The Penultimate Post

Hello blogosphere.  It has been longer than I intended between posts (things have been bastante ocupado here in Monteverde).  Some highlights of the past two weeks:

1) Cooking and consuming the best egg-in-a-nest of my life in a passive solar oven that another student made for EcoFest, a festival we put on a week ago (cook time: 2 hrs)

2) Got a gig playing at Sushi and Jazz Night at a local hotel last night with my friend Megan, who is an incredible singer.  Musicmaking and merrymaking ensued.

3) Took some finals, two more to go.

4) Ate chicharones (fried pig skins) for what will probably be the last time in a long time.  They're pretty delicious, but it's hard to shake the notion that one is essentially eating breaded bacon chunks.  You can pretty much feel them doing harm to your body.

5) Been seeing motmot birds all over the place.  They look like this:

Tomorrow I'm headed to Upala, a rural town where my host grandparents live.  It'll be refreshing to get out into the country and relax after all our finals are done.  Then I come back to MV to pack and Monday will find all of us traveling once more back to Alajuela, where we will part ways, some to travel in CR and Nicaragua and others to take that northing flight home.  My six hour layover in Dallas will be quite a change from 3 months spent in almost constant contact with either fellow students or my host family.  I think I'll probably buy a crossword puzzle book to pass the time (I have become addicted to NYtimes crosswords here, thanks to my friend Leah).

Anyway, I never got around to posting about our time with the BriBri near the Panamanian border, so here goes.  Centuries ago, the BriBri lived in what is now Panama, but they migrated Northward over time, largely to avoid Spanish settlement.  This migration led them into more and more mountainous terrain (where Spaniards didn't see it as worth it to pursue), and the community we visited, Yorkín, is located along a river in the foothills of the Talamanca Mountains.  

To get to Yorkín, we piled into well-worn canoes equipped with 15 horsepower outboard motors, each with a motor-operator in the stern and a poler in the bow.  These guys worked harder than anyone I have ever seen in my life, masterfully guiding the canoe through what seemed like the only navigable channel in an extremely shallow river, with the motor guy bodily lifting the motor out of the water in rocky patches to prevent propellor damage (they have to replace their propellors twice a year).

When we got to Yorkín, many of us were surprised to see another group of extranjeros staying in the community, but we soon found out that a women's group in the community started an ecotourism organization in the 1990s called STIBRAWPA (BriBri for women artisans), which has been largely responsible for a marked upswing in socioeconomic opportunities in the region.  They are visited by 1000 people each year.

STIBRAWPA was formed following the mass exodus of the BriBri workforce from Yorkín that was the result of the advent of the monilia fungus, which reduced annual cacao yield (their primary cash crop) by up to 70%.  Most of the men of the community were forced to seek work elsewhere, and (predictably) they found it on banana plantations and oil refineries, where their daily proximity to chemicals had sweeping adverse health effects.  However, the rise of STIBRAWPA expanded the cacao/banana agroforestry system to include ecotourism dollars, which has stabilized the local economy and allowed most of these men to return.  Furthermore, women have gained a lot of respect in the community and have made great strides in reducing the influence of machisto culture in the region.

Tourists who come to the area often come for just one day, but some (like us) stay for 4 days to a week.  Visitors experience first hand the process of turning cacao fruit into chocolate, take a BriBri language lesson, eat meals cooked by wood fire in an open air dining room, and many do some volunteer work (we helped continue the building of a new trail), all the while getting to know the area and the people of Yorkín.  

One can see the strange pressures of indigenous authenticity at work.  On our second to last afternoon, a teenager wearing a Nike brand tanktop and flat-brimmed backwards baseball cap was teaching a middle-aged French nurse how to use a bow and arrow (it was unclear to me in all our time there if the BriBri even use bows and arrows).  As I was watching in the dining area, one of the BriBri women who was taking a break from the kitchen answered a cell phone that was blasting a Shakira ringtone.  It is unfair for tourists to expect total cultural isolation and preservation, yet its subtle influences are evident, and even more curiously, if one looks a little closer, it is apparent that the BriBri are well aware that what they are selling is their culture, and they take many subtle steps to highlight their indigenous identity. 

That's about all she wrote for now.  I'll close out the blog with a final post when I return stateside early next week.  Thanks to all of you who kept up, and sorry for the long lapses in posting.  It's been a fun jaunt in the blogosphere, though I am not sure if it's a medium I'm cut out for, ha.  This last picture is of our logistics coordinator, Rolo, who organized both trips we took this semester.  He is kind of like a Tico uncle to me, and is one of the people I will miss the most when I come back home.  I hope you all are well.

Viaje Terminado

I apologize for the longer than usual lapse in posting.  We returned yesterday from our second two-week trip, which took us to Nicaragua and along the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica, visiting pineapple plantations, agroforestry operations and coral reefs.  The primary foci of the trip were agricultural practices and forest management.  I am going to split the trip into two blog entries because there is a lot to say (and my aunt invited me over for cafe and rice pudding this afternoon, so I have limited time).

