The Squirrels of Costa Rica

Well, if any of you know me at all, you know that I find squirrels really amusing. That being said, I've been able to photograph two that look distinct from each other so far.
The first I found in the city of Heredia, in the park near our hotel, the Hotel America. There is a beautiful church there, with a garden right next to it, and I had to jump up and run over to this little guy when I saw him.
The picture doesn't quite do him justice, but he's thin and gray with a little reddish near his tummy.

The next squirrel we saw was at Volcan Poas. He was incredibly friendly, looking for food from all of us. He seemed either a bit chubbier or a bit fluffier, I'm not sure which. :) He was right at the overlook for the volcano, where I took the picture of the plumes of vapors.
This second picture here is of Cory, one of the guys on the trip, trying to get the squirrel to come visit him. :)

The Beautiful Tropical Dry Forest in Guanacaste

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Oh, my goodness, there are so many animals in the tropical dry forest! I'd only heard about rain forests, but the dry forest has so many animals! I'm going to post lots of pictures here. :)

We went on a number of day and night hikes, and both kinds were awesome. I didn't take any pictures at night, because it wouldn't do the animals justice, but we saw lots of frogs and toads on the roads into the park, and also a cool bird that might be called a whippoorwill. It flies around at night, landing on the ground, and has big brown eyes. It's a brown bird, and flies up and then back down in short bursts, and has been known to trick people into going into the forest. We also saw the largest toad in the world, the marine toad, and I got to feel a tree frog's feet. :) We also saw two kinds of scorpions, one being a whip scorpion.

Apparently my professor, Tom Langen, is the world's expert on the magpie jay, which we learned has interesting social habits. A group of females will all help raise the young of one lead female. They're gorgeous birds, and we first saw one flying back and forth across the road as we entered the park.

During the day time, we were about to see agoutis, which are the small brown mammals you can see in the picture. They look about the size of a house cat, and run around eating. We saw a bird that reminded us of a turkey, but was black with a red neck. We saw several big iguanas, and a bunch of little lizards. We also caught a gecko! :)

There are so many birds! We also saw two snakes, one venemous that someone had killed, and another that looked black and white and reminded me of checkerboards.

We saw a number of deer in the park, and also, coaties!!! :) (Pronounced co-aa-teee, here they call them pisote. :) ) I saw them in Iguazu, Argentina last year, and they were scavengers there, but not here. :) We also got to see two kinds of monkeys!!!! Above I posted a picture of a white faced monkey, and we also got to see howler monkeys. :) With that white-faced monkey, that's another animal from my ceramic piece! Whoo! :)

I was on my first volcano!!!
It was SO awesome, because when we were going up the mountain, it was really misty because it´s a cloud forest, I think. When we got up there, though, we were worried because it was so cloudy we couldn´t see the crater of the volcano!!!
Hehe, it was funny, though. There was a guy there, and I asked him in Spanish if he worked there, and he said yes, so I told him ¨The clouds are going to part and we´re going to see everything.¨ He just smiled and maybe laughed a little, and I continued looking around.

I kept asking for it, and gracias a Dios, the clouds blew away! We got to see the whole crater, complete with acid lake and plumes of vapor or smoke coming out of the lake!!! :)

I think from now on I´ll post pictures after text. I think it´ll be easier. We shall see.
At the coffee tour, there was a butterfly tent!!! I got to see the big blue butterfly that´s on my ceramic piece. :) If you are unaware, I´ve wanted to go to Costa Rica for years. Now I´m looking for as many of the animals on the ceramic piece I made when I couldn´t go as I can.

We had a great drive around the mountains, and there are not as many rocks in them as in New York. There is a major problem with erosion on all the mountain roads here. They also have a lot of earth quakes, which contributes to the destruction of the roads.

Exploring Heredia

Good morning, we have pictures!

Yesterday was our first full day here in Heredia, Costa Rica, which is a city in between two sets of mountains.

