I’m not Tica. I don’t belong in Costa Rica. Nor do I belong in Panama. Nor Nicaragua, Argentina, or Bolivia. And I’m finally okay with that!

I remember going to Argentina with this illusion that I’d be able to start to fit in after a while. I was so excited that everybody was pretty much white so I could blend in without a problem, at least visually. While that eventually proved to be completely false, I never had a chance to blend in in Costa Rica. From the beginning, I looked funny, talked funny, and even thought funny. No matter where I traveled or worked or lived, there was never a thought that I would be able not to stick out. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. And if you can’t join ‘em, embrace the differences.

Something I had to learn to deal with this summer with was my identity as a foreigner. At first it was weird. I just felt like I didn’t belong. But after a while I kind of started liking it. Even though foreigners aren’t overly popular in that region, we also weren’t hated. I found out that people were interested to hear my stories and opinions, just because they might be different from their own. It was fun to be intriguing rather than “just another person walking by.” When I needed help, it was really convenient to be a traveler. People were much more willing to answer my stupid questions than they might have been if I were someone who was “supposed” to know the answers. And even though my Spanish was good, I still have a very obvious non-native accent that seems to automatically give people a bit more patience with me than they might have if I were a local. I don’t expect those experiences to translate to every community or region of the world, but in the places I’ve been, it’s worked pretty well.

Accepting being a foreigner doesn’t mean accepting being clueless. I can still walk around with a distinct air of “Yeah, I’m not from here. But I still kind of know what I’m doing.” It doesn’t mean I have to roll over and play dead whenever I’m confused. But it does mean I have to get used to not understanding everything that happens and I have to approach every situation with extra humility (something I really struggle with). Knowing you’re outmatched allllll the time culturally and linguistically changes how you tackle learning and questioning for the better in my opinion. It also forces people like me, who always want all the answers, to accept that there are things that we can’t learn instantly and that that’s actually okay and the world won’t end.

Being the extranjera can be uncomfortable, confusing, and a little unsettling at times. But it’s also something that can be embraced, appreciated, and used to connect to a culture on another level. While we can’t change our ethnicity or native culture, we still have the opportunity to experience the worlds of other people, just from a different playing field. In some ways, it’s a little unfortunate that we can’t perfectly integrate. But it’s what we’ve got, so we may as well roll with it.

I’m back safe and sound from another amazing week in Barra Honda. Not too much unique stuff to blog about that you won’t find in the other four Barra Honda posts, so I won’t spend much time writing about it again. Basically, the people there are amazing and I will miss them so much. That park is definitely where I call “home” in Costa Rica and saying goodbye (again!) was so hard knowing that I wouldn’t be able to even stop in and visit. Hopefully those goodbyes are actually “See you later”’s and I’ll be able to see them again someday.

On the upside, I’m home! After 7 months away, it’s sooooo good to finally see my family again. Thanks to plenty of time in transit between Costa Rica and the US, I’ve gotten the rest of my pictures from the summer posted in a new Facebook album here. This includes my last two trips to Barra Honda and my backpacking trip in Panama and Nicaragua. I also have a couple more blog posts on the way summing up my trip and final thoughts.

Instead of “Most Likely to Succeed” superlatives like in high school, I decided to look back over my summer and come up with some of my own bests, worsts, and mosts from the past three months.

• Best taxi driver: Cristofer (San Jose, Costa Rica)
• Sketchiest place to stay: Hotel Musoc (San Jose, Costa Rica)
• Best adrenaline rush: Ziplining and Tarzan Swing (Monteverde, Costa Rica)
• Randomly friendliest stranger: Andre (bus from Liberia to San Jose)
• Most exciting animal spotted in the wild: Boa constrictor (Barra Honda National Park)
• Best Spanish teacher: Tiki (Barra Honda National Park)
• Best Cumbia teacher: Moncho (Barra Honda National Park)
• Best Arroz con Leche: Meicel (Barra Honda National Park)
• Best sunsets: Tie between Tamarindo, Costa Rica and Barra Honda National Park
• Best hostel: Hostal Hansi (Bocas del Toro, Panama)
• Best food: Imagine Café (Granada, Nicaragua)
• Strangest painted sign: “Please don’t pee on this wall.” (Panama City, Panama)
• Worst border crossing: Panama to Costa Rica
• Best part of my entire summer: Barra Honda National Park

