Mexico (finally!)

Last week was full of Fulbright orientation activities in Mexico City. We literally went nonstop from 7:30am to about 11:00pm on Wednesday and Thursday, and Friday from 7:30 to 5:00. But it was all worth it. The people I´ve met are amazing, everyone is doing such interesting things and is so excited about their work. The Fulbright Commission put us up in a fancy hotel in downtown and paid for our meals in nice restaurants. We also went to the National Archaeology Museum, a "folk ballet" show (it was actually a series of traditional Mexican dances), the pyramids at Teotihuacan, and the Chapultepec Castle. We had guided tours of everything. We also had some lectures on Mexican history, politics, and relations with the U.S., and a formal reception in the U.S. Ambassador´s residence. All the Fulbright grantees were invited, there are about 60 of us, as well as Embassy staff. It was pretty intimidating and I didn´t really know what to say to anyone, so I mostly just chatted with other Fulbrighters. I did talk to the Ambassador for a little while, though, which was cool. Apparently he´s pretty close to Pres. Bush and when Bush was reelected there was talk of him getting a cabinet position; but apparently he got Mexico instead. I wonder what he thinks about that...

The weather in Mexico City was less than ideal, pretty cloudy, and rainy during the afternoons. Because the city is built on top of what used to be a lake, the drainage system leaves much to be desired, and there was some pretty bad flooding on Wednesday and Thursday. I was in a cafe with my roommate, Alder, when it started raining, then hailing, and then the floor of the cafe started to flood. We don´t know where the water was coming from because it wasn´t high enough on the street to come into the cafe. But there was about an inch of water on the floor! Eww. It did stop raining, but later that night when we were en route to the ballet, we drove through flooded streets about a foot deep! We saw shop keepers bailing out their stores with buckets, and there were mounds of hail on the sides of the road, which kind of looked like snow. It was pretty amazing to see all the cars just driving through the water.

I arrived in Cuernavaca yesterday, where the weather is much more pleasant. It rains, but at night, when I´m already nice and dry in my bed. It´s been sunny all day today, and warm, but not hot. Mmm, eternal spring. I think I picked a good city. So Cuernavaca is bigger than I thought, about 350,000 permanent residents (like double that on the weekends when there´s a mass exodus from Mexico City). I´ve been exploring the downtown area today, which is actually quite small. That makes it nice because I can start to learn my way around and not feel like I´m lost for 2 months like I did in Madrid! But I eventually learned my way around Madrid, so I´m sure I can figure Cuernavaca out. The bus system seems to be pretty extensive, although I found out today that there are 3 different route #3s, and I have to make sure I take the right one home! I´m staying with Rafael´s relatives until I move into my apartment on Tuesday. I found a cute one-bedroom apartment close to the National Institute of Public Health, where I´ll be working. It´s close enough to walk to work, and the buses to the center of Cuernavaca and also to one of the malls pass really close. There are also two Walmarts in Cuernavaca, which is apparently one of the cheapest places to buy groceries (except the market, where the quality can be questionable). If I´m going to start shopping like a local I´d better make a stop at Walmart... kind of counter-intuitive, I know. Also close to my apartment is a track where I can run. It´s away from the road so it will be nicer, although I would much prefer a pool. I´m still on the lookout for a pool, a yoga studio, and a place to take cooking classes. I think sometime this week I´ll explore the university here; I think I might be able to find some of that stuff around there.

Hopefully I´ll get internet set up in my apartment in the next week or two so I can post some pictures. Until then these descriptions will have to do!

A(aaah)renal

This weekend was by far the best I had in Costa Rica. I was traveling alone since Anna and LaToya were doing their own thing, and I really had a great time. I left Saturday morning for La Fortuna, a really cute town that has become the tourist base for visiting the volcano Arenal, one of the most active volcanoes in Costa Rica. It was dormant until 1968 when it exploded and destroyed some villages, and since then it´s been spewing ash and lava almost continuously. Lately the activity level has been lower, but if the conditions are right there´s a good chance of seeing some ash and/or lava. And I was lucky :-)

I booked an afternoon tour which included a short hike to see the volcano and a beautiful lagoon, during which time we were lucky and the clouds cleared up so we could see the cone. We also heard what sounded like thunder, but was actually the volcano rumbling. Back in the bus we started driving to the hot springs, and it was getting dark. I looked up and saw orange lava spilling down the side of the volcano!! It kept erupting for a while, we watched it for probably close to an hour. Definitely the coolest thing I´ve ever seen in my life. Cooler than the Taj Mahal, cooler than the Pope, even cooler than penguins! Seriously though, it gave me chills. Unfortunately it was dark so the pictures didn´t come out.

