First, they made us watch a lame video, but they soon made up for it by letting us taste the three different types of roasts. They are: claro, medio, y oscuro, otherwise known as light, medium, and dark. In my opinion, the medium roast was the best, but hey, that’s just me. Then they forced us all to wear hard hats, so of course we had to take lots of pictures of everyone looking like fools. Once we calmed down, they took us through the factory (if you could call it that, it was open-air) and showed us the whole process. It basically goes like this:

First, the beans are separated into three different levels of quality. This is done by filling massive vats of coffee beans with water. The best beans sink to the bottom, and the worst ones rise to the top. I gathered that this process is repeated multiple times. Second, the beans are dried. There are two different ways of doing this: sun drying, and machine drying. The sun-dried beans are of a better quality than the machine dried ones. It takes well over 100 days to sun dry beans properly, so this can only be done for half the year as it rains almost every day during the other half of the year. The machine drying process only takes 24 or so hours to do, so you can bet that most of the time you’re drinking machine-dried coffee. After that, they roast the beans in a big cylinder. It takes approximately 17-20 minutes for lightly roasted beans, 25 minutes for a medium roast, and 30 minutes for a darker roast. Then all the beans flow out of the toaster, where they are moved around in circles by a cool looking machine in order to cool. After that, the beans are either ground and packaged, or just packaged, and then shipped.

After the tour, they gave us the most delicious cold coffee drink I’ve ever tasted! I had 4 cups, and then I got the recipe. It is as follows:

2 cups milk
1-2 tsp. sugar
1-2 oz. espresso
1-2 oz. flavored syrup (they used mint, yum!)
and a little bit of ice cream

Mix ingredients together and blend! It’s REALLY good, I promise.

The entrance fee for extrañeros, or foreigners, is $7 for the day. This gives you access to multiple beautiful costal trails and three pristine white-sand beaches. My friend and I opted to take the Sendero Punta Catedral, which is a beautiful trail through forest and along rocky cliffs overlooking the ocean. There were plenty of look-out points, and all of them were gorgeous.

We stayed in Albergue Costa Linda, which is a youth hostel set behind the public beach Playa Espadilla. The rooms were nice enough, and we got a free spaghetti dinner on Saturday night. I think I want to go to the Caribbean next.

We actually didn´t see anything at all of note because a giant cloud had descended on the top, rendering our trip completely pointless. The trails were less than exciting, consisting of short paved loops through forest that left even my young knees in pain. We covered the whole park in about an hour, leaving us with with two more hours to kill until the bus left again. So yeah, that was about it. If you go, check the weather first and figure out a way to get there earlier than the 8:30 bus, that way you can see something besides thick fog.

Case in point, I spent the weekend relaxing on the most beautiful beach I’ve ever seen!

Manuel Antonio lies around the middle of the Pacific Coast, just outside of the town of Quepos. We passed the weekend on the public beach, Playa Espadilla Norte, or North Espadilla Beach. Playa Espadilla Norte lies just outside of Parque Nacional Manuel Antonio, which features a forested reserve and more pristine beaches. We decided to hold off a visit to the park until another weekend when we could devote an entire day to exploring its trails, beaches, and lookouts.

Getting there was relatively easy compared to getting to Dominical. We were lucky enough to get the last seats on the direct bus to Quepos from San José, which shaved about 2 hours off of an otherwise 5 and a half hour long trip. This bus only leaves twice a day, so be sure to check the schedules and buy your tickets the day before or you will be left to take the longer ride on the other bus. This bus first stops in Quepos and then continues along to Manuel Antonio, which is about half an hour past Quepos. Once you’re in Manuel Antonio, there is a bus which runs to Quepos every 20 minutes, making an afternoon of shopping quick and easy.

For those of you who are interested, Costa Rica’s only official nude beach lies just north of Playa Espadilla Norte. It is inaccessible an hour before or after high tide, so make sure to plan accordingly. It lies on the other side of some nasty looking rocks, so take some shoes. It is also frequented mostly by gay men, and so is recommended only for the open-minded.