As I start wrapping up my time here in Central America, I thought I’d share the obligatory lists of things I’ll miss/am looking forward too. Here’s a short list for each, in no particular order:

Things I’ll miss about Costa Rica/Central America

• Fresh fruit and fruit juice allll the time
• Pura vida
• Rice and beans (no, I’m not kidding)
• Speaking Spanish
• My host mom and the teachers and students at my school
• My students thinking I’m awesome 🙂
• Traveling at the drop of a hat
• Major affordable public transportation infrastructure
• Being impulsive and spontaneous just because I can; not making plans
• Monkeys
• Gecko noises
• Barra Honda. Barra Honda. Barra Honda times a million.

Things I’m looking forward to about being home

• Getting to see my family (of course)
• Air conditioning
• Free bathrooms
• Intellectual conversations on a regular basis
• Having a cell phone
• Putting toilet paper in the toilet
• Stability of having relationships that last longer than a couple weeks
• Fellowship and my church family
• Lack of iguanas of the roof
• Hulu/Pandora

Three countries later, I decided that the place I’d most like to be is back in Barra Honda. So I made some calls and it’s happening. The remainder of my time in Central America is being spent in my absolute favorite place of the whole summer: Barra Honda National Park.

If all goes according to plan, I should be back in the US on Saturday night. Don’t worry, I still have a couple blog posts on the way as well as a couple weeks worth of pictures.

Twenty-four hours on a bus really isn’t that long. At least not for me. Not sure how I got blessed with the ability to sit contentedly for so long, but I’m certainly not complaining. I went directly from the capital of Panama (Panama City) to the capital of Nicaragua (Managua) in one foul swoop, hoping to lose as little time as possible. Managua was pretty much what I expected: dirty, chaotic, and loud. But it was a friendly kind of insanity and I think I wouldn’t have minded spending a little more time there. I headed from Managua straight to Granada, the “colonial jewel” of Nicaragua. It’s the oldest city in the Americas and is located right on the edge of Lake Nicaragua. Because of the large number of tourists that come to visit, it’s been well cleaned up without totally losing the presence of the locals. This is where I decided to set up my base for exploring Nicaragua.

My first full day in Nicaragua, I took a day trip to León, about 3 hours north by bus. León is home to the largest church in Central America which was my primary motivation for going to visit. The best word I can use to describe the church would simply be “big.” I was surprisingly unimpressed actually. The façade was cracked and dirty, very much in need of a restoration project. Inside was much cleaner, simple clean white walls and then tons of adornment. Typical glitzy statues, crucifixes, pictures of saints, all that jazz. Around the inside are paintings of the stations of the cross. Apparently, they’re a big deal in the art world, but I’m not exactly a connoisseur of artwork and didn’t really get what all the fuss was about. If nothing else, I can check that cathedral visit off my list even if it was slightly less exciting than it was cracked up to be. Maybe if I were Catholic, I’d understand what more of it meant, buuuut…I’m not.

My second stop in León was at the Museum of Legends and Traditions. In the spirit of one word descriptions, this one was “weird.” Housed in the old prison/torture complex from the Samosa era, this museum is filled with creepy life-sized paper mache dolls depicting the legends and folklore stories of the local people. Basically all the boogiemen and Bigfoot types. All of these figures are housed in the cells where the inmates were housed and tortured. Looking past the Nicaraguan Grim Reaper and the giant woman cutting her own breast off (toma tu tete), the walls are covered in pained depictions of inmate life. Understandably, this wasn’t somewhere I cared to spend a lot of time and I made a relatively quick pass through the entire complex. Touring a torture facility filled with grotesque dolls while I was the only person in the whole place really didn’t strike me as a good way not to have nightmares.

