If you swear in the forest and there are people to hear it...

We're onto week three and we've had our second weekend of free time. I'll quickly cover the week day business.

This whole working Monday to Friday 9-5 is weird! While we may not be 'working' we're actually quite busy! We wake up and have breakfast with the Tico family, then walk down to Maximo for Spanish classes with La Professora Anna. We spend two hours in class, then head down to our usual cupcake meeting. After that Hayley and I would jump on a bus for an hour trip each way to our project, finish around 5 for the return to Maximo, pick up some of our Tico family then head home. While it doesn't sound like much it's really made me appreciate the weekend!

This brings me to the new business! Adventure time! 

So this weekend which just passed we decided to do a little adventuring while some of our Tico family were living it up USA style at an all inclusive resort with yes, other Americans (Nimit you're still cool don't worry).

Saturday morning we grabbed the shuttle and heading around an hour South East of San Jose, outside of a town called Cartargo to go white water rafting. After around 10 minutes of safety instructions in broken english (arm waving and laughing gets the point across right..right..) we jumped in! I've never been rafting before so the technique of shoving your foot as far under the set in front of you as possible was refined as much as possible before the first rapid.

Cries of right side forward, left side backwads, adelante, backwards, all in and "OH MY GAWD" from the back of the boat, the occasional spanish phrases made the morning very interesing.

I've uploaded the photos to facebook so if you're a friend jump on and check it out.

After our little rafting session they provided us with lunch, a traitional lunch plate called a casado (a mixture of gallo pinto-rice and beans with chicken and salad with your own addition of hot sauce) with a fantastic juice which I feel like they picked the ingredients at random. After we'd finished lunch it was back on the bus to zip lining!

For those that have never heard of zip lining (for god sake what's wrong with you, I recommend you try spending time outside of your house) it's basically being put into a harness, attached to a cable then 'flying' through the air from point to point. This reliance on gravity general requires you to start somewhere high and zip line down. There's only one problem with this concept, the bus only takes you half way up the mountain!

Our group consisted of four members of the Tico family, a group of 3 volunteers (one of which will be refered to as the Columban douchebag or CDB) and a mum, dad and little girl. Half way up the trek one of the other vlunteers starts huffing and slowing the group down. The nice people that we are decided rather than help him up the hill we'd over take him and step up the pace. After around 15min of walking we get to the top and start gearing up.

After yet another safety briefing in broken english (this one was a little better), the main points turned out to be;

1. You have to break yourself
2. Don't put your hand in front of the 'pully'
3. Don't fall off the mountain

We ended up trying 14 different cables ranging in length from "why even bother" to "where the hell is the other platform?!" The views were pretty impressive from surrounded by jungle to jungle 20-30m below you and a view of the surrounding cities. I'd recommend the adventure to pretty much every body.

There was a little surprise about 2/3 of the way through, we all ziplined to a platform basically made out of wire and suspended in an enourmous tree (you could peer down to what could be your death). After some of us may have decided to 'bounce' a little at the direction of the guide (much to the dislike of one girl) the guides hooked us up one by one and belayed us to the ground. It was a tranquil slow ride to the ground, allowing you to view the surrounding canopy and trees. Unfortunately for me I was the last of our group and unknown to me my 'friends' had been in discussions with the guide at the bottom of the tree. I guess the video says more than I could type...

We boarded the bus soon after this and headed home. Sunday was a little more sedate exploring a nearby town called Cartago. I wont write a blog post about Cartago except that it used to be the capital city however due to volcanic earthquakes regularly anihilating the place they decided to move the capital (good idea).

Take care guys.

-Stew

Tres Semana

Hola amigos!

This is my first entry in Stew's blogging experiment, so sorry if my writing isn't as entertaining as his! It's the start of week 3 here in Costa Rica. It's been a busy few weeks, this whole 9-5 workday thing is really helping me understand why non shiftworkers go nuts on a Friday - the weekend rules!

