in there???) ... well, you get the point. They're driving me crazy. And I just had to get that off my chest.

Now, on to less disturbing matters. A couple weeks ago I went to this really cool carnival in a town called Palmares (less than an hour from San Jose). It's apparently the biggest carnival in Costa Rica, and they had all kinds of rides and a parade and clubs. It was a blast.


Last week I participated in my first model UN. It was a little more work than I had imagined. I was India in the Human Rights Council, and we were talking about torture in conflict situations. So I had to do a lot of research on India (what international conventions had it ratified against torture, what was its own record on torture, what countries did it align with). And then the conference lasted three full days, so I was up to my ears in motions for "moderated caucuses" and voting procedures on making "friendly" and "unfriendly" amendments to draft resolutions. It was pretty intense. I learned that speaking like a diplomat is like learning another language. And I learned that, while it's fun to play pretend diplomacy, it can also be incredibly stressful at times.

Last but not least, my sister Wendy is visiting me! She and her boyfriend flew in Wednesday and will be flying back out in a couple days. I met them at the beach this weekend, and we spent a few days relaxing on the Carribean coast. They're on their way to spend a couple days at the volcano now before heading home Friday.

Glenn (Wendy's boyfriend) took this awesome shot:

Wendy and I on a lazy Sunday morning

I have three more friends visiting the first week in March, so my calendar is filling up, people. You only have a few more months to come visit me! :)

You didn't give up on me?

Yup, it's official. I'm the worst blogger ever. Apparently when I heard "holiday," I took that to mean a holiday from blogging too. But now I'm back. And I'll try not to leave you hanging for so long next time.

My big news is that I moved apartments. I was just too far from town, and it was getting to be too annoying. The bus only came every hour and a half, and I ended up taking a lot of taxis. So I moved into a three-bedroom apartment with two other girls from my class. One is from Switzerland, and the other is from France -- except the girl from France actually moved out to another apartment over Christmas break. I'm that hard to live with. :) No, actually she'd been thinking about moving for a while. She wanted to get farther out of town. How ironic. We should have switched places. So, now we have an extra bedroom. Anyone want to move to Costa Rica and live with me? Rent is only $240 a month with everything included. :) It's actually a really nice apartment, too. I'll have to take some pics and post them for you all. This apartment includes such luxuries as hot water throughout the house (most places, including my last apartment, only have hot water in the shower), an oven and a stove (no more hotplates and toaster ovens), a doorbell (most places you have to shout someone's name to get them to come out and unlock the front gate for you), and a balcony. I don't have as great a view, and I don't have a dryer anymore, but everything else is a total upgrade. And I get to have roommates again! So I'm rather happy.

My other big event of the past few weeks is that I went home for Christmas (perhaps that could be my excuse for not blogging??) It was wonderful to be home doing nothing for three weeks (well, I shouldn't say "nothing" -- my old work kept me pretty busy with editing jobs. Thanks, Carol!) I got to spend tons of time with the fam and all my friends in Chicago. I played Trivial Pursuit twice, and lost twice. I played Scattegories once, and lost once. I played Wordsters once, and ... wait ... I actually won that one. But my mom did give me a run for my money. I saw my old high school friends, I saw my old college roommates, I saw my old college newspaper coworkers, and I saw my cats! (They're in "foster care" with my old roommie and former co-owner of the cats.) I was a busy girl.

But now I'm back in Costa Rica. I just flew in last night (Wednesday). I left the house at 5:20 in the morning, and I didn't land in Costa Rica until 9:00. Most of that time was waiting around in airports (I had a layover in Phoenix), but still, it was exhausting. And I had my first class already today.

The weather is absolutely perfect here. Warm, but not too hot. Sunny. I was so happy when I got off the plane and rode in the back of the taxi with the windows down, and then I got in my bedroom and saw some ants crawling around, and I remembered that I wasn't the only one who loved warm weather. The bugs here really are everywhere. I took a shower with a big spider today. And the ants seem to like electronics for some reason -- every once in a while I see one or two on my computer, on my camera, on my printer, on my alarm clock. Other people say the same thing about their electronics. Weird. I'm looking at two tiny ants crawling on my desk right now. Wait, there's another one. Sigh. You may be freezing back in the States, but if you're relatively bug-free, you should count yourself lucky.