My next day in Nicaragua, I decided to spend a little more time exploring the city of Granada. I climbed up the belltower of one of the cathedrals to get the best view of the city. From there, I could see down to the lake, the bright yellow cathedral at the center of town, and zillions of matching tiled roofs. It was finally clear enough that it was worth the climb up the incredibly tiny stairs to spend 15 minutes just watching the streets below.

That evening, I’d scheduled a tour to the nearby Masaya volcano. We started in the town of Masaya, known for its sizeable artisans market. After that, we drove up to almost the edge of the main crater and spent a couple minutes admiring the view from the top.  Because of all the rain that had been falling over the past couple of days, most of what we saw was clouds and gas billowing from the crater. But every once in a while, we got a glimpse down deep into the crater and could see the beautiful layers of strata that make up the sides of the cone.

Our next stop was a tour in the lava tunnels. This was one of my favorite parts of my time in Nicaragua. Unlike the caverns in Barra Honda, these caves are tubes melted away by lava leaving behind ceilings that look like dripping rock. Instead of calcium deposits, this black rock was liquefied and solidified in such a short time that it all has an eerie feeling of time just stopping as you walk in. Inside was a surprising amount of life including tree roots that followed us about 90 feet in,  bats, tarantulas, and some cave being that the guide called a spider but that looked more like something out of a sci-fi/horror movie.

We left the lava tube and went to wait for the sun to set at the narrow entrance to another. As it started to get dark, the bats inside started getting ready for a night of feeding until they all started coming towards us. All of the sudden, we were surrounded by the sound of soft wings and little puffs of air were coming at us from all directions. Because of where we’d positioned ourselves in front of the entrance, the bats all flew between us or right over our heads as the left the cave. It was really neat to get to see the bats in bigger groups, especially after getting to study them in Barra Honda one at a time.

Sunday morning, I started the day with a walk down to the lake. Lago de Nicaragua is the second largest in Latin America (Lake Titicaca in Bolivia- which I’ve also visited- is the largest) and the 18^th largest in the world. Not too shabby. From there, I was off to see another volcano for the day: Mombacho. Mombacho is known for its cloud forest and wildlife and was really beautiful to walk around. Just as we were reaching the lookout point, the perpetual layer of clouds cleared (everyone in the vicinity burst into applause) and we could see out over the lake and the whole city of Granada with Managua in the distance.

Food highlight of the summer: Imagine Café, Granada, Nicaragua
Atmosphere: All John Lennon/Beetles themed
Drinks: Fresh orange juice and homemade ginger ale
Entrée: Green Chile Chicken Enchiladas (Green chile!!!! Cheddar cheese!!!)
Dessert: Fresh baked mango bread with vanilla ice cream and dark chocolate fondue.

The joy of backpacking is that you can make it up as you go.

The night before I meant to leave Bocas del Toro to go back to Costa Rica, I got a crazy idea that I actually wanted to go to Panamá City and see the canal. I asked around, found out the easiest way to get there and woke up painfully early to get on another boat-taxi-bus ride to the capital city. Known just as “Panamá” by the locals, Panamá City is supposed to be the most glamorous capital city of Latin America. And so far, I don’t disagree. When I arrived, I kept getting confused because the signs looked misspelled- like they should have been in English instead of Spanish. Everything is so streamlined and commercialized. It reminds me of a cross between Buenos Aires and any major city in the US. The locals joke that it’s like Miami, except that they speak more English in Panamá City.

After a full day of travel, I arrived, rather disoriented in the glitzy city. I wandered around the giant bus terminal-mall-movie theater-airport for a while before giving up and taking a taxi to my hostel. I found a local supermarket and unsuccessfully tried to cook a disgusting combination of macaroni, canned peas, Miracle Whip, and sardines (which I thought were tuna). No more trying to be creative with my cooking.