My friends and I stuck to Playa Espadilla for the entire weekend, which was more than beautiful enough to hold our fascination. Since it faces the Pacific, we saw spectacular sunsets over the horizon each evening. There are plenty of open-air restaurants near the shore, and if you pick the right table you can watch the sunset over a plate of delicious fresh-caught fish. Manuel Antonio is an expensive area relative to the rest of Costa Rica, so don’t expect to find the afore-mentioned $1.50 pinto deal.

My favorite detail about the beaches of Costa Rica is that the Ticos don’t play beach volleyball- they play beach soccer! Bring a ball or a frisbee if you come to visit.

For the most part, I can understand the general gist of what my professors are saying, but I lose a lot of the finer details. For example, I’m aware that I need to write a paper for my Ecodevelopment class on evolution next week, but I’m really not sure how long it has to be and whether or not we’re expected to cite a lot of sources. I also generally understand that while my professor seems to support evolution, a large majority of the students don’t, although I couldn’t understand their reasons. I know a lot of people here are Catholic, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t hear anyone cite the bible.

This brings me to my second point, which is that while I can generally get the gist of what the professors say, I can’t understand anything my fellow students say. If they stop and make a special effort for me, I can get it, but if not, I may as well be asleep. I’m not exactly sure why this is, maybe my professors use more educated language while the students rely more on slang. Maybe not. I know for sure no one taught me how to say, “cool,” “that sucks,” or even the seemingly simple, “stuff” in my university Spanish classes. Don’t even get me started on the up-to-the-minute slang. I’m generally limited to lame phrases such as, “How good,” or, “that’s bad,” “He’s not very nice, is he?” I do know that “mai” means, “dude.” Great! Now I can say, “Dude, that cabbie was not very courteous,” instead of the more accurate, “Dude, that guy was a frickin’ (BAD WORD EDITED), where does he get off saying stuff like that?!?” What I need to learn how to say is, “kiss my butt mai!”

Before I left the States, everyone told me I´d be eating Gallo Pinto until I left. That is not the case. I´ve only had it twice since I got here, and both times were at my request. Instead of yummy flavorful Gallo Pinto, I get white rice with every meal. This is what I had yesterday, it should offer a good idea of what my usual daily menu is like:

Breakfast (same thing every day):
Strange looking white bread with stranger looking yellow maragerine,
Strange looking white cheese, (it´s actually good, I´m just tired of it)
and an under-ripe orange. (Today, it was a crunchy peach. I´m not exaggering at all, it was crisp)

Lunch:
Sliced hot dog cooked in ketchup, (just to add a side note, the ketchup here is more like sugary paste than ketchup)
White rice with a single slice of red bell pepper,
and cooked plantains. (ok, cooked plantains are really good)

Dinner:
White rice with tuna in it.

Now this is not to say that Costa Rican food is bad. On the contrary, many of my companions daily describe glorious sounding meals. The rest complain that they have to eat Pinto all the time. To this I say, give me Gallo Pinto any day. At least the rice isn´t white!

Let me just preface this by saying we had absolutely no reason to choose Domincal over any of the other beautiful and closer beaches. It was a random decision made by a random group member that everyone blindly followed. So in retribution for allowing ourselves to be herded like cows by an inexperienced shepherd, we had to endure hours of cramped standing in a bus that was winding through hills over roads that were often bumpy and unpaved. Of course once we arrived, we learned that there was a quicker and easier route through a different city that would have allowed us to sleep in until the comparatively late hour of 6 am.

Once we arrived, we were able to secure rooms in a hostel for what began as $5/per night and wound up being $8/night (This of course actually excluded me, because I slept in my handy dandy Hennessy hammock in the tent area for much less). They offered outdoor bathrooms, showers, and a moderately equipped kitchen, but no hot water.

It was one of our friends’ 21st birthdays, so of course it was required that we all take shots with him. No one even thought to bring shot glasses, so we took turns passing around a giant cooking ladle. It definitely added to the fun.