We spent the first three days of our field trip in a riverside Nicaraguan town called El Castillo (the castle).  The town's namesake is a castle/fort atop a hill overlooking the river.  It was built by the Spanish in the 1500s to provide security for trade routes during the golden age of Caribbean piracy.  Interestingly, the San Juan river, which runs by the town, was initially considered a prime candidate for an aquatic trade shortcut from the Atlantic to the Pacific, but political strife and seismological activity spurred foreign investors to look farther south to Panama and construct their historical canal.

Our next destination was a beautiful and remote location called Giovanni's, a rustic forest lodge in the northeastern lowlands of Costa Rica.  Giovanni himself is a mysterious, manically industrious and pensive man with a mischievous sense of fun and adventure.  He has been protecting his holding of mostly primary forest for years and has made a living in everything from carpentry to butterfly farming.  He has open disdain for the trappings of modern life and talks about the minimal fees he pays for light and phone with a face as though he had just eaten something disagreeable.  Yet he has an almost childlike sense of wonder about nature, and approaches what he perceives as his given mission of forest protection with a quasi-religious fervor.  His place is beautiful and peaceful, and reminded me a lot of the Homestead, with its wood stoves, hammocks and mismatched coffee mugs.

Some of us helped grill kebabs and burgers one night, accompanied by the laughing voices of the children of Giovanni's friends and the sounds of the woods.  Everyone had worked up an appetite that afternoon swimming in a nearby river, swinging on rope swings into the water and playing around on some river kayaks, and we thoroughly enjoyed the bounty of the grill.  The idyllic joie de vive of Giovanni's was emphasized in contrast to the ever-expanding pineapple plantations that continue to replace forest and cattle farms alike in the Saripiqui area, and along the Caribbean slope in general.  The tour we took of a nearby plantation that supplies Dole with both organic and conventional pineapple left a little to be desired in the way of accurate information, and we felt thoroughly ridiculous drinking virgin Piña coladas out of pineapples at the end of the morning (though we certainly found plenty of humor in the situation).  Also, much of the decor was pineapple themed:

We persuaded Giovanni to accompany us on the remainder of our trip, the next stop of which was Cahuita, a coastal town with a National Park notable for its coral reefs.  We went snorkeling for a few hours one morning, which was awesome since I have only ever been snorkeling in the Great Lakes, and though they have cool shipwrecks, they have nowhere near the biodiversity present in the tropics. 

That's all for now (time for rice pudding!), but stay tuned for another post soon about our time with the BriBri, an indigenous group near the Panamanian border.  On an unrelated note, I will leave you with a picture of the finished retaining wall (complete with artistic improvement and beer can planters awaiting plants).

Earthbag, Mirthswag

TGIF.  Tomorrow marks our only free weekend of the entire program.  Although I entertained the idea of accompanying a few friends on a trip somewhere, I think I'm going to take a much needed break from the whirlwind nature of the program's structure and have a slow weekend of hiking and decompressing.  I wish I could camp somewhere, but almost all land is privately owned around here, which makes things difficult. We'll see.

Last Sunday I got the chance to see the nursery/reforestation project where my host dad works several days a week.  It is in the country just outside of Monteverde on land that used to belong to a handful of cattle farmers.  Being away from touristy (though beautiful and fun) Monteverde proper made me realize that I have been sorely missing open country, so it was a welcome breath of uncluttered air.  Lorenzo (my host dad) and I took a brief hike to a waterfall on the property, which was beautiful, and the cleanest I've ever seen since it is only 50 meters from the stream's source spring.  Then he took me to the station run by the reforestation foundation, which had rocking chairs on a porch overlooking the valleys to the West.  It was easily the best view I have seen in the Monteverde region and as Lorenzo said "La unica lo que falta es una cerveza en la mano."  (the only thing missing is a beer in my hand).

So far, both the experimental and control beds of lettuce seem to be growing pretty well.  It's too soon to draw many meaningful conclusions though, so we'll have to wait until after our next two week trip (i.e. three weeks from now) to see if the organic/synthetic mix is a viable alternative to 100% synthetic fertilizer.  While we're waiting, I am working mornings at the greenhouse.  Although it's repetitive work (mostly cleaning lettuce beds after harvest, removing roots and leaf litter), it's methodical and therapeutic.  Plus, working there has its benefits.  I've been able to improve my rice/beans lunches immensely with the addition of delicious cherry tomatoes and basil, and I've been able to supply pitchers of refreshing mint/lime water out to the retaining wall crew, which I've also been working with in the late mornings.

The wall project is proving hard but rewarding, and the technique is really interesting.  It's called earthbag or superadobe construction and was developed by an Iranian-Californian architect as an entry in a lunar domicile construction contest held by NASA.  It is based on the idea of using locally available materials to create housing, and did well in the NASA contest because the vast majority of the materials wouldn't have to be expensively carried by shuttle to the site, but rather collected on the moon itself.  The basic idea is that you use long bags of the material used to bag agricultural feed, stuffing them with an earth-concrete or earth-lime mix.  You build them up in layers, tamping each one and letting it harden.  Each layer is connected to the next with barbed wire, and the finished product is a dome or collection of domes (when building a house, we are just using it to build a retaining wall).  Interestingly, it has been re-pitched not as lunar housing but as an emergency shelter option in post-disaster or war-stricken areas.  It can use materials of war (barbed wire, trench dirt) to create homes, and quickly too (with community efforts).  Here's an example of a finished but unplastered structure:

And here is a picture of Michelle and Carrie working on our wall:

I am looking forward to using this technique to design a new outbuilding for our cats at the Homestead this fall so they have warm shelter for the winter (and so they don't poop all over our common spaces in the people cabins).  If you are as interested in superadobe as I am, you should check out this website:
http://calearth.org/building-designs/what-is-superadobe.html

In other news, at a coffee farm we visited recently, I saw/used a nice composting toilet!