First thing Tuesday morning, I set out for the Canal. After a moderately confusing time trying to find the right bus, I got to the visitors center shortly after it opened. Visiting the Canal made me wonder why I didn’t go into an Engineering field. Everything about it is awesome. “Big” can’t be captured in photos, unfortunately, but everything was huge. And awesome. The ships were ginormous. And awesome. The mechanics with brilliant and intricate. And awesome. You get the idea.

In the three and a half hours that I stood and watched, only three ships (and a little boat) passed through. And that was one after another. At first, I wanted to say that everything in the Canal moves at glacial speeds. But I’ve seen glaciers. I think glaciers actually move at Panamá Canal speed. When I got there, there was a battleship passing through. The sailors were on the deck and waving to us as they waited. After that came a couple of massive cargo container ships. The scale of everything at the Canal is tremendous. The entirety is about 50 miles long and takes 8 hours to pass through. The ships are raised and lowered, via a series of three locks, about 79 feet to cross the Isthmus. With each ship, 52 million gallons of freshwater are dumped into the Pacific or Atlantic Ocean. Lots of statistics that you can look up online if you’re as interested as I am, but I’ll avoid boring you with more of them right now. Point being: Panama Canal = terrific.

After watching ships for three hours, wandering through the museum and doing everything else I could come up with to do in the visitor’s center, I struck off to find a bus to a nearby national park. The bus got me most of the way and a sweet English woman in an old green Beetle drove me the rest of the way and gave me the afternoon’s bus schedule before dropping me off. Yay nice people! The part of the park I was visiting was a combination zoo/botanical gardens and, true to my Argentine zoo experience, safety standards in other countries seem to be much lower than those of the US. There were at least half a dozen cages where I easily could have gotten my fingers bitten off, but it actually made the experience much more enjoyable knowing the animals were so close by. I even got to practice my howler monkey call, not understanding why the monkeys weren’t howling back…until I read the sign and found out they were black spider monkeys. Sigh. I guess my monkey identification skills have a ways to go.

In my continued effort to do Panamá City in a day, my next step was the ruins of old Panamá. I’m no ruins buff, but these were pretty cool. There were fantastic explanations of what each pile of rocks used to be and why it was important. Some of the structures were impressively large and well preserved. Even though they were “only” about 500 years old (which isn’t that old for ruins) it was still really cool to get to experience some of the history of one of the most important cities of early Latin America.

Next stop: Nicaragua!

Also, with regard to pictures, they’re all going to go up when I get home to the States, so be ready for a massive flood of pictures once I get them all editted and posted. It’s on my To-Do list immediately after “Hug family” and “Pet dog.” They’ll be up ASAP.

Guess what? I hate speedboats. And it turns out that islands aren’t the best place to spend a lot of time if you never got over your childhood fear of speedboats.

After a very tearful goodbye in Barra Honda, I was off to Bocas del Toro, Panamá (located here). Bocas is a series of 42 islands in the Carribean Sea off the northern coast of Panamá. They’re the primary tourist destination of the country (along with Panama City/the Canal). They can only be reached by plane or by speedboat from the mainland. My bus from San José took us down the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica. As we neared the coast, our non-airconditioned bus filled with swamp-worthy humidity. We wound our way through thick mountain jungle roads lined with waterfalls and vines for several hours before the coast came into view. It was a perfect stereotypical beach postcard: palm trees, white sand, blue sky, gentle waves, and jungle in the background. Unfortunately, we didn’t follow the coast for too long before we headed to the Costa Rica-Panamá border crossing (which was a HUGE pain). After some taxi/bus absurdity I made it to the port city to go to the islands. It was on the boat that I remembered that I HATE speedboats. Something about bouncing over the waves has always terrified me and I apparently haven’t outgrown that fear. I finally talked myself into relaxing a tiiiny bit for the half hour ride to the island but was more than happy to get off when we arrived at the island.