Then we went to the hot springs. It´s a whole resort with pools of varying temperatures, a swim-up bar, and a restaurant. There were also cold pools to cool off. Very refreshing. I spent most of the time hanging out with a super cool French Canadian couple who laughed at how I pronouced my last name in English. I also met a German girl, an Ecuadorian man and his Costa Rican wife, and some Spanish girls. You really do meet more people when you travel alone. And the coolest part was that I could talk to everyone on the tour because everyone could speak at least either Spanish or English. The tour guide was kind of crazy though. There were about 15 of us, about half spoke Spanish and half English, and only a few were bilingual. We were all on the little tour bus and the guide starts saying in Spanish, "okay, for those of you who speak Spanish, I´m going to explain a little bit about what we´re going to see. But in general they tell us here in La Fortuna that we should speak only in English because of the tourists. So we´re going to the volcano, blah blah blah...." And he just kept speaking in Spanish the entire time!! I felt really bad for the people who couldn´t understand. And he was clueless as to who spoke which language. During the hike, he says in Spanish, "don´t touch this plant, it will make you itchy and give you a rash." Then he looks at the Spanish girls and says in English, "danger!" They were like, "huh?" Really funny, but again, glad I spoke Spanish or I wouldn´t have understood anything!

The next day I got up early for my waterfall rapelling tour. This was the one thing I really wanted to do in Costa Rica, and I think it may have been the coolest thing I´ve ever done. There were 8 of us on the tour: 4 Brits, 2 girls from Texas, me, and a Costa Rican who was training to be a guide. Turns out the Texans are getting certified to teach English and will be moving to Oaxaca, Mexico in October to teach for a year. We exchanged email addresses so we can hopefully travel together in Mexico. So the guides for this tour did speak English, which was good since it was imperative to know what was going on. We started out on a short walk to the waterfall. To get down to the waterfall the first rapell was from a hanging bridge. From the middle of the bridge you just drop down (slowly of course) on your rope and land in the pool at the bottom of the fall. It was about a 25-30 meter drop, but the waterfall itself was fairly small. The walls of the waterfall were high and narrow with lots of vegetation. Then we had to scramble down over some rocks, jump into another pool (not like cliff jumping, just a hop really), rapell a couple meters down another part, and then the hardest part was at the end. It was about 8-10 meters to the bottom, and we had to put one foot on either side of the waterfall, legs straight, and rapell down. I was wearing my hiking boots, which kept my toes safe and stayed on my feet really well, but they were very, very wet. On the way down I lost my footing and swung into the side of the cliff. I scratched my shoulder a bit, and I have a really nice blueish-greenish bruise on my knee. But I got my foot back and went down the rest of the way without a problem. I was completely drenched at the end. Then just for fun we got to go on a "Tarzan swing". We just swang back and forth, we couldn´t jump off the end because we were fastened in. And lastly we rode horses back up to the top where we started. I had a really great time. The Texan girls bought a cd with the pictures, so hopefully they´ll email me some so I can post them.

I´m back in San Jose, packing and getting ready for Mexico!! I´m so excited to go and look for apartments and get settled. And super excited for Erin´s arrival at the end of September!! Yay! It´s been an interesting month here in Costa Rica, and I´m glad it ended with such an exciting weekend. Pura vida!

Descent into the Den of Sin

This weekend LaToya and I went to the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica. We wanted to leave Friday afternoon, but when we got to the bus station there were no more tickets left for the 4:00pm bus!! Irritated, we bought tickets to leave early Saturday morning, and went to have coffee. Saturday we were at the bus station at 5:45am, and we got to Cahuita, our destination, at about 10, just in time for a snorkeling tour of the coral reef in the national park. Unfortunately, it´s been raining a lot so the visibility was pretty bad. And there were a lot of jellyfish.... But oh well, it was still fun. We met a cool Canadian couple who had just gotten married in Costa Rica and were backpacking around the country for their honeymoon. Soo cute.