If this international law thing doesn't work out, I can always pick coffee

Every day on the way to and from campus, our buses pass through acres and acres of coffee plantations. I always thought they were beautiful, and this past weekend I had the opportunity to actually step inside the leafy green fields to pick some of the coffee myself. Why, you may ask? The idea was to let students experience what it's like to do the work and to interact with the local coffee pickers. It was really an amazing experience.

We showed up at 8:00 a.m. on Saturday, and they loaded us into the back of a wagon that was pulled by a tractor. This is how the workers are transported to and from work every day. (Of course, the regular workers had already been working since 6:00 a.m.; we just got to sleep in a bit.)


Our coffee-picking destination was along the same road we take to school every day. Below is a picture of the portion of the road that "broke" and caused us to be displaced for the first three weeks of class. The original road was actually off to the right of the photo, but there was a bit of a landslide (note all the fresh dirt), so they just created this new road here with gravel and dirt. There's a really steep drop into a canyon off to the right of the photo.


So, I never really thought about how coffee beans grow exactly, but I never would have guessed they look like berries. But guess what? They do. (See below.) We were given instructions to only pick the red berries and to leave the green ones on the plant (I presume they wait for the green ones to ripen, then pick those). Picking them is a very tedious process, since you are supposed to avoid collecting leaves or green berries. No one wears gloves because they make it too clumsy to work with. If you smoosh the berry, you find two white seed/bean things inside that look exactly like peanut halves. Apparently these are then rinsed off, dried, and then I think they actually crack open and the coffee bean is inside them. Then you roast the beans.


Here are my spoils! I only picked for about an hour or two, and I didn't get very far. We pooled all of our collections together, and we were told that we would have earned a TOTAL of about $5. Split between 18 people, that means we each earned about 30 cents for our hour or two of work (but we were a lot slower than the normal workers).


This guy picked a lot more than me...


This guy below is only 16, and he's been coffee-picking since he was 8. Apparently the average worker picks about 6 to 10 of these baskets of coffee every day, which is the equivalent of about $8 to $14. But the faster guys can pick up a few more baskets a day, bringing the earnings, at most, to about $17 a day.


Here are some more workers. Most of them are from Nicaragua and come for seasonal work. The company apparently gives them free housing while they work, and they work 8 hours a day. Around February, when coffee-picking season slows down, they go work in the sugar cane fields.


Both men and women work in the fields, and they often bring their kids with them, either to work or just to hang out with them. There was one 16-year-old girl there working, and this baby below is hers. (I'm not exactly sure who the girl holding the baby is -- I think the 16-year-old's sister or maybe one of the worker's kids.)


And here's just a random shot of the coffee plantation.

So here's my favorite part: Apparently the coffee beans we picked are separated into different grades, and the high-grade beans are exported while the lower-grade beans stay in the country. Guess who this coffee plantation sells its high-grade beans to? Starbucks. Seriously. So the next time you're drinking Starbucks coffee, you may be drinking beans I picked with my own hands!

OK OK, you win

So, you asked for a hair picture. Here ya go. I kind of look like an idiot in this picture even without the hair. Enjoy.

Hairy experience (sorry, i love bad puns)

So, I've been in this country about three months now, and my Spanish is slowly but steadily improving. I still can't understand people if they're just rapidly talking to each other, but I can give directions to taxi drivers and can more or less read cooking instructions on the back of food containers. Yet I've run into a few stumbling blocks. People seem to misunderstand me, even when I think I'm speaking the language.