Bocas Town, located on the largest island, is a very confused place. It’s trying really hard to be incredibly touristy, but it also has a huge number of locals who seem to just be carrying on their normal lives, trying to work around the hoards of tourists invading their islands. What comes out is a strange clash of old and new that feels kind of awkward but makes for great people watching. Bocas is largely influenced by people from the larger Caribbean islands (like Jamaica and Barbados) and the Spanish sounds like somebody put your stereotypical “Jamaican filter” on top of an English-influenced Spanish. Weird.

My first day in Bocas, I took a boat tour of some of the local attractions. More speedboats…yay. Our first stop was Dolphin Cove. If I were a dolphin, the one place I would definitely NOT hang out is the place where there’s twenty motorboats driving around looking for me. But I’m not a dolphin, so apparently my opinion is invalid. There were tons! We puttered around with the million other tourist boats taking pictures of the dolphins that were surfacing all around us. I promise we weren’t feeding them- I don’t know why they were there. But dolphins are my favorite animal so I was quite happy.

Our next stop was snorkeling on the reef. Along with my fear of speeding over the water goes my discomfort with open water. We had an hour to snorkel and I spent the first 15 minutes just trying to get my heart rate down as I stared down through my goggles. I’m adding “snorkeling” to the list of things that I’m really bad at. Not sure why but it just makes me incredibly anxious and jumpy. Fortunately, there were lot of great coral formations, plants, and beautiful colorful fish to distract me from thoughts my inevitable salty asphyxiation. I saw a couple tiny plastic bags float by before realizing that I was looking at jellyfish. Which, of course, popped my heart rate right back up to just-jumped-in-the-water levels. After I’d seen a couple and was sufficiently freaked out, I decided to swim back to the boat to ask the tour guide if the jelly fish sting. Before I made it back to ask, I found out the answer to my question. They do. And I had the red marks on my leg to prove it. I climbed back into the boat to inspect the damage and found several swollen red patches that burned like…I dunno what, but they hurt. Our guide got me some vinegar when we stopped for lunch which helped quite a bit.

Our last two stops on the tour were a beautiful soft sanded beach (blah, blah, blah- you’ve heard me write about beaches a million times now) and another snorkeling spot which was significantly less interesting than the first. By the time we made it back to the island, I was starving and found myself a delicious dinner of fish with garlic butter sauce, coconut rice, and plantain patties. Yummm.

Day two I woke up to torrential rain on drumming on the roof. Not to be put off from my plans for adventure, I hopped on a bus to cross the island (only eight miles of it) to Bocas del Drago and Playa de Estrellas. When I arrived, it was still raining, but another couple and I waited until it slowed to a drizzle before heading off to a neighboring beach on foot. The one we were looking for was Starfish Beach. While the clouds never did actually go away, the rain stopped and we survived the walk without too much excitement. (Minus the mad scientist/expat/conspiracy theorist/lonely fisherman who we passed on the way who kept referring to George W. Bush as “emperor”). At the beach, we found the starfish, though not in the quantities we were hoping for. I didn’t know this but starfish are actually pretty decent sized and can move when the want to. I always thought they just sat there. I stand corrected.

Sunday night was a Turtle Tour. I decided that, if I could see turtles in Panama instead of making a separate trip, then I was deeeefinitely going to do it. We left the main island around 8 pm and rode in another evil speedboat an hour to another smaller island. There, we met a biologist who seemed slightly less than thrilled to have us there. It was the first time she and the tour agency had teamed up and there were unclear expectations on both sides. Everyone on the tour showed up expected to sip piña colatas while the turtles danced in front of the beach chairs. The biologist had work to do and planned for us to follow her around without interfering. Neither party won. Especially because of the work I’d done in Barra Honda, I really hit it off with the biologist and talked with her more than anybody else in the group, including the staff. I appreciated hunting for turtles with a researcher instead of a tour guide; she wasn’t looking for turtles to amuse us, she was looking for them because she wanted to find them for her own reasons. That makes for a lot more motivation and determination on her part.