Well, that about wraps her up for now, I suppose.  Pura vida.

Bats and Greens and Coffee Beans

Last Friday/Saturday we visited a nearby nature reserve to learn about mammals.  Especially fascinating was the evening activity of netting and learning about bats (murciélagos).  One particularly interesting bat species has an incredibly detailed reproductive behavior.  Each male tries to attract a harem of females to its arboreal habitat and, once successful, tries to keep them around by hovering a few feet away facing them and singing a complex song.  Evolution sure has created some weirdly intricate biological patterns.

On Sunday, I cooked dinner for my family as planned: risotto wrapped in lettuce accompanied by rosemary olive oil bread and white wine from a box.  This made me nostalgic for the homestead, but luckily I had leftover bread to tide me over for the next few days.  As a side note, the Clos brand of boxed wine here is better and cheaper than the reasonably priced bottled wines (top score).

Here is a photograph of our growing lettuce plants (synthetically fertilized control bed for our experiment).  The signs are to dissuade prodding by greenhouse visitors.  We have been using the down time between data collection to prepare other beds for normal greenhouse produce and to create signage for all of Orlando's vegetables and herbs.  These signs will include origin, nutritional info and culinary/medicinal uses.  

I played piano at Vitosi (nearby drug store) again on Sunday.  This time I played for around an hour and a half, and after a while they even turned off the radio (which I took as a tacit complement).  A highlight of the day was overhearing two retirees quietly singing along while I played a jazzed version of the sesame street theme song.  

Tomorrow we will be investigating the methodologies/ideologies of two big coffee interests in the Monteverde region, which should be interesting/tasty.  Unfortunately, it means yet another jam-packed Saturday.  The program provides a lot of cool opportunities but I think all of us wish we had a little more unstructured play/exploration time.

There's a café nearby that has a book exchange program, which I have been taking advantage of.  I recently traded for Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, which I am stoked to start it (never read any Faulkner before).  

In other news, I am excited to be helping with another internship happening here at the Study Center: a SuperAdobe retaining wall.  I hope to implement the technique to build a dome-shaped outbuilding at the Homestead that can function as an improved Cabin Cat (Ohio winter is hard on outdoor felines).  I'll post pictures of the process when I have them, but for now I'll leave it at that.

Well, it's been a long week, so several of us are gonna check out a nearby tapas/cocktails place called Chimera.  (Mojito+fried yucca=sonrisas)  Hasta luego.

Haleh shoma chetoreh?

While here in Costa Rica, I have been steadily improving my Spanish.  I would estimate that I can now speak with the proficiency of a precocious 4 year old with some knowledge of specialized agricultural vocabulary.  I knew when I signed up that I would get the chance to learn the language of old España.  What I didn't know was that I would also get a chance to learn some Farsi phrases.  My friend Michelle's family are Persian Oklohomans (globalization=real, QED), and she's been teaching me various simple phrases, such as "How are you?" (Haleh shoma chetoreh?) and "Your father is a dog," (Pedar sag).  It's a fun language to speak, with lots of guttural "h" sounds.  In other worldly news, I met a British woman at the bar last night who arrived in Monteverde a week ago after a month working at a Honduran orphanage.  After several years working as a criminal lawyer in London, she grew disillusioned with her job, quit it and has been backpacking in Central America since.  It was inspiring to talk to someone brave enough to take the time and effort to take a serious re-evaluation break and search for a new path.

This is a picture of the hydroponic greenhouse where I am currently working/experimenting.  It's in a montane pine forest and from the top of the slope you can look out over the treetops to the Gulf of Nicoya.  In all honesty, the experiment has a kind of hurry up and wait feel to it, so we have lots of time to do other things around and for the greenhouse.  On the first day, we resaturated the volcanic rock substrate for the beds we are using for our experiment.  Then, we measured and counted the leaves on 260 lettuce seedlings before planting them.  Each one has a gridded identity (e.g. K4) so we can track progress in lettuce grown with synthetic fertilizer and lettuce grown with a 1:1 mix of synthetics and organic worm waste.  While we wait for them to grow, we are keeping busy by translating the garden's webpage into English, making informative signs for the 22 different plants Orlando is currently growing, and clearing the beds of the roots of already harvested lettuce.

One of the benefits of my internship at Hídroponicas de Monteverde is delicious fresh produce to bring home.  I have started a few mornings with a delicious lettuce leaf full of cherry tomatoes (yum).  I got some lettuce and rosemary to bring home today because I am cooking dinner for my host family on Sunday.  I am planning on making mushroom risotto to be eaten in lettuce wrap form (hooray for finger food) and rosemary olive oil bread (all the bread here is flat or Wonder-type sandwich fog, so my mouth is watering at the thought of a hefty loaf).