For example, when I first arrived here, I asked someone if they sold "cafe frio" (cold coffee). I needed my daily coffee fix, but it was really hot out, so I wanted iced coffee -- you know, Dunkin Donuts style. To my happy surprise, the guy said yes and promptly left to go get it. About 10 minutes later, he comes back with this elaborate coffee-milkshake-type of thing with chocolate syrup drizzled around the edge of an ornate glass cup and whip cream on top. Now I'm not saying it wasn't good -- because it was fantastic. But it wasn't exactly what I wanted (and it cost $5 instead of your usual 80-cent cup of coffee).

My next related experience was just about a week or two ago. I was in a bar with friends, and I wanted to order nachos. They had nachos with chicken or nachos with beef on their menu, so I went up to the bartender and pointed to the nachos on the menu but said "nachos sin carne y sin pollo -- vegetariana." Clear enough to me. I wanted nachos but without the beef or the chicken. And he asked "ensalada y fijoles?" So I said yes -- I wanted the salad toppings (lettuce and tomatoes) and beans. I even pointed to the girl next to me who was eating exactly what I was trying to order. A short while later the bartender brings me a huge garden salad with a side of refried beans and a handful of tortilla chips. Now -- again -- it was darn tasty. But it's not what I meant.

The culmination of my language barriers came this past weekend when I went to get my hair cut. I was quite proud of myself because I called the woman Saturday morning and asked to make an appointment for 2:00 that afternoon, and I did it all in Spanish. That part was successful. Then I described how I wanted my hair cut. I made a point of learning the word for layers ahead of time (capas), so I said I wanted capas largo (long layers). Perhaps the woman understood me and simply thought she knew better, but instead of long layers, I got incredibly short layers. My total hair length still goes past my shoulders, but the shortest layer is probably halfway up the back of my head. It's kind of like the Rachel haircut on Friends -- which would be cool if this were 1997. But it's not. Unlike my other experiences, I was not happy with this substitution.

So, I'm thinking I'm just going to let it grow out a bit until I'm home in December and I can explain to someone in my native tongue how to fix my hair. Until then, I'll keep practicing my Spanish.

Panama!

The week before last was crazy with final papers and presentations, and then last Wednesday we had an exam, so I was of course cramming for that. I think it went well -- cross your fingers! It was all about concluding treaties, the International Court of Justice, and the use of force. It's crazy how much I've learned already.

Then we had Thursday and Friday off, and you know how I just can't stay away from the beach! :) Actually, I tend to take every opportunity I have to get out of Ciudad Colon. It's a really small town (one traffic light, I think), and we're close enough to San Jose, but San Jose doesn't have a lot going for it. I'm realizing that I miss big cities, big time. I'm too close to roosters and muddy roads all the time. I miss street cleaning, and people rushing off to work in suits and high heels, and tall buildings, and meeting friends for a drink after work. But I don't miss it so much that I don't appreciate what I have going here. I love learning what I'm learning, and I love getting to know the local culture and seeing as much of the region as possible. I'm just going to be happy to move back to a city after my year is up.

Speaking of traveling as much as possible, a fellow classmate Jessica and I decided to travel over the long weekend. We went to the Carribean coast again (to Puerto Viejo) hoping to avoid the rain, but we weren't so lucky. But it was still great just to be by the beach and to be able to relax. We spent Thursday and Friday in Puerto Viejo, but then we decided that, since we were only about an hour and a half from the Panama border, we should go for our last two days.

I'm so glad we went! It was such a great experience. First we took a bus to the border, where I got a new stamp in my passport. And then you have to walk across a bridge to get to Panama. I think it's the first time I've walked over an international border. The bridge was this really old, rickety railroad bridge. Here are some pics of it:


On the other side of the bridge there are these taxis that take people to a harbor (about 15 minutes away) where boats leave for Bocas Del Toro -- our destination point. Bocas Del Toro is a collection of islands right off the coast of Panama in the Carribean. So we took an hour-long boat ride to the main island. The first half hour winds through a river, and then it opens up to the sea, where we wound through some of the islands. It was really beautiful. Some places had little huts on the water that you could rent:



We arrived on the island (Isla Colon), ate lunch at this little place on the water, and then found a hostel for only $8 a night per person. We were walking down the main street with all the shops and restaurants when we ran into a local guy named Robert. He offered to take us on a boat to one of the other nearby island for only $2 each way, so we took him up on the offer. (By the way, everything in Panama is in U.S. currency. Someone said they used to have their own currency -- Balboas -- but now U.S. currency is the official currency for Panama. Weird, huh?)

