My Return

I’m sitting in the middle of the Mexico City airport where my flight is laid over—completely out of it for the time being. It might be the fact that I woke up at 2:50 this morning to take a shuttle from a San Jose hostel to the airport, and haven’t slept since. It might be due to crying pretty consistently since parting ways with Hanna once her flight took off, or it might simply be that the weight of the fact that my time in Costa Rica has ended has finally descended upon me. In spite of being completely mentally absent I’ve somehow managed to make it out of Costa Rica, into Mexico, through customs (even though I’ll be in this country a grand total of 3 hours) and into the food court. However once in the food court I managed to miscalculate the exchange rate for pesos and ended up spending 8500 colones or, that’s right, 17 dollars on a super small portion of crappy food that—you guessed it—had meat hiding inside.

            But all in all, the journey so far has been pretty easy. Its been crazy traveling alone and having time to reflect on the last three months. It’s a little scary to me that its already starting to feel surreal, almost like a dream. I can only imagine it will feel even more that way when I’m back to my usual routine at home. I can only hope that it never stops feeling real for me. I can’t even tell you how many ways this experience has changed my life. I’ve learned SO much. More than any other quarter I’m positive, and most vitally I’ve learned so much about myself and what I’m interested in and what I want out of the world and how much I actually might be able to achieve. I’ve never been more inspired by teachers than by those I had in Monteverde. They weren’t just teachers, they were friends, and they cared SO much about igniting our interests and pushing our limits. My interest in biology and nature has been so revitalized thanks to them, and thanks to the beauty and diversity that Costa Rica boasts.

            Maybe most importantly were the friends I made: mis companeros through this entire experience. From the first two weeks where we were dropped on an island and then the middle of a dry forest without electricity or hot water or any civilization and had no choice but to learn about each other, its been an insane ride. I’m not sure I could ever find a better group of 26 people to enjoy this journey with. I was constantly surprised and inspired by every single person’s enthusiasm for life, enthusiasm for nature and their knowledge of both. I will never forget the hikes and field trips we shared together, finding frogs and fungi and insects and seeing joy in every discovery. Or the nights at Mata e’ Cana, rollin in with our huge group of gringos and taking over the dance floor, looking like idiots and making Ticos jealous. My biggest hope is that we stay in contact throughout the years. California is an incredible place and we are lucky enough to be able to bring back what we’ve learned to such an amazing and naturally diverse state. All the same I can’t express how much I’ll miss seeing everyone together every day. I’ll be thinking about you guys a lot when I get back.

            Coming back to the present, the past week has fallen right in line with the rest of my time here in terms of enjoyment. This was my third time to the Caribbean and I never cease to be amazed by this part of the world. Puerto Viejo, where we stayed is a party town to be sure, but now in the off-season its pretty mild. The town runs right along the crystal-blue water’s edge. Coconut trees line the shores and pretty much any view from any angle looks like a desktop that would come with your mac. Marvin, the girls, and I (along with Harrison and Mike a few days later) made some amazing snorkeling excursions down the coast. Two of the days we rented beach cruisers to take us a couple miles down the coast through some beautiful forest. Sometimes everything just seemed more like a Jack Johnson music video than real life. The snorkeling was some of the best I’ve ever seen. On Hanna’s and my last full day we made a 6 km trek through some seriously beautiful poison dart frog and eyelash viper-filled rain forest to a beach that had a tiny island only a couple hundred meters away. We were able to swim around the entire thing and all of us did. Different sides of the island were home to different species of fish, and the entire area was so rich in life. It was so incredible.  

     We tried taking advantage of as much beauty as we could...even getting up with the sunrise.

            The hostel itself was quite entertaining as well. We took up most of the rooms—I think we only really encountered one other couple the entire time we were there. Vista Verde is run by Olaf and his wife Katy (Cat-ee). They are extremely German and extremely adorable. If you are ever in Puero Viejo I highly recommend staying with them, their three-legged cat that we called Tripod, several dogs-including Hansel who is pretty much bald due to a skin disease, their collection of poison dart frogs, and several other rag-tag animals. They are very sweet and very accommodating, and most importantly their hostel has lots of hammocks. I’ve never been more attached to colorful pieces of fabric. Its possible I bought one or two to bring back…

            As for the journey back from the Coast, Hanna and I left on a 4 o’clock bus last night that took us 4 hours away to San Jose, then took a taxi across the city in which I thought once again that I was going to lose my life. I do not recommend taxis in San Jose. They drive on the wrong side of the road, blow through red lights, come perilously close to pedestrians and will give you a heart attack if you are used to gentle American driving. We stayed at Hostel Pangea, a “party hostel” that resembled a tacky abandoned MTV beach house but per usual managed to make some good times out of it.

