Monteverde Weekend

Friday we left after lunch and took a bus to Monteverde. If you looked this up on a map, you may have thought this would be a quick trip. However, you're mistaken. LONGEST bus ride EVER. The road system is not the best here and a majority of the trip was spent on windy gravel roads where one side was looking straight over a cliff and the other was the side of the mountai

n. Not really that fun, BUT being in Monteverde was a blast. This was a view from our hotel and I thought it was really funny that there were cows literally right next to us, so of course I took a picture of Bessie here. :)

Friday night we didn't really do anything, just kind of got to know the kids in the program from San Jose and sat by the pool. There were sooo many of us from A&M so it was neat just to get to sit and chat with them. It's really funny and strange trying to tell the other students about A&M and getting them to understand why we all just kind of go together all the time. Side note: on Saturday evening, John and I were talking to some girls and ending up, of course talking about A&M. This one girl was from New Jersey and didn't have a clue about anything, so I pretty much gave a mini-speaking engagement to her and two girls from Oklahoma. That was pretty fun, gotta admit. I think after that, they were just kind of like, sooo, you have school spirit. And I said "Aggie spirit, yep" :)
Anyway so Saturday we got up and did some cool stuff in the forest. I went ziplining through the canopy and it was FANTASTIC. It wasn't really scary so much as it was just breathtaking to be so high up and flying through the trees on these steel cables. Probably the scariest thing we did was a Tarzan swing where the guides kind of just push you off of a big tower and you swing ridiculously high and far over the trees. A bunch of people got some good pictures of this, but I brought a disposable just in case something happened, so I don't know how mine turned out yet. The rest of the day was just free for whatever, so Saturday night a bunch of us went to a bar in town called Amigos and danced. So fun. A couple of people knew how to salsa, so just a bunch of us American kids took over the dance floor and salsa'ed and did the Soulja boy and all kinds of stuff. At one point though, I was dancing with John and we just kind of gave up and started two-stepping to some really fast latino music. It was such a blast though. And, then one of the best parts with the best pictures (although, of course I don't have any--I'll get them, I promise) was sunday we went hiking through the forest on our own and just got to take whatever paths we wanted. It was really cool under all the foliage and we saw some beautiful plants and some real weird caterpillars. After our hike, we packed up and headed back and I think pretty much everyone crashed out real early last night.
None of us in our class know how our teacher is grading. Every day is mas practica, and I guess that's cool, but we dont have any actual grades yet. Tomorrow we're all going on a field trip to INBio Parque, and since it's going to take a long time, we get Wednesday off. Not really sure what we're going to do yet, but I'd either like to go white water rafting or go into San Jose maybe and check that out. We'll decide tomorrow.
I think now is the biggest storm we've had since we've been here and definitely the loudest thunder I've heard in a long while. Our host mom is actually really scared of storms and just came up here to make sure we were ok. She's so nice to us, I can't even explain.
Well, I guess happy Memorial Day to all of you who get to celebrate it, and I'll catch ya on the flip side. :)