joy comes from

...being mistaken as a spaniard or having people ask me if I learned Spanish in Spain for the third time
...having wonderful time to catch up with family in a foreign country
...laughing so hard while intaking immense amounts of turkey on thanksgiving
...walking around Heredia on my own while listening to good music
...finding ridiculous pictures tagged of me on facebook (props to Sara J.):

...coming home and having a 'tecíto' with Mama Ku, my temporarily present Guatemalteca sister, Eme, Mike, Ash, and Eme's Tica friend who has been studying in Spain for the last few years (it lasted a solid 2 hours if not more)
...talking to my parents on skype!
...new adventures brought by newfound comfortableness in Costa Rica and a willingness to travel to new areas of the city
...the fact that the area down by the central market and artisan market are like a strange cross between Causeway Bay, Wan Chai and a standard North American shopping mall
...seeing all of my friends partaking in tamales with their host families and ENJOYING it (not being all awkward like all of us were at the first introduction meeting)
...being much more comfortable speaking in Spanish in a conversational manner

maximizing hammock time

There is something to be said about waking up in the morning to the sound of howler monkeys, lizards and waves lapping on the beach. That was the joyous way I woke up on Sunday morning at punta mona, an off the grid, permaculture focused organic farm/botanical garden.

On Friday, we stopped at a banana farm on the way out to manzanillo for the night. There, we were introduced to how the strange tendencies of people in the USA and Europe dictate whether or not a perfectly tasty banana is 'good'. For it to be so, there must be no bruising, which is really hard to make happen. Needless to say, over 25% of bananas end up being thrown out just because htey have too many scars for Western tastes. Luckily, a company that makes baby food bought the bananas and now they are used as a base puree rather than being thrown away.

This is how bananas are protected from bugs and sunlight:

 Friday night we spent the night in Manzanillo. The next morning after breakfast, a few of us impromptu jumped in the water while still wearing most of our clothes instead of swim suits. Always an interesting decision when one is hiking for what was anticipated to be a couple of hours.

About 20 minutes later, we hopped out of the BEAUTIFUL Caribbean and put our packs back on, met up with Tino, our local guide and hiked out to Punta Mona. We saw these wonderful things:

 

Fresh Coconut: Tino cut the shells off with his machete 

 papaya trees outside of our Manzanillo hostel

 starfruit trees

 backpacking to Punta Mona

 

The Golden Orb spider: not poisonous, I promise

 At a viewpoint on the hike out

 The inside of a strangler fig - it grows from the ground up around another tree and strangles the life out of the tree it grows up.

A walking palm - they can actually change their location

Forest godesses. Don't really know why, but I ran with it :)

 Cocoa bean (where chocolate comes from!)

 Yellow Eyelash Viper - ridiculous. We also saw two gray ones.

 Spot the sloth.

 Almonds on a Almendra de la Playa (beach almond tree)

Howler Monkies!

 A scary spider. This is why you don't grab a tree if you're falling.

 Nests of the Montezuma Oropendola

 Spines on a Palm Tree - another reason why you don't grab a tree when you fall down.

 A pretty white flower.

Once we got to Punta Mona, we started learning about permaculture and what it is to live sustainably off the land. 

Cocoa beans! Shelling them and getting ready to make chocolate.

Cocoa shells

 Toasted cocoanut mixed with soy sauce that we had on our Ron Don for dinner.

ground chocolate credit to Joshué

best.

 They had a couple types of tea.

Hibiscus flower - we had these outside of our church in Lima

Coral could be found all along the trails and gardens at Punta Mona

Outside of our rooms at Punta Mona

 epiphytes - plants that grow on trees

Later on Sunday we stopped at a reserve for the BriBri indigenous people. They have an iguana conservation project in hopes of increasing the population of iguanas so that they will survive and can be used once again for traditional purposes. 

PAVO - it's thanksgiving today. I'm excited for lunch :)

 these things look like what i would imagine dragons to look like

gourd tree - used in traditional art and traditionally used as containers

Interesting things I have experienced: compost toilets, magic berries and then eating star fruit and having them not be bitter, eating almonds on the beach, getting intense amounts of bug bites, moving away from being self-conscious and hiking in the rain without caring about how I feel - just enjoying the experience and not finding things to complain about, enjoying the thickness of vegetation, the beach, realizing that I would feel very comfortable living in a beach town. That's it for now :) 

música nueva!

There is something so wonderful about new music. I stumbled across a band called Two Door Cinema Club while not writing my policy paper this afternoon. They're an Irish band that is a mix of indie, rock and electric. I think my brother would like them, actually. So I went onto iTunes and bought their CD Tourist History. With great timing, too. A couple minutes later, Lara let me know that I was going to drive Loquito, Lindy and Dinorah's car, down into town because she had to drive the van and leave it at the mechanic. A few butterflies at the thought of driving in a foreign country (basically a first, unless you count that time driving around the Redhill loop in high school). So I hopped in the car, she showed me the special ways to stop the alarm from going off on you while driving, I plugged in my new music and rocked out down into town.

The next best part after getting to drive for the first time in a few months was the fact that we went from the mechanics to a massage school in San Rafa. Basically, we had almost 1.5 hour long oil massages for free. It was wonderful. And my masseur was from Yakima! Small world. She works in the Virgin Islands after majoring in tourism and hospitality. Maybe I should do that for a bit. Live in the Caribbean? Couldn't be a bad life choice :)

That was today. It was a good day. For sure.