Tonight we are headed to a nearby Reserve in order to take a night hike and observe different types of mammals.  A focus of the night will be bats, or murciélagos, which we will be netting and studying up close.  Unfortunately, we will be missing the TexMex Fiesta at Bar Amigos, which includes (among other things) un toro mecánico and live music by a band that goes by the name of Los Alegres Veteranos (the happy veterans).  Qué lástima! (what a shame).

I have been researching common vegetables in the processes of creating signage for Orlando's greenhouse and have learned many novel pieces of trivia.  For example:

1) spinach originated in Persia
2) a famous British officer, Field Marshal Montgomery, coined an obscure euphemism for visiting prostitutes: "Well lads, we have two days leave.  Best take care if you plan to take favours in the beet fields."
3) Mint captures free testosterone in the bloodstream, so it is sometimes used to treat hirsutism in women

Well, as Tigger would say, TTFN.

He Vuelto a Monteverde

Que pasa, interweb?  It's been a while.  We returned last night from our two week trip along Costa Rica's Pacific Coast.  It was jam-packed, with each day scheduled from 7am til around 9pm.  That said, we did get a few nice breaks, especially to enjoy the small beach town of Playa Grande.  The trip was bookended by visits to hydropower plants.  We began our travels in the Northwest, where we visited Lake Arenal, a man-made reservoir, and learned about the dam system that created it.   We heard about many of the dam's ecological effects, including changing dynamics among fish populations and water diversion from the Atlantic to the Pacific slope.  Interestingly, Costa Rica is atypical in that 80% of its electricity is generated by hydropower (compare to roughly 15% in the U.S., which is still proportionally high in global terms).  ICE (the government controlled electricity and telecommunications company) is about to begin construction on a new dam that will double the nation's energy capacity.  It is called the Diquis project and is located in the Southwest.  We spent yesterday learning about it from ICE's perspective and then spent the afternoon talking with schoolchildren and community members in a the town of Ceibo, which will be entirely submerged when the dam is built.  It was a sobering afternoon, but practicing our Spanish with the kids helped us keep a hopeful attitude.  It's true, after all, that ICE is undertaking an incredible variety of projects designed to ease social and ecological costs incurred by the Diquis dam, but it is still clear that with repercussions on such a grand scale, it is near impossible for them to navigate the transition smoothly.

We also visited sites of high geothermal activity.  One was within a National Park and the other was nearby, but outside of the park's boundaries.  Consequently, this latter is now the site of a geothermal power plant.  It will be interesting to see what happens with the geothermal sector in CR, as only one plant currently exists, but areas with geothermal potential abound.

In the middle of the trip, we visited Palo Verde National Park, which includes lots of wetland habitat that is ideal for birding.  There are 850 avian species that call CR home for at least part of the year, and in just three hours with the help of three expert birders, small groups were able to spot over 50 of them!  It was undoubtedly nerdy, but just as undoubtedly fun, and I'm looking forward to learning a lot more about temperate species (I'm sad to say I could only identify around ten birds total prior to Bird Day).

We then spent three days on Isla Chira in the Gulf of Nicoya, which was a welcome break from the 3 restaurants a day, hotel-hopping spree of the first week.  We stayed in a homey, rustic lodge made up of cabins and a small semi-enclosed dining hall.  It was nice to be able to do some sink laundry and relax in the woods.  While on the island, we visited two similar local groups involved in fishing and clamming.  The artisanal (hook-and-line) fishing group has been really successful in establishing sustainable practices in their protected area of the Gulf, and have been hailed as a model for other communities trying to do the same.  The clamming group, on the other hand, met with initial success but had lots of problems with protecting their clamming grounds after a series of news media promos brought a lot of poachers to the area.  Sadly, much of this downturn has to do with the fact that the group is run by women, and the men poaching the clams do not respect their authority when they patrol.  The women have changed gears from clamming, or "piangua"-ing, to offering tours of the mangroves that provide clam habitat, incorporating clam digging into them as well.  It was a definite highlight of the trip.  We all suited up and squelched thro ugh the mud, jumping nimbly (or not-so-nimbly) along the tough but pliable gigantic root systems of the mangrove trees in search of clams.  Once back on the boat, we had delicious clam ceviche (similar to pico de gallo), easily the best dish I've had since arriving in the country.

On the subject of food on the island, we also ate beans prepared in this super cool solar cooker:

This post is getting pretty long, I suppose.  Breifly, then, other highlights included our bus breaking down on the second to last day and getting stranded outside of a tuna factory for a couple hours.  It was during this time that we ate at a soda (i.e. cafe) that gave many of us indigestion (three cheers for Tums).

Fortunately, zen average held and we were rewarded the following morning with an early morning breakfast cruise along a beautiful river.

We start internships tomorrow, so I'll be learning lots about hydroponic gardening, which I'm looking forward to.  Now I'm off to put some pages behind me in the mediocre Spanish novel that I have a quiz on in two days.

Avian Dreams/Realities

I have had a few bird dreams lately, possibly as a result of eating chickens I have known.  The most recent was this morning, as I dreamt that my Mama Tica (Yolanda) was in the shed, killing a panicking duck for us to eat for that night's dinner.  Strangely, upon waking I discovered that she had essentially done the opposite by saving and caring for a runt chick that wasn't being cared for by its mother hen.  Every morning is a wrestling match between murky dreams and sun-spangled reality.

