My REAL birthday was quite uneventful but relaxing. Which is just the way I like it. My favorite presents were (not in any particular order):
· No Spanish class on Monday! Thus I had the entire afternoon off to talk to people over Skype and just relax.
· B-Day cakes, two brought in during lunch with a lot of candles to blow out. At what age do you stop putting the total number of candles on the cake?
· Birthday blessing by the priest during Sunday Mass, in Spanish of course.
· Receiving the Native Plant garden design internship! This is the one I was waiting for, and hoping to get here in Monteverde.
· Met my Tico brother (18) who came to visit me from San Jose where he is studying to be an Architect.
· Just time to relax and get to know other students instead of working on homework.
It was a good birthday.
The rest of the week was kind of a blur though because I had a bunch of classes, taking the entire day, and covering very similar concepts, or at least coming to the same conclusions. Everything points to the fact that we as human beings have been irresponsible with the natural resources of our planet Earth. I do like one of the analogies though: the Earth is our bank account. It always accrues interest in our favor, by capturing energy from the sun, changing our Carbon Dioxide to Oxygen, cleaning our water and such. The problem is that we usually ask for more than what is being produced by this interest, thus going into our capital investments. We are overspending and draining the account. So either we need to learn how to increase the investment process (in a safe way) or learn to live within our means, and within the Earth’s means. I think we can do this, how about you?
We only have one of these... let use it wisely.
I really like the book Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the way we make things by William McDonough and Michael Braungaurt. It talks about this idea of completely rethinking, redesigning, and remaking our society and how it works in a sustainable way. It is an easy, interesting read for anyone (they put things in very simple terms). Check it out, or at least hold the book in your hands at some point and tell me what you think of it. You will see what I mean.
Wednesday was Tracy’s birthday, so we got more cake again. Very good cake too. Also on Wednesday we were introduced to the field trip that we are leaving for on Sunday February 28th. Let’s just say my toe-ed feet were getting pretty excited at hearing about all these details. Parts of the fieldtrip include but are not limited to (because I don’t want to spoil it for you): a visit to a seaside swamp where trees grow out of the water, walks on the beach looking at particular native marine fauna (animals), and a visit/climbing of one of the three large objects located in Lake Nicaragua. Now these are not riddles because I am not crafty enough to make those, but if you do a little research and thinking you may figure out where I am going before I actually blog about it. Speaking of blogging, I hope you all have a lot of homework to do for the next two weeks, because I will most likely not be able to post blogs for you to read for that time period, since I will be traveling to very remote areas of Costa Rica. You can go back and reread the past blogs though for the final cumulative exam though if you like. Just kidding.
Another notable event includes coming face to face with a tarantula! Yes I not officially have seen one. My Tica mother brought it back with her from my Tica grandmother’s farm in the San Louis valley. Look at the beautiful coloration on the legs!
Also, I am getting to know my five year old Tico nephew, Diego, much better. Now-a-days, we draw stuff together, or play with the flashlights that I brought and even shoot rubber bands around the house! Sorry Mom, I know I am being a bad influence, but my Tica mother said it was alright. Diego is quite a Klingon (is this how you spell it?) so I get to throw him around a lot, since he is so light, and life him up to the rafters. He is hard to understand some times though because little children have a hard time comprehending that I cannot understand really fast talk, and they talk REALLY fast.
This was a surprising incident. I guess they don’t have “minimum height” signs here in Monteverde or anywhere in Central America for that matter. I watched this truck chug up the hill in front of our study center and clip the power/phone lines that were hanging down just a tad too low, thus yanking them and their pole to a breaking point. Yes, they did snap and fly everywhere, luckily no one was injured, thanks be to God alone. It could have been much worse. It took out the phone communications for my home for two days until they got it fixed, hopefully hanging a bit higher this time. This event reminded me of the when the Quaker’s were trying to move up to Monteverde in the 50’s and kept getting stuck in the muddy rutted roads. It was big news back then when trucks came through all the way up to Monteverde. Now I guess what makes the front page news are incidents like these with headlines like “Truck stops traffic for 10 minutes!” Seriously, this is on the only road through Monteverde. It was a big deal. Ok maybe it sounds more like the classic traffic jam on a rural country road when two, slow tractors meet eat other, coming from different directions, which makes everyone else traveling 60+ mph nearly stop. Oh, how I miss some of the finer points of Iowa.
(OH, this even nearly happened three more times on Saturday from Noon-5pm, only with tour buses. Crazy drivers.)
Ok, so this may be a shorter blog and maybe that is a relief to you as readers. I promise my toes will have so much more to type about when I return from my field trip. Peace Be With all of You!
That is Ross...
Erin, this is your first bug picture... more to come.
Hundreds of Orchid Species... too many to take picture of.
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