Los Montanas estan bonita

Well a successful trip outside of San Jose has quickly come and gone. The trip to Monteverde was awesome and amazing. The ride down there took around 5 hours. We checked into our "rustic" looking hotel and rustic being a loose term here. It was nice but it seemed like a Super 8 in the mountains. My comforter smelled moldy because I think it's fairly moist there, not to mention the bed was hard as rocks. The only downfall was the rooms, everything was fantastic.

Saturday we awoke for 6:30 breakfast and had to be ready to leave by 7:30 if we were doing any other trips on the excursion, which most of us were. The only thing I wanted to do was zipline through the jungle while I was here, I determined that even before I left. Well I got to zipline in Monteverde but in the mountains, which was even better. The tour had 11 different cables and a tarzan swing, which is exactly what you think it would be. The tarzan swing included jumping from a really tall platform and swinging back and forth until the guides caught you. I would post the video but it was taking way too long to load. I'll find another way to post it sometime

It was the best part of the canopy tour. Even people who were afraid of heights successfully completed this part of the trip and loved it afterwards. Then we finished up the tour by going on 2 really long cables (at least a mile) across a valley and it was just gorgeous. I have video but I'll try to find one where you can really see what's going on in it. We were all still in a buzz after the canopy tour. The rest of Saturday was spent in town down from our hotel and some of us went dancing Saturday night.

Sunday we were supposed to go to the biological reserve and we were in a bit of a gloomy mood about it because it was raining all day. It was still raining while we toured the nature trails and most of us soaked our clothes while looking at the nature in the cloud forest. After the tour, we had lunch and headed back to San Jose. We ended up making record time and arrived at around 4, which was a couple hours earlier than expected.

Now I'm off to complete my hectic week of classes before a mini-vacation at the beach in Puerto Viejo. I have a birthday party to bring food to in Spanish tomorrow (I'm bringing homemade epanadas courtesy of my host mom), an oral exam on Thursday and a final exam in Spanish on Friday. I did find out that I don't have Spanish on Monday which means a longer weekend at the beach, life is indeed rough here. Well gotta get home for dinner. Hasta Luego!

P.S. If any of my fellow readers feel the need to send me a care package with any sort of American goods because you love me so much that you don't want me to pay import taxes, here's the address:

ISA
Attn: Vanessa Skocz
PO Box 101-2010
Zapote, San Jose
Costa Rica, Centroamerica

Just sayin'.