The beach was beautiful. It is a black sand beach, with relatively big waves (for the U.S. anyway, I can’t compare to other Costa Rican beaches yet). I still haven’t learned to surf, but I think that may be my next fun project. We went body boarding, which was still a lot of fun, but tiring. The rip tide was pretty strong, so I would only recommend it for strong swimmers.

My big adventure of the weekend was to attempt to acquire and cook enough food to feed 21 people. My friend Adam and I had heard of a fish market close by, so we decided it would be a fun trip to walk there and get fresh fish and maybe stop at a fruit market along the way. As it turns out, “close by” and “fish market” are relative terms.

We proceeded to walk 6 kilometers (approx. 3.5 miles) along the highway with the sun beating down on our backs until we found a sign for the fish market. The fish market, it turned out, was the house of a local fisherman. He had a little freezer half filled with one kind of fish. I asked him what they were called, but I couldn’t understand him so I just smiled and nodded. They were pretty large fish, with big ol´ dead eyes staring us in the face. He handed us the massive fish whole, and which point we were obligated to beseech him to filet them for us, as neither of us had a knife or the know-how to do it ourselves.

We prepared ourselves for the return trek, and headed off. We wondered if we could have bargained with him a little more over the price, and then proceeded to feel a little guilty about this as it was pretty cheap compared to U.S. fish and he obviously had more need for the money than us. Along the way, we stopped to pick of a BUNCH of fruits and veggies for dinner, and by the time we got back we were beat. Luckily, we returned to people who were willing to cook it all for us, so we finally got to rest. I still have battle scars on my feet to attest to the long and gruelling 7-mile hike Adam and I took so we could all eat like kings.

Hands down, the best part about San José is its little mercados, or markets. The first market we visited was Mercado Central, and it was teeming with Tico farmers and bustling buyers. Everywhere you looked, you could find exotic little fruits and strange looking vegetables. A big hit with my group were these little citrus fruits called granadillas. They look like ovular orangish-green oranges on the outside, but are filled with grayish purple seed sacks. You eat the sacks and the seeds together which is a very messy, and therefore fun, affair.

The next market we visited was the Mercado Artesania, which has plenty of artesian trinkets and tidbits. There is plenty of jewellery, clothes, and statues made of exotic Costa Rican woods. I found a spectacular sari of a light linen-type material for under $5. Most of the prices at the market were reasonable, but if I overheard correctly I was getting a more reasonable price than many gringos since I was speaking in Spanish.

The last thing we did was tour the historic and beautiful National Theater of Costa Rica. Our guide gave the tour in both Spanish and English at the same time, which meant we got to hear the same bad rehearsed jokes twice. That aside, the trip was well worth taking since there is some simply breath-taking architecture and artwork inside the theater. The theater, which was officially inaugurated on October 21, 1897, features an elegant Italian Renaissance façade. It houses some fabulous sculptures and paintings, also done in the Renaissance style. So if you enjoy touring beautiful historic buildings, the National Theater of Costa Rica is worth checking out.

Well, when I looked up from taking my last picture, I suddenly realized I couldn’t see my group anywhere. So I kept on walking down the road, picking up my pace a little bit, hoping to see them around the bend. No such luck. I looked for boot tracks of my companions in the mud, but when I couldn’t see them, I started to get a little worried.

All of a sudden, out comes riding a real live Tico horseman on his shining stallion. He was one of my guides from earlier in the day, and luckily he recognized me. He asked, “Donde va?” or “where are you going?” and I had to admit that I was lost and really didn’t have a clue. He introduced himself as Raul, and swept me up onto his horse with him and returned me safely to my group.

I had walked way past my group, which had turned off without me knowing it. We trotted up to where my group was eating lunch, and of course everyone started cat calling at the silly gringa riding up on horseback. I thanked the gentleman for saving me in my time of need, and sat down to eat another plate of rice and beans.