The biologist made rounds on the island every hour, keeping a furious pace to make it all the way around each hour as she looked for turtles. The first round, about 2/3 of us (out of 14) kept up with her to the end. The others got bogged down in the deep soft sand and were battered by the constant waves at high tide and arrived back at the starting point, exhausted. The second time around, only three of us decided to go with her. As we splashed our way along the coast without light for fear of scaring the turtles, Ana stopped dead in her tracks and started backing up even before I crashed into her (I was blindly following in the dark through deep sand- cut me some slack.) She quickly hushed us and explained the procedure for turtle tackling. The turtle didn’t lay any eggs but started back towards the sea. On Ana’s cue, we jumped the turtle and stopped it before it could get back to the water. When I say “turtle,” I’m not talking about garden variety little squirmers. This turtle was big enough to ride and probably about 3-4 feet from head to tail. Ana straddled it and checked it for a tag while we all oohed and ahhed and got in the way. When we were done scaring the poor turtle, we let her go and she quickly waddled her way back into the sea while we all watched in stunned silence.

Everybody who didn’t make the second round was quite jealous, of course, that we got to see a turtle. But still only about 7 others (plus me, following one stride behind Ana) decided to go for the third time around. By the time we hit round 4, I was the only one who still wanted to go and since we only had one boat, I lost. A little after midnight, we headed back for the island where we were all staying, significantly more exhausted (and with sorer calves) than when we started. After about 35 minutes on the boat, a really loud argument broke out among the tour company staff. I was tired and passed it off as everyone being tired and irritable. I didn’t bother to listen and figure out what the argument was about but 3 minutes later, the silent motor indicated that the problem was a complete lack of fuel on the boat. So, at one am, tired, wet, and a little cold, we’re floating in a small boat somewhere in an archipelago off the coast of Panamá with no fuel in our boat. Perfect. Luckily, they had the sense to drop anchor and somehow managed to call a friend. This friend was kind enough to come get us, but also had almost no fuel in his boat. He left the staff on the boat and took the rest of us back to a nearby island in hopes of getting fuel to get the first boat back safe as well. Lesson: boat gas stations on small islands have no real reason to be open at 1:30 in the morning. The friend finally dropped us off on the main island and I have no idea what happened to the first boat and the staff. Hopefully they survived… I got to bed around 2:30, just in time to wake up at 4:45 for my next bus: Panamá City!

Sure enough, a travel day later and I’m ready to go again. Here’s what I’ve been up to for the past week.

The originally planned end to my service trip included time in Barra Honda National Park. I was lucky enough for this to be my second time there, but, unlike the first time, I was there for a lot longer and felt a lot more prepared. Instead of 5 of us flooding the camp at the same time, I came up by myself last Wednesday. I felt myself getting more and more excited as we drove up the pitted road to the park entrance. When we arrived, I jumped out of the car and ran straight to the kitchen to say hi to everybody who was around. I gave Meicel a HUGE hug before running around looking for the other staff an volunteers I’d missed. I felt instantly comfortable again, like I was home, or at least somewhere I’d spent a reaaaally long time. After hello’s, Rich immediately put me to work clearing a trail. It was so wonderful to be back and working in the forest again with the terrific people I’d been missing.

Day 2, I was up for a bird walk at 5:30 with our terrific biologist, Eduardo. Luca (another volunteer) and I hiked through lots of mud and mosquitos to spot lots of local birds, both inside the park and out. After a delicious breakfast, courtesy of Meicel, Stephanie, Tiki (one of the staff) and I set about the surprisingly large task of cleaning our cabin. We emptied the entire room including matresses and attacked the whole place with hoses, scrub brushes, and no moderate amount of disinfectant. Stephanie and I, who were barefoot at the time, were less than thrilled to find a couple live scorpions (and some dead ones too) floating around in the swamp we were calling our room. After being thoroughly covered in soap and involuntarily sprayed down with the hose maaaany times, we were very proud to show off our clean room to our roommates who were considerably less impressed by our work than we were. After a very short afternoon nap, Luca and I were off on another investigation task: bat project. Even though it was drizzling (and later, raining) we still were able to set up the bat nets and collect a couple. All four that we caught came right at the beginning of our six hour shift and we spent the rest of the time laying in the mud under a tarp swatting at the mosquitoes that were trying to take refuge on our faces. At eleven pm, we finally called it quits and headed back to the camp, considerably wetter and more tired than when we started but happy that we’d gotten to collect a couple more bats.