Today we have a rare reprieve from the daily whirlwind grind.  We have the whole afternoon and evening off, ostensibly to finish our internship proposals, but I finished mine yesterday so I'm enjoying the prospect of a free afternoon.  I will probably walk over to Santa Elena in order to pick up a few supplies for our upcoming two-week trip, which begins on Sunday.  We will be spending time in many towns along the length of the Pacific Coast, including San Isidro del General near the southwestern Osa (Bear) Peninsula, a few towns along the Gulf of Nicoya (NW), and even a field station on Isla Chira (3 days).  I am excited to see more of the country, especially since we will have the opportunity to visit many places that wouldn't be available to tourists.  The trip is focused on thematic content related to water and energy production/consumption, and we will be visiting a geothermal plant, a biofuel station, and a few hydroelectric plants.  We will also be studying turtles, doing some birding in Palo Verde National Park, and visiting some mangroves.

Tomorrow we will collecting, identifying, and drawing conclusions from bioindicative macroinvertebrates, which basically means mucking around in some nearby streams and collecting bugs (hooray!)  Sure beats the hell out of pounding three cups of coffee through four hours of lectures.  And then on Saturday we go to a reserve for another day hike to learn about plant dispersal/pollination mechanisms and play in a waterfall.  Experiential learning is the best education.  I often find myself discouraged with the daily word/talk grind and the routines of university life.  As one of my favorite poets/authors, Jim Harrison, once wrote, "Why cast Robert Redford in your life story if all he's going to do is sit there and piss and moan at the typewriter for two hours in expensive Eastman color?"  This semester is already proving to be a healthy and refreshing break from the mental infrastructure and verbal gymnastics of ivory tower academia.

Clamming in a mangrove > pontificating on the Freudian implications of 19th century British literature

This will likely be my last post for two weeks or so, as I will have little to no computer access on our trip, but I'll likely have plenty to relate via interweb upon our return.  Here's to the quick onset of spring for all of you in the temperate stretches of los Estados Unidos.  Pura vida!

Update: I just got back from Supercompro, where I purchased a few trip items.  One of said items was a slim bottle of organic rosemary shampoo!  How awesome is that?  Just goes to show that there are many untapped market niches just waiting to be exploited for marginal gain.  Take heart, entrepreneurs one and all!  Expect it to hit shelves in the U.S. by 2012, because let's be honest, how could a product with such universal appeal NOT leap to international market domination?  All kidding aside, I am looking forward to using this shampoo.  I love the smell of rosemary, and we often put sprigs on our stoves during the bitter homestead winter to spruce up the cabins.  Now I get a chance to lather my hair with it!

Butterfly Killaz

I had to give a twenty minute oral presentation in Spanish on Friday.  Although it seemed pretty daunting, in retrospect it was cool to recognize how much of the language I have learned in just two weeks.  Our class is just four students and the professor, Jose, who tends to be quite a character.  Much of our time is spent simply discussing various topics in Spanish, and Jose manages to steer the conversation effortlessly, slyly integrating new vocabulary and grammar that we are working on.  Anyway, I decided to give my presentation on the Homestead, which ended up making it pretty easy for two reasons.  One is that there is a lot to say about it, most of it interesting, and the other is that since I have already had lots of practice explaining it to my host family, I already have most of the requisite vocabulary (e.g. "We poop in an outhouse," and "Showers are a rarity").  Looking through pictures to choose some to show, I felt pangs of Homestead nostalgia and wished I could visit.  Then I remembered that it's the middle of gloomy Ohio winter and I was cured of such wishes.

Yesterday we had our first Costa Rican Natural History session, which took the form of an all-day hike and presentations on the wide variety of plant growth forms that abound in the cloud forest.  My group focused on canopy trees, sometimes also called emergents on account of the way they pop up out of the canopy.  We saw some pretty incredible views and hiked to the highest point in the region (at an elevation of around 6,000 feet).  Interestingly, the TV towers for the Monteverde Zone are up on that ridge, which means that in the rainy season the technicians have a hell of an ATV trip up flooded dirt roads at 70 degree slopes to do maintenance work.  The roads are not very good here, generally speaking.  The country is only the size of West Virginia, but it can take a full day or two to get from one place to another because of the state of the infrastructure.  Although our focus was primarily on plants, we saw some birds, lizards, and millipedes too.

We also used fancy compasses and trigonometry to estimate and compare the heigh of several old growth trees.  Here is a scientific measurement action shot:

In other news, my friend Sam's host dad runs a canopy ziplining tour company and generously offered us a discount for a tour, which we took him up on this morning.  In addition to ziplining, we swung on a huge "Tarzan swing," rappelled down to the forest floor from the canopy, and climbed back into the canopy through a ropes course installed inside a strangler fig tree.  Even as someone who isn't too afraid of heights, it was pretty humbling to stand on the small platforms in the crowns of giant trees and sway with them when wind gusts came through.  On one particularly long "zip," Mirasol (fellow student) struck and killed a butterfly in mid-flight, which gave us pause to think about the casualties of ecotourism.

