Hammam!

Just a warning: This is about a public bath so it will include discussion of partial/full nudity.

ISA organized small group trips to the hammam for our first time, so my first time was with a group of about 5 girls along with Iman, our female ISA director.  We brought our shower supplies and towels, as well as mats, little water scoops, small plastic hair brush things, black soap (made from some part of olives), henna powder, spare underwear, and these little scrubby mitts.  Well, ok Iman brought most of that the first time but I now am in possession of all the hammam supplies!  We walk into the first room, which looks like a locker room, where a few women are laying or sitting down in their towels.  They are clearly done and are just hanging out, relaxing, before they get dressed to leave.  While Iman pays and gets us large buckets, we wonder if we are just supposed to start stripping here or not.  Tentatively, we start, and then a woman walks in and strips as fast as I have to during quick costume changes in dance shows!  This makes us more comfortable, so we strip down to our underwear (no bras), wrap up in our towels, and wait for Iman.  When we are all ready, we walk through a door into a steamy room that is mostly empty, and through to an even hotter and steamier room where there are women seated all around the walls, bathing.  There are two pipes running around the room, one blue for cold water and one red for hot, with little faucets every few feet.  We find a spot where most of us can fit, set down our mats, and start filling out buckets from the faucets.  We sit down and Iman tells us first to just use our scoops to pour warm water on ourselves.  After a few minutes of this, she mixes the black soap and henna powder with some water to make this green slime and tells us to rub it everywhere.  During this, another dancer in my group and I ask Iman if it is ok to take off our underwear since about half of the women in the room were not wearing any and it kind of got in the way.  She seemed surprised, but told us it was perfectly fine, she just never expected American girls to be comfortable with it.  We told her that as dancers and performers, sometimes you have to change in front of other people, so a lot of the time you just get more comfortable with it.  I know it seems weird from an American perspective, but bathing in underwear is just not that comfortable.  Note: Apparently full nudity does not fly in the male hammams.  After covering ourselves in the green slime (or as I like to call it, playing “swamp thing”), we rinse it off.  Iman then shows us how dead skin comes off in rolls if you rub a finger over your arm.  This next part was definitely the most different and memorable part of the hammam experience.  Two at a time, we go to the middle of the room with our mats and our scrubby mitts to where a couple almost naked women (just underwear like everyone else) are waiting to scrub us.  I lie down, and she takes some of the black soap and proceeds to scrub me cleaner than I have ever been in my life.  Without language, she has to point and prod and sometimes just grab me and move me where she wants me to be.  Almost every inch of me was scrubbed, and hard.  It even hurt sometimes, but I just tried to grit my teeth and bear it.  You can say “shwiya, shwiya” (one of our most used words meaning something like “a little”) to get them to lighten up, but I wanted to see what it was like to just let them do their thing.  After being scrubbed, we returned back to our corner to wash our hair and then use our own “nice” smelling soap before a final rinse off.  We used the little plastic brush things while washing our hair and I have actually started using the brush in the shower, too.  It makes it easier to rinse out all the shampoo or conditioner and makes my hair turn out smoother and less tangled.  After this, we walked back out to the locker room, sat for a little bit, got dressed, covered our hair (Moroccans believe wet hair is the quickest way to get sick so you have to cover your hair or they will cover it for you), and went home to relax.  I loved it so much, I have been back about every other week since :)

The Misadventures of Michelina

Sidenote: Michelina was in Ghana with a group from her school before she met up with ISA in Granada