Saturday was The Cabalgata. Not just any cabalgata. The Cabalgata. From the time I showed up in Barra Honda, it took about 5 minutes for every single person to tell me about The Cabalgata. It’s not everyday that something actually happens around here. Read: “Never.” We made a special trip to the closest town to get clothes for the day’s events and were already tired before the festivities even began. The Cabalgata took place in the village of Barra Honda (about 3 miles away from the park). All of the locals showed up on horses, dressed in lots of leather, jeans, and cowboy hats. With admission came all the food and drink you cared to partake of and we really enjoyed the meats and drinks that were provided for us. After everybody had said hi to everyone else in the very small village (even we knew some of the people), everyone mounted off and rode off to the next stop of The Cabalgata. This one was back in the woods (instead of in the village center). Those of us who weren’t lucky enough to be riding horses piled into SUVs and pickups and fishtailed our way through the mud and rain to join the riders. After almost 5 hours of this fun, we headed back to the village and waited in the city center for the evening’s festivities to begin. Around 9 pm, after all the riders had washed off their thick coat of mud and put up their horses, The Dance began. The live band played a selection of almost exclusively cumbia (the most popular dance here in Costa Rica which I, coincidentally, am really not at all good at) for four straight hours. We occassionally got a salsa, merengue, reggaeton, bolero, or bachata song, but I could die happy without ever hearing another cumbia. Nonetheless, I had an amazing time dancing the entire night with different guys from the park and the local community. Definitely a highlight in every sense.

Monday was a crazy day in camp. What felt like thousands of volunteers showed up at the same time and the prep work had everybody a little on edge. The sudden influx brought the total up to 20 volunteers, more than comfortable capacity for the facilities. I spent the afternoon constructing beds in a spare classroom for extra volunteers and then trying to find sheets for all of them. The dynamic of the whole group changed with the sudden appearance of a whole group who knew nothing about where they were or what they were doing there.

Monday also marked the second 4th of July I’ve spent outside of the US. But unlike last year, I actually got to celebrate with other Americans. Our group demographics also meant I was celebrating with more Englishmen than Americans, but so be it. Everyone drank to “Mur-cah” and we called it a night. Y’know, work to do in the morning!

My second to last day was the greatest as far as work: mixing concrete and breaking rocks. You think I say that sarcastically, but I really had an amazing time. I’ve never gotten to lay concrete before and it was fun to work with our group to haul over gravel, bigger gravel, sand, and concrete and then to mix it all up with a shovel. I think for me part of the significance was the permanence of what I was doing. That concrete will long outlast the time I could spend in Barra Honda and, if I ever come back, I can point to it and say “I helped build that!” Rock breaking was kind of the opposite. There’s a waterfall that hasn’t started running yet this season. While it’s still dry, we’re trying to dig out a pool underneath for future volunteers. Unfortunately, some rather large boulders were laying there impeding progress. I had the afternoon off so I went out with three of the guys to see what we could get done. We took turns digging around for a little while before setting in with the sledgehammers. There were a couple mutters of “Don’t worry about it, you’re a girl. We’ve got it.” that gave me extra determination to see what I could get done. When the guys had unsuccessfully worn themselves out, I jumped down in the whole and began patiently working around the rock with the shovel, trying to roll it over where they couldn’t. Sure enough, it was patience not force that won the battle and I managed to do what they couldn’t and got the rock to a more “vulnerable” face. The guys went back in with the sledgehammers and only one of them managed to lop off anything more than chips. I whined about “Guys getting to have all the fun” until they finally gave me a hammer and sat back to watch. Turns out, I’m not so bad with a sledgehammer. Much to their chagrin, I whacked off huge chunks, more than two of the other guys combined. The walk back to camp included a very happy, endorphin filled Megan and a little bit of blood dripping from all of us courtesy of the flying rock shards. Success indeed! My night assignment was a night walk with Luca, Stephanie, Eduardo, and another volunteer. We walked around in the forest in the dark for almost three hours, finding all sorts of strange insects, spiders, frogs and the like. We even managed to walk down huge dry waterfalls under Eduardo’s knowledgeable guidance.