I got my first choice of internship, so I'll be experimenting with worm "tea" (i.e. poop), trying to find a way to make it mimic the nutrient ratio of synthetic fertilizer currently being used at a nearby hydroponic greenhouse.  I'm excited to work with Orlando (the farmer) and learn all about hydroponic horticulture.  OK, time to finish an essay.  Hasta luego.

Neverland Sunset

Hello blogosphere.  During this past week, my afternoons have been consumed by hours and hours of Espanol, but the mornings have been devoted to a wide variety of internship presentations by several people who are doing cool stuff in Monteverde in the realms of native plants, conservation, environmental design, alternative building methods, eco/agrotourism, and sustainable agriculture.  We had a few hours this morning to select our top three choices and write a preliminary proposal/application.  The internships I chose were:

1. Working at a nearby hydroponic greenhouse, experimenting with "worm tea" (i.e. poop) in an effort to create the right balance of nutrients so that it can be substituted for the synthetic fertilizer the farmer is currently using. (note: most beautiful/organized greenhouse I have ever seen, saw the biggest and most incredible beet I have ever encountered)

2.  Working with an engineer to learn a new construction technique pioneered in Iran called SuperAdobe in order to build a big retaining wall at the Study Center in order to prevent erosion into a nearby stream/eventual property damage.

3. Working with same engineer to design and implement a rainwater harvesting system for the roof of the Study Center.

I should find out tomorrow which I'll be working on for four weeks later in the program.  The engineer, Ayal Bryant, is super cool and I'm thinking about asking him if he has any upcoming builds/other projects this summer he could use a hand with.  We'll see...

In other news, I saw a great sunset the other evening.  In a fortunate set of circumstances, the roadside directly across from the CPI language center where we take Spanish classes is one of the best overlooks in Monteverde and we leave CPI just before sunset every day.  Consequently, several of the past days have found most of us gawking and snapping photos for ten minutes after class.  Two days ago the coloring in the sky and the view of the Gulf of Nicoya and its islands to the west looked like something straight out of Peter Pan.

This coming Saturday we have an all day hike up to/in the Cloud Forest Reserve, our first Costa Rican Natural History class session.  It should be great, since I've been looking forward to the chance to do some hiking and actually get in the forest to explore.  Then on Sunday several of us are taking a walk on the more touristy side of things and doing a Zipline Canopy Tour, which should be awesome.  Well, the mountain evening chill is blowing in through the door of the Study Center, so I'm headed home to some warm beans and rice.

The Raw and the Cooked

Greetings, blogosphere.  I didn't have a picture of my niece, Naomi, to post last Thursday, but now I do, so mission accomplished.  Several noteworthy things have happened in the past few days.  First off, a sloth decided to call our yard home for a few days, which led my host-father to proclaim it the family mascot.  Unfortunately, it didn't hang around long enough for us to think of a clever name for it, but it did hang around long enough for me to take a few pictures.

On Friday night, a bunch of us went to a little art cafe in Santa Elena called La Carambola, which was fantastic.  The woman who runs the place is named Susanna and it's pretty much just her with hired help during rush times.  She lives above the cafe and has hammocks set up in the yard for people to relax in.  The menu is Middle Eastern, and every Friday night she has some variety of ethnic food special.  We all enjoyed delicious falafel/hummus wraps with a glass or two of optimally priced boxed wine, which was little to nothing like Franzia.  The box was more like the kind of box that soy milk or veggie stock comes in, and it was actually pretty decent.  The place has a wonderful atmosphere and as much as I like beans and rice, it was a nice culinary reprieve.  I went back to La Carambola this afternoon to do some reading and have a glass of ice coffee, and I ran into a few other students.  After we had been reading assorted assigned chapters and articles for a while, Susanna came out to offer us some complimentary watermelon slices (the best I have ever had in my life).

Yesterday morning, we arose bright and early to head to a nearby farmer's market, or la feria.  (Note: the Tico daily schedule is old-school agrarian, leftovers from the days when farming, rather than ecotourism, was the most common occupation.  Most Ticos go to bed around 8:30pm and wake up around 5am, and since my bedroom is practically in the kitchen, I'm up and about by 5:30 most days).  We went to collect data for a lab on community food security.  After talking to farmers and compiling a price list at the market, we headed to a nearby supermarket to compare availability/affordability of staple goods.  Outside the SuperCompro (a popular Tico supermarket chain), we encountered the cultural novelty of a DJ announcing the day's hot sales over a soundtrack of American classic rock.  Several of us introduced ourselves and she enthusiastically allowed us to announce some sales ourselves.  All in all, it was a fun and interesting morning, and I learned some key phrases like "Where are these green beans from?" and "Today only, Yucca root for 900 colones per kilo!"

When I first arrived at my homestay last Sunday, I told my host-mother that I really enjoy cooking, and she told me she'd teach me how to make some Tico dishes.  Unfortunately, our program is so busy I haven't have many chances to try my hand in la cocina.  That changed last night though, when I helped Dona Yolanda and my sister, Malory, make chicken empanadas.  Yolanda had already prepared the chicken and made the tortilla dough, so it was basically just assembly and frying, but it was really fun.  Making consistent, uniform tortillas is an art, and I was amazed at how quickly Malory cranked them out.  Mine were much slower and aesthetically inferior, but they still tasted good.  The meal had a heightened sense of warmth and enjoyment because of the absolutely torrential downpour going on outside.  It's very windy in the mountains here, and at night it sometimes sounds as if the tin roof or even the whole house is going to be swept away like something out of the Wizard of Oz.