This weekend just gone, we (and 2 of the girls in our "family") decided to try the ultimate Costa Rican tourist attraction - Zip Lining! The verdict is...it's awesome. We also threw in some white water rafting, just cause we're badass ;) I've put a video of it on facebook, and I believe Stew is uploading some photos as I type.

Back to Work...

Today we started at the volunteer project we will be on for the next 6 weeks (6 weeks of free work? This seems familiar somehow...). It's a private ambulance company based here in San Jose called "TrasMedic". The last 2 weeks at the hospice for AIDS patients was eye opening and challenging, but I'm not going to lie - I'm excited to be back on an ambulance! The language barrier is difficult, but the crews seem really nice and the work is exactly the same, albeit the equipment a little more dated and the protocols a little less rigid!

I'll report back once we have more stories.

H

Dos semana

It's late...again but here goes.
We're into week 2 of our Central America journey and it's been surprisingly busy so I'll try to give you a run down of whats been happening.

Our host family is now complete, our Tico mum (or Mama Tico) is Denia. A very animated motherly come crazy woman. The things you shouldn't be learning in a Spanish class we learn from Denia (eg: puta). By Tuesday night last week all the volunteers had arrived including the two Australians, a Canadian and three Americans (a couple and a solo traveller). The dynamic of the house is pretty chill and we all get along. Four of us (excluding the couple) all walk to the same Spanish class in the morning, then have lunch and disapear to our respective projects.

Spanish class is taught by yet another crazy Tico Anna who's ability to teach to a room full of english speakers in only Spanish impresses me! We've got four weeks of her making random noises to get the point across so time will tell (like I need a reason to make random noise).

Our project is around 40 minutes away on the bus just outside another town called Cartago. Our project is a 'hospice' for people with HIV/AIDs and various other developmental/mental problems. There are two patients who I'd deem as requiring active care but we smash through what we need to do in less than half the time we're there (think we should slow to tico time). The other residents may have AIDs however they're permitted to leave the hospice basically whenever they want with some exceptions. There are a few residents who have drug/stealing pasts and we've been told to keep an eye on them if we go out with them (they're mostly gone by the time we arrive anyway).

There's talk about our project being changed to actual work on an ambulance service (stay tuned).

FINALLY the fin de semana (weekend)! A big group (the family and more volunteers) around 16 of us left Friday for Manuel Antonio. It's a national park on the beach around 2-4hrs (depending on the driver) away on the Pacific coast. The drive out was near death experience after experience but we made good time.
The main public beach is okay, surf able waves (albeit small waves) and black volcanic sand mixed with rocks however the beaches inside the national park are more reminiscent of home. Only thing that really differs from some of our tropical beaches is that we don't have monkeys foraging through your stuff! We've got a couple of pictures of a baby monkey playing in a tree with some body's t-shirt (I'll work out how to upload more than one photo at a time from my iPad soon).

That's basically our week in general detail. Almost time for another weekend with zip lining and rafting planned for Saturday (Sabado) but it's time to catch the bus!

-Stew
Google pictures of Manuel Antonio

Little late..

It's our second night in Costa Rica so I feel like I'm starting this late but this little travel diary is a little tedious given today's technology!

For a quick introduction my wonderful girlfriend (oh god we're one of THOSE couples) Hayley and I decided to fly from Australia to the small Central American country of Costa Rica to learn Spanish and volunteer. Prior to this we spent around 3 weeks traveling through the USA. We made it to Las Vegas, Houston Texas, New Orleans Louisiana (think we were both suitable impressed), skipped back to the west coast to San Francisco then drove down the Californian coast to Los Angeles. In LA we boarded our aircraft and are now in my first non English speaking country!

Now you've mostly been introduced to our little jaunt we can talk about what happening! This is our second night in country at our host family's house following our first contact day with the Maximo Nivel staff. So far so good.

Tomorrow will be our first day of Spanish classes and first day at our project however time to try to catch up on some more missed USA sleep. Remind me to tell you the one about our host mother and surprise gay sex. Updates to come!

-Stew