Costa Rican Clubbing/Volcano Hot Springs

July 12th, 2010

We got a cement mixer! The back of the school is all cleaned up and the cement mixer is really nice because it speeds up the process by quadruple fold. Tomorrow I think we start laying blocks and outlining the mural.

We were able to take Saturday completely off which was really nice since we've been working our butts off the past week. It gave us time to spend with our families and get to know them better. I woke up around nine thirty, and explaining the Smallridge Sleeping Genes wasn't exactly easy to do in Spanish. I just realized I left one of my water bottles at the hotel. Shiz. Oh well. Shiz! Anyway. The family had some friends over and me, Natalia, and Tatiana headed over to Zarcero to check out the park.

It was a park right in the middle of the city and it had a church surrounded by tons of shrubs that were cut into shapes and animals like dinosaurs and giraffes. I got a coffee flavored ice cream and almost died. When we got back we chilled with the family friends some more and Natalia painted my nails. I was bored so I put some designs on them in white. Everybody thought it was kind of weird because apparently they don't do that here.

All week they've been asking me if I like to dance and if I like to salsa. I said I like to dance and told them about the salsa class we took in San Jose. They asked me if I wanted to go dancing Saturday night. I said I'd love to, especially after hearing stories about Julia and Morgan going dancing with their sisters. Olga called up Caitlin and asked if I could go, and she said yes. We headed into Zarcero and picked up my cousin and her boyfriend then proceeded to go to a bar for dinner. We had chicken with mashed potatoes and tortilla chips and coke. After we left there around ten we drove to the mall. We met two of Monica and Natalia's friends there and apparently they said the dancing there was bad, so we left. We then kept stopping at places that looked like dance places, but none of them were very busy.

We finally pull up to one over an hour away from Las Brisas and decide to go in here. We walk in and I"m expecting this mellow salsa place. It's not. This is a full blown frickin night club There's a bar on one end, dancers on the other, and no room to move. It was so sick cause you don't get to do that in the states when you're my age. Well, you can't exactly do that in Costa Rica when you're sixteen either. The bouncer asked if I was with my sisters. When they said yes, the bouncer said I couldn't go in because I wasn't eighteen. My sisters explained I was from the USA, and there the drinking age is 16, so it was okay for me to go in! THE BOUNCER LET ME IN.

We start to chill there and dance and such, when I have to do a double take because I could have sworn I saw someone I knew from school. It obviously wasn't. But it was a guy who looked very similar, just like 2819472910 times cuter. He looks up, we make eye contact, and he does the guy nod thing. He's across the room and in his group so whatever, I turn my back and keep dancing About an hour later I notice he's moved to the group next to us, which was kind of funny. He eventually moved into our group, and was asking Monica about me. We ended up dancing and it was a ton of fun, bu then it got to be around 2am so we had to leave. He tried to convince Monica to let me stay but then she explained I had to be up at six the  next morning. Anyway it was a fun time, and I definitely want to go back.

I got home at three and got about three and a half hours of sleep, and then we left for La Fortuna. We arrive at our hotel and it is wicked hot outside. It's nice and cool in Las Brisas because we're in the mountains, but this was a different situation entirely. We get in our room, turn the AC on, and are given four hours to do nothing. We had a peeling party because otherwise I would have had to wear clothes in the hot springs, which would not have been very fun. I really need more songs on my iPod. During the peeling party Joprah gave relationship advice, which was really helpful for all of us.

At five we left for the hot springs, which were absolutely amazing. There were different temperatures of the pools, and there were like twenty pools or something. They were all naturally heated by the volcano we were at. We also had dinner there, and it was a buffet. Ranch potatoes? Hell. Yes. We ended up splitting into groups at the springs. My group was me, Michelle, Hannah, Dan, and Ely, which was really nice because we're fairly quiet and all really chill.

We went on the water slides there too. There were three different ones, and Dan was the guinea pig for al lof them. The first was extremely violent. It jostled you around and you ended up banging your head on the slide. It was covered so you couldn't see and at one point you weren't even touching the slide because the drop was so steep. It also made you go really fast so it didn't seem like it was supposed to be over when it was, so I ended up getting a ton of water up my nose when it threw me into the pool. The second slide was pathetic. You stopped at several different points, and had to push yourself along to keep going. At the end you weren't dumped into the pool but had to scooch yourself out on your own. The third one was really short and open, and was a level down from the other two. At the end it had a huge drop.

After the slides the five of us found a good spring and just stayed there until ten, which is when we had to leave. We gott back to the hotel and I crashed.

We were able to sleep in until around eight this morning. We had breakfast in town, but it was more like a snack. I had scrambled eggs and two pieces of toast. We then went to the waterfall of La Fortuna. It was cool, but not nearly as awesome as Nyaca. You couldn't really swim, and there was no promised rope swing. That's when we found out the rop swing was somewhere else, and so we spent a couple of hours there. See pictures.

We then went back to the restaurant and I had a giant burger with fries. Then we went across the street and got ice cream. Food baby anyone? When we got back to Las Brisas I went over Morgan's house with Dan and we played wii.