An Unrelated Note: My host father has a great fondness for dancing, and one of his favorite movies is his DVD of Michael Jackson's best music videos and live performances.  He thinks that MJ is "un bailando mas mejor" and the world will never again see anything like him.

That's all for now, so I'll sign off with another picture of Pelusita, this time trying to wake up her mother to play (can't resist, kittens are only kittens for so long...)

Slumdog Mountaineer

I have now been in Costa Rica for five days, but it has felt more like ten.  We spent Sunday and Monday getting oriented to Tico culture in Alajuela, a city not far from the capital of San Jose.  Out hotel was beautiful, but not extravagant, with artful apertures to let in sun and breeze.  These slats in the ceilings were two feet wide and as long as the room, and the floor beneath them was actually dedicated to beds of native plants (bushes and small trees, mostly).  The common breakfast here is Gallo Pinto (speckled rooster) and consists of beans, rice, eggs, and queso fresco, a salty and delicious soft farmer's cheese.  An incredible array of fruits and fruit juices are also available for breakfast, given their abundance this close to the equator.  The eggs are the best I have ever tasted, even better than Homestead eggs.  They are always fresh and tasty.  I recently heard that the average carton of eggs in the U.S. goes nine months between being collected and eaten.  Yikes.

On Tuesday we left Alajuela and set off for Monteverde, but took a detour in order to spend a few hours in La Carpio, a massive shantytown of 35,000 and one of Costa Rica's poorest communities.  The population is largely comprised of Nicaraguan immigrants (many without papers) and in a classic case of Not In My Backyard, the Costa Rican government held the threat of deportation over the folks there in order to quell opposition to the installation of a massive landfill right on the outskirts of the community.  The fumes are pungent and there are significantly more cases of respiratory illness than the national average, especially among children.  We went to a combination women's co-op and montessori school for lunch, where we were treated to a short play about an immigrant family.

Before leaving, we hiked down to a river in one of the poorest sections of La Carpio.  Since there is little infrastructure in most of the shantytown, grey and black water merely flow downhill, unfiltered, ending up directly in the river.  There is also a considerable amount of trash scattered over the cobbles in the shallows.  Despite its absolute filthiness, in the hottest days of the dry season, children still swim there to cool off.

After this sweltering and heavy, but nonetheless valuable excursion, we piled back onto our bus and finished the trip to Monteverde.  The road from the San Luis Valley up into the mountains is an adventure to say the least.  It is a dirt road, but that name conveniently glosses over all of the cobbles and chunks of granite that dot its path.  Upon arrival, we had a brief orientation to the basic guidelines of our homestays and without further delay we met our host families.  My host mother is named Yolanda and works as a ninera, or nanny, and my host father, Lorenzo, is a maintenance worker at a nearby biology center.


They have two daughters, Kathi and Malory.  Kathi and her husband, Jose, live in the basement of the house, and Malory lives nearby, but is around nearly all the time with her adorable three-year-old daughter Naomi (nah-oh-mi).  They have four dogs (Scrappy, Bruno, Chizpa, and Canela) and a cat named Pelusa, which just had a kitten one month ago.  The kitten doesn't have a name yet, so they call her Pelusita.  They also have chickens and a rooster that roam about the yard, so I feel right at home.  Yesterday, we had fried chicken for dinner that I may well have met a few days ago, which was quite good (Dona Yolanda said "mejor que el pollo del supermercado") and I talked with my host family about the prevalence of farmer's markets here.




Last night we watched a scrimmage on TV between Costa Rica and Venezuela (futbol).  Naomi is rarely content to sit still for long, so I kicked a little ball around on the floor with her while the game went on.  Each time before she kicked the ball to me she would shout, "Estas listos por el campionato?" ("Are you ready for the championships?"  I met my host aunt and uncle yesterday evening, along with their kids, which was nice.  I had a brief and halting discussion en espanol with Uncle Samuel about Quakers, whom he opined were "gente muy simpatica" (very kind people ).  I told him I agreed and tried to make a joke about their dog, Muneca, but I'm not sure I got my point across.


The center where we study is beautiful and smells like plants, coffee and woodfire (the latter probably from Johnny's Pizzeria next door), which is good because I'll be spending a lot of time there, as will all of the other students in my program.  There are 21 of us and we'll be taking classes Monday thru Saturday for three months, with the exception of two extended field trips.  I hope we get one or two saturdays off so I can hike over to the Meeting House and play ultimate with some Friends.  The beer here isn't much to call home about, but it's ok.  The most popular is Imperial (el cerveza de Costa Rica), but I have also tried Bavaria Negra and Tona, which is a Nicaraguan lager that tastes kind of like a Belgian.  The Bavaria Negra is my favorite, which manages a darker caramelly flavor without being too sweet.  Well, I should probably go do some book-learning, so I'll leave you with some pictures of the center and the vistas.

