As the month of Oct came to a close I thought of all that happened since my last post. I will start with our weekend at the Arinal Volcano. It was our first weekend away with the other students. There is something planned about every other weekend but this is the first we have participated for various reasons. We began our 4 hour bus ride and after about 2-1/2 hours stopped to eat our sack lunches at a rest stop filled with Iguanas. Most of them were full grown and freely roaming the area. For those of you that are not familiar with them, I would compare them to a cross between a lizard and a dinosaur.
We then loaded back up and enjoyed a great time there from Saturday mid afternoon until Monday after lunch. The volcano has now been inactive now for (it depends on who you ask) somewhere between a couple of months and 2 years. Of course the local shops say that it is still active, you just need to hang around a while to see it "blow" Ha! I guess it is not a lot different than our tourist spots in the States.
Our next adventure was when Marcy, Janae and I joined a few other students to climb "Tres Cruz Mountain". We started out an elevation of 4200 ft and ended up at 6800, so just over 1500' increase. It was about a 1-3/4 mile hike up so a fairly good grade. The descent was another story. We went back down about 1300 of that elevation in 2000'of distance.
So a little less than a 45° drop. That proved interesting on a slightly slippery grass covered hill with a barb wire fence at the bottom and a river on the other side of the fence. Everyone survived but the guide mentioned that maybe she should find an alternative route for coming back down. There was a great view from the top though. It was well worth the couple of scratches that we got.
My last adventure that I had was just this past Saturday when I put my bike to use a little more than I had yet. I had heard of a town called Cartago that was supposed to be a nice place to visit so I took off right after getting the produce at the ferria. It really was a nice ride. About 25 miles one way and mostly uphill, it was about 5000 ft elevation with a high point along the way of 5,300 ft. It felt good to get out and ride some distance again. All but the first 2 miles was ridden on the Pan American Highway. It runs from Argentina to Alaska and in the US is referred to I-5. I will need to take my camera along the next time as it also had some fantastic views of God's workmanship.
School continues to go good and as we go into the community, it feels like we can continue to use it more and more. I am sure that we sound like a toddler speaking but I guess that is better than not at all at this point. Interesting to see how people react to our attempt to speak Spanish. Some are very helpful at correcting you very politely, others will just ignore you. Then some will let you struggle and drag on for 5 or ten minutes trying to understand and finally say "I do speak English if that helps at all" :) . One last thing was a culture experience that I had this past weekend at a local "Big Lots" sort of store. It was very busy and crowded and as I waited my place in line with maybe 8-10 people behind me, I notice that the three ladies in front of me were receiving items from other people that would just walk up between the lines. After this happened maybe 5-6 times I realized that along with the item, they would be handing them cash to pay for it. Ha! It didn't seem to bother anyone behind me so I figured it was just part of the way things happen here. Then, just as it was my turn to start putting my items on the belt, another person showed up on the far end of my checkout lane with a full cart and begin to unload their items and the cashier started to ring them up in reverse, and the customer had a bunch of plastic bags that she laid on top of my items and proceeded to bag her things up. :). I wish I would have had a video of that. Again, it didn't seem to bother anyone behind me so I just waited until they were done, and then I ask the cashier "más?" her reply of "no más" was good enough for me to begin my things. It really was quite comical when you think about it.
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