I don’t even know where to begin with this other than at the beginning, a whole two days after getting to Meknes.  So, it was our first Friday in Meknes and Michelina was out buying a phone when she started feeling really tired and faint.  I was at home because there was company over, and when she got home, she told me she had to go to sleep, and she did.  Over the next couple days she slept almost non-stop.  She would get up every now and then to try and eat, eat a few bites of food, then have to lie down because she was dizzy, and then fall asleep.  Our host mom and dad thought it was just from all the traveling and was totally normal because just about every American who comes here gets sick at some point.  My red flags started going off sooner, but I figured I was just being paranoid.  The extremity of her fatigue, back pain, and the fact that she told me, “I think this is the most water I ever drank in my life but I haven’t peed in three days” all made me very uncomfortable, but as I said, I thought I was just being paranoid.  I always forget how accurate my gut feelings can be... Anyway, by Tuesday morning our host parents decided she needed to go to the hospital to get some blood tests done.  They tested her for malaria, which came back negative.  She slept in the hospital for a couple of nights before they found out that she had Leptospirosis on Thursday (I think).  This is a bacteria that attacks your kidneys (explains the back pain and lack of urination) that I had already heard of because there was an outbreak of it in Nicaragua while I was in Costa Rica.  Now that she was being treated, she started to get better.  However, when I visited her on Friday, she looked worse than I had seen her since she got sick.  She told me that she had malaria, too.  She had spiked a fever that was higher than the bacteria should have caused, so the doctors decided to do the malaria test again since it can take a while to become active and detectable, and found that she had the most dangerous strain of malaria.  If left untreated once symptoms develop, it can be fatal in just a few days, so it is a good thing she was already in the hospital!  Since she had been taking anti-malaria drugs and no one else on her trip got sick at all, my theory is that she ate something contaminated with the bacteria, which then messed up her immune system and her body’s processing of the malaria pills, thereby giving the malaria a chance to thrive.  Other people in her group may have gotten bitten by a mosquito with the strain of malaria, but they didn’t get the bacteria so their pills should have been working fine.  Anyway, after that, it was just a long road to recovery, with her staying in the hospital another week after the malaria was detected, and then being kind of weak after she was released.  One little bright side to all of this was that the insurance we have with ISA covers travel expenses for one family member to visit if a student is hospitalized for more than 24 hours (or gets a felony), so her mom came to Meknes to visit for a week.

Because I fail at real blogging…

Well, I was hoping to write real blog entries about my time in Morocco so far, but since I am clearly failing at that I will just list some of the highlights for now.  Hopefully I will eventually get to write full entries for some of the bigger things.  I have been keeping up a list of things to blog about eventually, so for the most part I will just post that, but I will flesh it out a little bit to make it more interesting than just a list.  Since I just wrote it as I thought of things to write about, it does not follow the most logical order, but I think I am going to stick with it.  My last post ended with my arrival in Meknes, so I am very far behind.  I will pick up now with the short version of my life since this point, and yes, I am aware of how long the short version is.  And now that I wrote it all, I am going to take out three things and give them their own posts so I apologize if there is any discontinuity because I don’t have time to read through and fix stuff.  On to the update:

-My family: I already mentioned a little about Majda, my host mom, and Mamoun, my 10 y/o (about to be 11) host brother.  Also in the home are Mustafa, my host dad, Amin, another host brother, and Amina and Aziza, the two girls who live here and cook and clean for the family.  Mustafa is a surgeon and Majda is a nurse, so they are the unofficial ISA medical team.  If I get sick, I am in good hands!  Amin is Mustafa’s son from a previous marriage.  He is much older than Mamoun, is blind, and is a music teacher.  He will also be getting married in April (to Majda’s sister) and Michelina and I get to dress up for the wedding!  Amina and Aziza are both around the same age as Michelina and me and are a lot of fun, even though we can barely communicate with them.  It was weird for Michelina to get used to having them here, but my family in Costa Rica had Rosa, and the dynamic of it there was kind of bad while here it is great, so I am happy about that.  Life at home can be kind of crazy, but I love it!  Mamoun has endless energy and there are always people over for tea and/or dinner.

-Getting lost and finding my way: Michelina and I got lost a few times in our first couple of days here, and then I got lost a few more times on my own after she got sick (more on that in a bit).  The streets here are not all in a grid like we are used to, so we got turned around a lot.  It also didn’t help that the ISA director who showed us all how to get home from school is new and didn’t know where the homestay was!  By now, I think I have the hang of it, but I am still not always sure exactly which way is the quickest to get somewhere, but at least I (usually) know where I am.  Of course, this only applies to the little part of our neighborhood and small bit of two others in Meknes.  My neighborhood is called the Ville Nouvelle or Hamria.  It is the new part of the city.  In contrast is the Medina, which is the old city.  Every big city in Morocco seems to have a European style Ville Nouvelle and an old Moroccan style Medina.  Nowadays, Medinas are mostly filled with shops selling things ranging from artisanal items to produce to meat.  The streets turn and wind all over the place, so I only know how to properly navigate a few parts of ours.  The other neighborhood I kind of know is Zitoun, which is where my university is located.