My last morning, I got to go on the butterfly collecting trip. A not-too-strenous hike took us past the 12 traps that the previous day’s group had put up. Each net had to be taken down and each butterful carefully grabbed to figure out what kind it was. I absolutely loved getting to take the butterflys out. Each time I put my hand it, there was amad flutter of wings beating around my hand until I could finally carefully get my hand around one to pull it out. Eduardo wrote down the species of each butterfly we extracted before we let it go. The constant struggle of the butterflies left us all with a coat of butterfly dust of all colors on our hands. Metalic blue, brown, white, yellow, grey, and black specks like a fine glitter all over.

Basically work this week was a ton of physical labor and terrific investigation activities. I spent hours raking, digging holes and ditches, cleaning, and mowing. But I also played with frogs, bats, butterflies, and birds. Another amazing week. I think part of the reason that it’s so easy to get attached to the people of Barra Honda is the group’s productivity. Not only are we living together, but we also accomplish big physical tasks together. I’m not sure why, but that seems to really bond people. Multiply that by countless hours spent hanging out and a lack of cell phones or internet and you end up with a lot of people you’ve gotten really close to in an extremely short period of time. Leaving this time was even harder than last time. I hope someday I can go back again to be with the amazing people I’ve met in Barra Honda and spend even more time in the park. For now, it’s on to Panama!

I don’t have time for a real post at the moment, but I’m currently safe and sound in San Jose, Costa Rica. I left Barra Honda National Park this morning (yes, I cried) and am on my way to Bocas del Toro, Panama tomorrow morning. I promise I’ll blog about what’s been going on soon, but right now, it’s way past my bedtime and it’s been a long, emotional day. Barra Honda was absolutely incredible (again). A brief preview of blog posts to come: bat pedicures, concrete mixing, scorpions, waterfalls, and awkwardly amusing Spanish snaufus. Emotionally, right now, I’m sad about leaving and bummed that I’m not going home. Basically, exactly where I expected to be right now: tired and homesick. Once I switch into travel mode in the next day or two, I should be fine. Lots of fun adventures to come!!

If you know much about Costa Rica, then you know that the country is most frequently associated with the phrase Pura Vida. Literally translated, it means “pure life” and it describes so much about the atmosphere here. It’s a totally legitimate response to the question “How are you?” and even an adjective to describe people.  It can be a greeting, a farewell, or anything in between.

To live pura vida is something that the Ticos seem to have grasped and are embracing to it’s fullest. At first, I thought it was only a phrase for tourists- something to put on t-shirts and mugs and for hotel owners to say when you walk in. I felt like the whole “pura vida” idea was just an act, an elaborate show put on for foreigners. But the more I listened, the more I heard the phrase spoken between locals all the time and saw what it looks like to live out pura vida.

Costa Rica isn’t the kind of place you come to experience the “culture.” It doesn’t have the super clear cultural distinctions that you might find in exploring somewhere more “exotic.” But I think that most Ticos (Costa Ricans) would describe their own culture as pura vida. Pura vida signifies full of life, things are going great, all is well. Think “hakuna matata.” It’s the laidback appreciation for everything that’s passing around you. Running on a clock that’s a lot slower than that of the United States lets you actually enjoy life instead of packing it as full as we love to do.  Instead of running a million miles a minute, Ticos have a better idea of what it means to enjoy the smaller (and bigger) things and revel simply in existence. There’s a certain sense of peace and contentment that comes with being happy where you are. Not constantly striving to get out of a situation or living in discontent. Giving thanks in all circumstances. I think we could all use a little more pura vida.