            And now I am here, still in complete disbelief that I will b in Los Angeles in just a few hours. I am incredibly excited to see everyone, but still a little apprehensive about going back to “normal”. Frank has said several times over this program that you can prepare yourself for the culture shock coming into Costa Rica, but its much harder to prepare for the culture shock of returning to the U.S. I suppose only time will tell!

Pura Vida 

The final weeks of EAP

Its hard to believe how much time has actually passed since I last posted. Harder still to believe just how much has happened in these past few weeks and where I am now. Where am I? sitting in a hammock at 6am surrounded by twinkly lights and coconuts carved to look like fish on the balcony of the hostel I’m staying at in Puerto Viejo on the Caribbean side of Costa Rica. I can’t believe the program is over. Our group of 27 is now split up completely-with some of us starting travels around the rest of this country, some of us already back at home in the U.S., and some starting journeys throughout the rest of central and south America. I’m on the Carribean side with a group of 7 others: Madeline, Johanne and her brother Damien, Sarah, Marvin, Elizabeth and Hanna, and I’ll stay here for the next few days until I travel back to San Jose to hop on my plane to California. This morning we got up at 4:30 to watch the sunrise (Aimee you would have died). I’m going to try to briefly go through what the last few weeks have been like. Forgive me if I ramble on. I’m already pretty sentimental.

Homestay ended well. The Castillos were awesome and though they weren’t SUPER traditional Ticos (in fact they weren’t Ticos at atll—they’re Ecuadorian), we ended up getting along great. There were some serious initial frustrations on my part in the beginning, simply because I was struggling so hard to communicate. In having to suddenly participate in day-to-day Spanish conversations it suddenly felt as though I had never taken a Spanish class in my life. I would get extremely nervous any time I tried to speak, and ended up spending a lot of time sitting silent and awkward at the dinner table. But by about day 8 I sort of turned a corner and my confidence got a serious boost. I’m sure now that I’m not forced to do it everyday, my Spanish will deteriorate exponentially, but at least I can say that at one point, I was barely able to communicate. It also helped tremendously that there was another girl living with the family-also named Katie and from California. She’s awesome and an excellent Spanish speaker—needless to say I took advantage of her skills quite often. During all this I was spending 2 to 4 hours a day sitting in Bajo del Tigre—a trailhead in the Children’s Eternal Rainforest, observing and taking notes on my independent research species, the long-tailed manakins. They really are the cutest birds ever. I miss those guys now, they got me through a lot.

Once homestay ended 2 weeks later, I was back at the station with everyone, and I was ecstatic. I loved my homestay, but I also loved the freedoms of the station—being able to go out hiking whenever I wanted, constantly having snacks around and cooks making us delicious meals, company 24-7. However what I did not anticipate was the amount of work we had coming once we returned. Within our final two weeks at the station we were required to put together a final project first submission, complete 4 finals, an agroecology video project, an 8 minute power point presentation on our independent projects that we had to present at our symposium, and a final submission of our project ready to be published. I don’t think I’ve ever had a more sleepless two weeks. There were probably about 7 days in total in which I did not leave the library at the station except to eat and use the bathroom. It was one of the more intense academic experiences of my life, and in the meantime, we were all desperate to have fun in our final days together, so any time we had even the slightest break in our workload we headed out to the bars or tried to create some kind of festivities at the station—needless to say, it was sleepless.

Finishing everything felt incredible though. Our symposium was amazing. Seeing the fruits of everyone’s labor for the past month, and being able to share mine was pretty indescribable. And once we were done with the final submission the relief was enormous. I think one of my favorite nights of the entire program was the one right after I turned in my submission. Erick, our teacher that lived with us at the station decided that we should go surprise our other teacher Pati at a show she was playing at a place in town. It turned out to be at the beautiful house of a woman who opens up her kitchen to the town every Friday night, and makes her patio a restaurant, offering awesome food and wine to anyone who comes. Pati was playing guitar and singing on the patio surrounded by beautiful twinkling lights and tons of people we recognized from town, including more of our teachers. Pati is amazingly talented, and we were all just so happy and content to be there. I’ll never forget it

The last nights were filled with final talks from Frank about reentering the real world, getting our EAP shirts (which I designed!) and taking millions of photos in them, traveling back to San Jose and taking more goodbye pictures, a SERIOUS roast on all of us planned by the teachers and presented to us in Hotel Cacts on our final night, and then the strange goodbyes as people left one by one or group by group. I held it together almost until the very end. It still hasn’t really registered that I won’t see everyone every day anymore. We were literally always together (sometimes in complete isolation) for 3 months straight. I think once I’m back in the U.S. it will hit me a little harder, but for now I’m going to just try to enjoy the Caribbean sunshine with my remaining friends here and worry about all that later

The one thing I am REALLY looking forward to though is seeing my friends and family from home. It probably doesn’t seem like it from the blog but my time here hasn’t always been easy and thinking about you guys has gotten me through a lot.

Sorry for another long post. I’ll try to fit one more in before I leave on Monday. See you all soon!