-Classes, Moulay Ismail University, grande taxis: While here, I am taking Beginning Arabic 1 and 2, two content classes (Three Religions, Three Peoples, and Peace and Conflict Resolution), as well as a short 5 week course on the local Moroccan Arabic dialect of Darija.  They are all interesting and I am enjoying them, even though there are the occasional misunderstandings and bumps in adapting Moroccan teaching styles to work with American students.  The university itself is very nice.  It is a small campus, especially compared to UCSD, but there are always students around so I often run into people I know there.  Also, students here will go to the campus to hang out even when they don’t have class.  Students who have already graduated will even come hang out on campus with their friends.  Lastly, the options to get to school include walking, busing, petit taxis, or grande taxis.  The walk is about 45 minutes and is along a big road so the air is very dusty.  Since I already have some issues from my allergies which hit me as strong as they do at home, I don’t walk very often due to the dirt in the air.  I took the bus once with my friend, Nita, and a Moroccan student who we met at the taxi stand.  There were no taxis and we were late so we took the bus through all sorts of parts of Mkenes that we had never seen.  It takes a while a costs more than the grande taxi though, so I haven’t done it again since.  Petit taxis work like our taxis, except they only hold 3 people and will sometimes pick up other people so that they have 3, but only if you are all going in the same direction.  Now, grande taxis.  They are all big Mercedes Benz cars that, by our standards, hold 5 people.  Here, they hold 7: the driver and 6 passengers.  They work kind of like shuttles, so they taxis wait in certain places and you find one going the route you want.  I take the one from Hamria (the neighborhood I live in) to Zitoun (the neighborhood where the university is).  The taxi waits until 6 people are crammed in and then starts driving to its destination.  However, you can ask the driver to stop anywhere along the way, and if there is room, you can flag one down and get in along the way too.  They took some getting used to, but now I just think they are very useful.

-Tour of Meknes: We drove and walked around, but I forgot to charge my camera before it so I didn’t get to take any pictures.  We saw a gate in the medina (old part of the city), the old grainery, the mausoleum, and some great views of Meknes.  I don’t have much to say about it because as interesting as it was then, the rest of Meknes that I actually live in is more interesting to me now :)

-Sounds guys make at girls on the streets: AKA street harassment, but honestly, nothing said to me here is as bad as the stuff I hear at home.  The theory behind this is that all good Moroccan girls are at home at night, so if a guy wants to hit on her, he has to do it during the day and on the streets because the good girls will not be in the bars or clubs at night.  Basically, imagine how guys act in bars and clubs at night and put them on the street during all hours.  However, most of what they say here is a lot nicer and more complementary than what they say at home.  Mostly I just get welcomed to Morocco and told how beautiful I am in multiple languages, with them hoping I’ll respond to one.  The only thing here is how much more persistent some of them can be, and how much more often it happens.  Sometimes we get followed for blocks or by cars, and I can’t walk more than 10 feet out of my house without guys making calls or saying things, but I have practice blocking them out from when it happens at home.  What I find amusing is that the guys here use the same sound as the guys in Costa Rica to get female attention: Psssst, psssst, pssst!

-Jedi robes: So, there are these things called jellabas that people here wear a lot.  They come in all sorts of colors and patterns, and both men and women wear them.  I even bought a fleece one to wear in the house because electricity in expensive so they don’t really use any sort of heaters.  Not only are the fleece ones super comfortable and warm, but they look like Jedi robes.  Actually, they all look like Jedi robes, just some look like fancy ones.  I still find myself secretly smiling at all the Jedi walking around Morocco :)