48 Hours

In the pre-dawn hours of Sunday, I will fly South for the remainder of the Northern Hemisphere winter.  In fact, this will not be the first time an important day of my life has coincided with the Superbowl, as I was born on Superbowl Sunday in 1990.  I guess it's a good thing I don't care much about football (I mean...Go Steelers...yeah!)  I am approximately halfway packed.

An Abridged List of Items I Have Packed

• 1 Energizer headlamp
• 4 waterproof field notebooks (i didn't know they even made waterproof paper)
• 2 pair of quick-dry conversion pants/shorts
• 1 Crystalaire sweatshirt (though the tropical days are hot, apparently mountain evenings can get cool)
• The Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace
• 1 trusty pair of Chaco sandals
• 1 hiking boot (unfortunately, my other boot is down the street at Sonny's Shoe Repair after losing a lacing hook.  fortunately, although Sonny was rather grumpy about the whole situation, he agreed to fix my boot by Saturday.  As I opened the door to leave, he emphasized that he closes up shop AT 2PM and I was in for a rough surprise if I showed up even A SECOND AFTER)
• 2 packs of black Uniball Vision Needle pens (I am including this hopelessly nerdy item in the interest of unbiased disclosure)

An Abridged List of Items I Have Decided Not to Pack

• 1 Macbook laptop (sayonara Nicco 2.0 + his virtual life)
• Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (it's just too damn long)
• 1 pair of rainbow suspenders (since i'm unsure of even their cultural acceptability in the U.S., i'm not taking any chances abroad)
• The Collected Journals of Hernan Cortes
• 1 block of Yoder's Hot Pepper cheese (despite its sentimental value as a kind of totemic Homestead symbol, I'm not too sure it would survive the flight; also, I apparently won't be suffering from dairy withdrawal anytime soon...see below)

One of the folks in my program recently emailed everyone a bare bones map of the Monteverde region.  Some notable features: 

El Unicorno Disco: Need to refuel with some tapas and drinks after donating blood at the Red Cross?  No problem, it's only a five minute walk to El Unicorno Disco!  Drink too much at El Unicorno Disco?  No problem, it's only a five minute walk to the Red Cross!

Bajo Del Tigre Nature Trail: Want to get away from it all?  Take a scenic hike on the Tiger Hollow trail, certainly better-named than the neighboring (I kid you not) Natural Valley Nature Trail

Johnny's Pizzeria: Feeling homesick?  Eat a slice or two of New York style pizza at Johnny's!

The Cheese Factory: Just what it sounds like.  "We bring da Monterey, da Chedda, da Gruyere and da Feta!"  yum

Friend's Meeting House: Lost sight of your inner light?  Come explore questions of faith and community with local practicers of humankind's most historically peaceful religious denomination.

Trapp Family Lodge: Remember the end of the Sound of Music?  Apparently those family singers didn't stop for long in Switzerland before carving out a piece of tropical paradise for themselves in Central America.  No Nazis here, Julie Andrews! (most of them self-exiled further south to Brazil)

Laundry La Amistad: Ever wash your jeans and feel like there's something missing?  Add some authentic historical flavor to the usually mundane task of laundering your clothes at La Amistad, which might be named after the famous slave ship that caused politico-legal uproar in 1839 when the crew mutinied and steered it to the U.S.  (Disclaimer: Amistad also means "friendship" in Spanish, so this could just be a regular non-historical laundry establishment called Friendship Laundry, but which one is more fun to believe?)

Meg's Stables/Bat Jungle: "Meg" sure is a shrewd businesswoman, cornering two unrelated market niches at once like that.  Who knew bats, horses, and humans could live symbiotically and profitably in such close quarters?

On a more serious note, the map also shows a cemetery, butterfly gardens, a post office, and a bullring.  This map seems to show that I'm headed to a region that is characterized by a weird mix of colonial/imperial influence (Johnny's, Meg's, Friends Meeting House, bullring) and a thriving ecotourism industry that manages to be profitable and conservationist/preservationist at the same time (butterfly and orchid gardens, numerous ecology centers, nature trails).

I am excited to be on my way to San Jose, and then Monteverde in two days.

Blogra Cadabra

As of this evening, I have succeeded in creating a weblog to document my travels and experiences in Central America this Spring.  I will be primarily living and studying in one of three towns in the Monteverde Region: Santa Elena, Cerro Plano, or Monteverde itself.  My flight leaves on February 6th, so I will be spending the next few weeks brushing up on my Spanish and organizing my life to ease the transition to living abroad.  

My program will involve two lengthy (14-day) trips so I am double-checking my backpacking/camping gear.  I'm also doing a little bit of reading as preparation for both the culture of Costa Rica and the academic content I'll be dealing with while I'm there.  The two books I'm currently delving into are Eduardo Galeano's Open Veins of Latin America and Michael Pollan's The Botany of Desire.

The classes I'm taking while in Costa Rica include: Spanish, Tropical Biology and Policy, Costa Rican Natural History, and Sustainability: Society, Environment, Economy.  I will also be completing a one-month internship at the end of the semester, hopefully on an organic coffee farm.

Well, that's it for now, I suppose.  I'll post again the day before I fly south for the rest of the winter.