We wandered a bit in the morning, changing money at the bank (the exchange rate is about 535 colones for every $1), and exploring nearby shops and an indoor market. We found a great artesan shop, with all kinds of wooden carvings, furniture, and plates. As you'll see in the following picture, Zem bought a water coconut, and several of us tried it, and it was sweet and delicious.



We also bought some mangoes and passion fruit. Leif and I ended up at a pastry shop, where we tried something called 'oreja' which is Spanish for 'ear.' By the size of it, the whole name should have been elephant ear, because it was a large crispy piece of sugary dough that appeared fried. After that we found another market, which had little shops that served food inside. This is what we had (fajitas de pollo, casado), which was chicken cooked with onions and bell peppers, chayote (that green chopped squash), rice, beans, pasta salad, and plantanos maduros (those yummy ripe, sweet fried plantains again! :) )

Well, sorry about the weird order of the pictures. The top picture is of passion fruit, which I was surprised to find had a squishy middle that reminded me of pomegranate, because you suck on the seeds to get the fruit you eat off them. I'm not actually all that fond of it, as it's such a messy process. :) I'll stick to drinking the juice.

The sun is shining in Costa Rica!

Greetings from Central America! We have arrived in Costa Rica. :)

We arrived late last night, and will be going exploring shortly. :)

I had papaya, watermelon, gallo pinto (fried rice and beans) for breakfast, and fried plaintains ´maduros´ which are ripe and sweet. Nom nom.

I´ll update more later, hopefully after I buy an SD card reader so I can upload pictures!

[As you can see, I have uploaded pictures of breakfast! I also added a picture of the view from the hotel in the morning]

About Ometepe Bilingual School

In less than three weeks, I'll be leaving for Central America! I'm working to finish all my homework and studying before I graduate from Clarkson University, and then two days after graduation, it'll be time to get on the plane!

I've realized I haven't given the website for the Ometepe Bilingual School! Here it is:

http://www.hmerida.com/en/kids.htm

During the month of June I will be teaching 40-50 students between the ages of 5 and 18 (although I hear there is a 2-year-old student at the school now!). I will need to come up with some good lesson plans that can engage all of the students, no matter what their level of English.

If you are interested in providing me a with a lesson plan you would like me to teach, please let me know!

Some ideas I already have are songs from Camp Ma-He-Tu, games, and hopefully some lessons from professors here at Clarkson. I hope to give each child a little bit of what I have learned throughout my education, so they can see how much fun learning can be!

Visas, Preparation, and PIECES

I'm getting more and more excited about teaching in Nicaragua. I looked up whether I would need a visa today, and it seems that for 90 days or less is is unnecessary. :) This is good, because I didn't want to have to send my passport anywhere. Ah, the laziness of the busy college student. I looked at http://travel.state.gov/travel/cis_pa_tw/cis/cis_985.html and it looks like I'll just have to purchase a tourist card when I get there.

I'm trying to look around for lesson plans, suggestions, and supplies to make a fun teaching atmosphere. One of the resources I was given by the Ometepe Bilingual School director is the PIECES blog at: http://www.thepieces.org/pieces-blog/
It is a blog posted by students from Switzerland who traveled to Nicaragua in February to teach, and I have been using it to get an idea of what works well in teaching the students, and what I should focus on as I prepare. According to the blog, there is at least one student interested in engineering, so hopefully I can come up with some good lesson plans that show how much fun engineering can be. :)

A staff member at Clarkson, David Bowen, has lent me a book on traveling in Nicaragua, and has offered some travel tips. He's traveled there in the past, and by our conversations I'm getting excited about meeting the people that live on the island.

Hopefully I'll have a decent amount of time to devote to preparing to teach, as I've been trying to both keep up with school work and prepare our electric snowmobile for its trip to Greenland. The semester is almost over, and that means I'm that much closer to Costa Rica and Nicaragua!