So Robert took Jessica, me, and this British guy to an island called Bastimentos -- which was the best cultural experience I think I've had since I got here. This Robert guy used to live on the island, so he knows everyone on it, and he introduced us to about half of them. The part of the island we visited is where all the locals live. They're all Afro-Carribean and speak a different kind of English (as Robert said, it's like English but not proper). There was this main cement walkway through the town, but no cars or roads. It was so lively -- it seemed like the entire town was out and about. There were boys playing baseball in a field:


There were guys playing dominos:


And there was a funeral, so half the town was dressed up and gathered at one house and at a pub down the street celebrating the dead's "passage into the next life," as Robert put it. We actually talked to a nephew of the man who died. He and several others in town said the man died of a broken heart because his son had recently been stabbed and killed. Here's a pic of some of the people gathering for the funeral celebration:


And here are some other pics of the town (I took about 50):




We went back to the main island after a little while and then left for San Jose early the next morning. It was quite an experience.

Back to the beach

I just can't stay away from the beach. Since I was sick, I was waffling back and forth on whether I was up to a weekend away, but late Friday night I decided to go for it. I went with two friends (Michelle from school and her Rotary friend who's also from the States and studying in Costa Rica, but at a different school). We went to Cahuita, which is on the Caribbean side of Costa Rica -- a first for me (all the other beaches I went to were on the Pacific). The Caribbean is great this time of year because it doesn't rain all day like it does here in the Central Valley or the Pacific side. In fact, it didn't rain at all when we were there.

Cahuita is absolutely beautiful, but the trip started out a little rocky. Since I waited until the last minute to decide whether I was going, I bought my ticket at the last minute and learned about a little thing called "de pie," which was stamped on my ticket. It means standing room only. A four-hour bus ride with no seat. It turns out several people were without seats, and we ended up sprawling all over the aisle of the bus -- at one point I laid down in the aisle and actually fell asleep. And Michelle offered to switch with me for a leg of the trip, so it wasn't so bad.

We roll into town around 2 p.m. and start popping into hotels looking for a room. In the half dozen or so towns I've staying in so far, I've always been able to just go there without a reservation and find a room for $10 to $15 per person a night. Not this time. Monday was a Costa Rican holiday, and apparently everyone went to Cahuita. We went door to door looking for a free room, and everywhere was full. By this time we were exhausted and tripping with sweat (it had to be close to 90 degrees -- way hotter than San Jose). We kept running into a few other backpackers who were in the exact same boat as us. After an hour or so we finally found one place that "sort of" had a room. There was some weird story about how some guy (I think who worked at the hotel) had the key to the room, but when he came back in an hour, we could access the room. And the shower was not totally put together when we got in, but they came in and fixed it. So all of that was a little weird, but we were happy just to have the room. And it turned out to be a beautiful place! It was this little duplex-type cabin that had a kitchenette on the first floor, and then a little second floor with three beds (sleeps up to five people). It was right on the water and had a porch with a beautiful view. Here are some picks of the place:



The next morning we woke up and went snorkeling. Landlubber I may be, but put a life vest on me, and I can pretend to swim with the best of 'em. We took a little boat out into this bay area -- and by little boat I mean something that looked like a big canoe with a clip-on motor. It was a sunny day, and we snorkeled over a large coral reef area with tons of bright blue and yellow fish (and some weird spiky fish and something that looked like a brain). It was really cool.

And then the guide dropped us off at the tip of the shoreline so we could walk an hour back through the state park on a path that followed the beach, and we saw a bunch of monkeys on the walk back!

But I'm back in town now and this week is incredibly busy. We have a moot court thing on Friday, so we're all very busy preparing for that, plus we have a different paper due Friday and our final exam next Wednesday. Plenty to keep me busy!