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