So Cahuita and neighboring Puerto Viejo, which is slightly larger, are apparently infamous for being frequented by druggies and women looking for a fling with a "rasta man", as my guide book put it. LaToya and I were skeptical about going, but her boss has a cabin there and said it´s worth a trip. There are two national parks nearby, and Puerto Viejo itself is just a fun place with lots of restaurants, shops, and bars. We enjoyed the snorkeling and the black sand beaches, and of course, the people watching that comes with a town of such repute. We affectionately called Puerto Viejo the "Den of Sin". The theme of the weekend was, "no, gracias". Here are some examples:

sketchy man: ganja brownies?
us: no, gracias

sketchy man touching my arm
us: no, gracias (followed by a quick change in location!)

sketchy man: want to dance?
us: no, gracias

You get the picture. Another theme was waiting for buses. On Sunday morning we wanted to take the 9am bus from Cahuita to Puerto Viejo. The trip is only 7km, but it takes about 30 minutes due to poor road conditions and the presence of bus stops every 10 meters. We were at the bus stop at 8:30. The bus did not come until 10:15. Ahhhh! We hadn´t eaten breakfast because all the restaurants were closed. Why were they closed? That´s theme number 3, which I will discuss shortly. Anyway, we did finally arrive in Puerto Viejo. Later that night, Anna had to take a bus back to another town where she had meetings the next morning for her research. The bus was supposed to arrive at 6:30pm. We were there at 6:15, and the bus didn´t come until 7:15. Yay!!! It was shorter that time!! I have to say that I don´t envy all the backpackers here. I´m traveling around with my school backpack with clothes for 3 days, while they have huge packs that they´ve been carrying for weeks. Backpacking in Europe hardly seems like roughing it now. It´s mostly a matter of infrastructure, but also climate. Everyone has rain covers on their packs because it rains almost every day.

Theme 3: Being hot, sticky, and dirty. Welcome to the tropics, where after you shower you immediately slab on the sun screen, followed by the bug spray (it´s dengue season in Costa Rica!). Then you go outside and add sweat to the mix. Go to the beach, add sand. Go to the bar, add beer. Now you´re a hot, sticky, greasy, sweaty, sandy, stinky mess. After a few hours like that you just get used to being dirty and it´s not so bad. No really, it´s not. In Puerto Viejo soap is no where to be found, so forget about washing your hands. Yeah, it was okay for a day. But the first thing I did when I got to San Jose was take a long, cleansing shower. Ahh. I don´t think I could ever live in the tropics. The lack of air circulation is really suffocating. Especially when the one weekend you decide to go to the region there is a scheduled "down time" in the electricity from 5am to 9am on Sunday morning. Yes, that means the fan stops working. And the toilet stops flushing. And the restaurants don´t open. And apparently, the buses stop coming, or come late. Oh, what fun we had! So, yes, it was a challenging weekend, but we survived, and none of us are presenting symptoms of dengue or malaria (yet!), so hopefully we will continue to survive.

Nicaragua

Success rate of guessing my nationality before I open my mouth: 90%
Success rate of guessing my nationality once I start to speak Spanish: less than 10% (everyone knows Americans don´t speak foreign languages, duh)

Nationalities I´ve been mistaken for (with frequencies):

Spanish (more than 10)
Costa Rican (2)
Mexican (1)
Italian (1)
Belgian (1)


Last weekend was a holiday in Costa Rica, so we went to Nicaragua for a few days. After spending 6 hours in the nicest bus I´ve ever seen in Latin America (air conditioning, t.v.s, and even a bathroom!) we arrived at the Costa Rican-Nicaraguan border. We all had to get out of the bus and wait in line to pass through immigration. There were two other buses there, so the line was really long, and it was starting to get late (7pm), and the border is only open until 8pm! After waiting in line for about 45 min, we reached the front where a guard was letting people into the building to get their passports stamped. He looked at me, LaToya, and Anna, and another American guy who was in the line with us, and said, no, you guys can´t pass, you cut in front of other people in the line. He then pointed to some Costa Rican guys who were behind us and said they could go through! We tried to tell him that we had been in line the whole time, but he wouldn´t even listen to us. He only let us through when some Costa Ricans who were on our bus vouched for us and told him that yes, we had been in line and needed to get through so our bus could move on! So it ended up okay, but we were really shocked at what had happened. Later I thanked the Costa Rican guy who spoke up for us, and he said, yeah, that guard was crazy, he just wasn´t paying attention. But of course, we weren´t finished crossing the border. Between the Costa Rican and Nicaraguan borders is about 2km of no man´s land. If you´re on a bus that goes direct, the bus will take you. If not, you can walk or rent golf carts! When you get to the other side (which is where the Nicaraguan border begins), you have to go through customs and get stamped into Nicaragua. The whole process took about 2hrs, most of which were spent standing. After we got through we really didn´t feel like going through that again to go back to Costa Rica!!

But once we got to Nicaragua we had an awesome time. The people were incredibly friendly and helpful. Since it was getting late, I was concerned about getting to our hotel in Granada, which is a cute colonial town south of Managua. I started talking to some people on the bus to see if anyone knew where the hotel was in relation to the bus stop and/or how much a taxi should cost. Turns out that Granada has experienced tremendous growth in the past few years, and about 50 new hotels have gone up (most of which are small, with about 10-20 rooms), so not even the locals know where all the hotels are! There were two older women who were helping me find people on the bus who were also getting off at Granada, and one guy, probably in his late 20s, said he was from Granada and was going home to surprise his family (he migrated to Costa Rica to work). He said not to worry, that he would help us get there. When we got off the bus, he got into a cab with us (which was grately appreciated since we didn´t want a shady cab driver taking us to a different hotel or totally ripping us off!) and helped the driver find the hotel. We arrived without a problem, and the receptionist at the hotel was waiting for us in front! It was a great welcome to the country!

The next day (Sunday) we took a tour of the islets off the coast of Granada in Lake Nicaragua. Our tour guides were awesome, and we saw some amazing houses on tiny islets! Apparently you can buy an islet for as little as $25,000 and build your own house on it! While there are a lot of rich people now moving into the islets, most of the people who live on them are poor and make their living fishing. We stopped at a restaurant on one of the islets and asked the boat driver to pick us up in a couple of hours. We had food and drank the local beer (which is pretty good, by the way), and then a nice Nicaraguan guy who was sitting with his family came up to talk to us about the U.S. Turns out he immigrated there when he was like 16 and now lives in Texas. He´s a dual citizen, and he loves both countries. He talked to us (in English) for like a half an hour! He just wanted to welcome us to his country, make sure we were enjoying ourselves, and share a little bit about how he loves Nicaragua but he also loves the U.S. and feels that a part of him will always be in both places. We were really surprised to be so well-received as Americans in Nicaragua, but everyone was thrilled to meet Americans who were enjoying their country! Also, most people there know someone in their family or neighborhood who has migrated to the U.S.

The next day we went to Ometepe Island, which has two volcanoes. We didn´t have enough time to hike up the volcano, but we did do a short hike to a lagoon and a beach on the other side of the island. Again, wonderful people everywhere we went. The last day we spend in San Juan del Sur, which is a small beach town on the Pacific Coast. It reminded me a lot of the beach I went to in Ecuador. The bad thing about San Juan is that there is absolutely no shade anywhere on the beach. And there are no beach chairs or umbrellas like there are in resort towns (obviously), so we didn´t spend a whole lot of time on the beach. The water was really warm though, which was nice, but the sun was so hot that we preferred to sit at one of the beachfront cafes and drink more local beer (hehe).

The drive back and border crossing was much easier that the first time around, although I still don´t think I´d like to do that again. LaToya joked that we should go to Panama next weekend, but none of us are really up for the hassle. We are going to go to a beach on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica, though, which is very close to the border. I said the only way I´m going to cross the Panamanian border is if I do so by accident! (only kidding, Mom). All in all, it was a great trip, but I was glad to be back and settle down a little bit. I´m staying at Wendy´s boyfriend´s house with his parents. His parents are Spanish, actually, which is unexpectedly comforting since I´m already familiar with the culture. His mom, Lupe, makes awesome Spanish food, which is far superior to Costa Rican bland rice and beans, which they eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner (not kidding!). It´s nice to have a comfortable place to come home to, especially in a foreign place!

Yesterday was the first time I got to do some touristy stuff in Costa Rica. I went on a day tour to Sarapiqui, a rain forest. I spent the morning zipping through the canopy suspended by zip lines, and the afternoon white water rafting. It wasn´t intense rafting, but it was all I could handle. I´d rather be hiking anyway. Actually what I´d rather be doing is rapelling down a waterfall, or canyoning. I´m trying to plan a trip to do that soon. This week we have a lot of meetings and some interviews for LaToya´s research, but on Thursday we´re planning to go to that beach on the Caribbean side (it´s called Puerto Viejo). Yes, definitely more playing than working. Pura vida!