-Couscous and shirtless belly dancing, talking about taking a belly dance class with Majda and watching “Whatever Lola Wants”: Most families in Morocco eat couscous every Friday for lunch, including the apartments where the other ISA students live.  However, and I don’t know why this is, my family here doesn’t eat it every week, and not always on Friday when we do.  I wrote this particular one down because it was the first time we had couscous and it was on a Saturday.  Another of Mustapha’s sons came with his family, including his daughter, Selma, who was about 3 years old.  We also had a mini-belly dance party that included a moment when Majda pulled off her sweater revealing nothing but her bra underneath.  Being in a Muslim country where people are covered wrist to neck to ankle in public, this was very surprising for us!  However, once she realized that people in other buildings would be able to see into our apartment she put her sweater back on.  We then talked about (or thought we talked about) taking a dance class with Majda, but it turns out she just meant dancing in the house and taking a lesson from her.  These are VERY fun, but dance classes here are not very structured so Heather, a girl in my program who belly dances at home, has been teaching some more technical classes for us too.  We also watched the movie, “Whatever Lola Wants” which was fun because it is Majda’s favorite movie and it is about an American girl who goes to Egypt and learns to belly dance.  It also features a song from a musical I have been in :)

-Wedding, seeing the Riad in the Medina: So as I already mentioned, my host brother, Amin, will be getting married in April!  Today, Michelina and I bought takshidas (hope I remembered that right) for the wedding!  I don’t really know how to describe them right now, so you’ll just have to wait for pictures.  On my first Saturday here, the family went to see the Riad in the Medina where the wedding (or at least part of it because it didn’t seem big enough for a wedding) will be and I went with them.  A Riad is a traditional style Moroccan house.  They are very plain on the outside because in Islam you are not supposed to show signs of wealth.  This means that most of the buildings in the Medina all look the same on the outside, but then the insides can be amazingly beautiful and used as guest houses or event spaces like the one we saw.

-Squatty Potties and Bum Guns: This topic may one day get its own entry, but for now this will have to do.  If you don’t want to read a small description of my toilet adventures here, skip to the next part.  So I knew coming here that a lot of places outside of the big cities have squatty potties instead of “Western” style toilets, AKA a porcelain hole in the ground with grooved places for your feet.  Without going into details, I will just say that I am getting pretty good at using them and actually prefer them to disgustingly dirty public bathrooms with Western toilets.  Turns out squatting is a lot easier than trying to hover over a dirty toilet seat!  However, I did not expect to see a hose next to the toilet in my homestay and not a square of toilet paper to be seen.  Majda showed us a very basic charade so that we knew what it was for, but we were still bewildered and nervous.  The solution to this is not as interesting as with the squatters: we just buy toilet paper.  However, we did use the hose the first night until we bought toilet paper, but no, I did not use it to the point of not being able to use my left hand for eating.  Which, by the way, is only a loose rule here in the cities and only applies to the hand that reaches into the communal dish.  Tearing bread and actually putting food in your mouth with either hand seems to be fine, at least in my house.

-Meals: Mealtime here is usually a very communal activity.  Sometimes we all get our own plate of food to eat off of, but more often do not.  For big meals when there are guests over, we start with mint tea or juice, and cookies.  This is also what we have when guests come over who are not staying to eat a meal.  After pre-dinner tea time is over, we move to the table and start with some salads and appetizer dip things.  Khobs (bread) is central to most meals as it is often the main eating utensil.  Salads are eaten with forks, but the other things are best eaten by scooping some up with a small piece of khobs.  Using the index and middle finger to support the bread, you use your thumb to assist in the scooping process and make sure the food stays there until you get it to your mouth.  After these are done, a large dish is brought out with the main course.  Some people serve themselves a portion from the dish onto their plate, but others, like Majda, usually just eat off of the dish with a fork or their hands, both with and without some khobs.  Sometimes it is like a feeding frenzy, but it is always a mini-adventure!  After this comes dessert, which is usually fresh fruit.  We used to have mostly oranges and bananas, but now we have started having more strawberries, and they are all delicious!  At smaller meals, this is all just downsized a little, but there are usually the same number of courses involved.

-Communication via French, Arabic, Darija, English, Spanish, Italian, Charades: This started out with more charades than language, but with the help of Arabic and Darija classes plus some French tutoring at ISA and just picking up bits of language around the house, I am getting better at communicating with a nice variation of languages!  Since I speak Spanish and Michelina speaks Italian, and both are similar to French and spoken by some people in Morocco, we are getting pretty adept at communicating with the people here.  However, it is always an adventure, especially when trying to haggle in the Medina...

-Linguistics seems to be helping with the language stuff sometimes, especially with pronunciation since I am used to making sounds I don’t know.  After some more time in Arabic class, this is confirmed.  Or I just have a knack for languages.  Apparently I set the record grade for the Arabic 1 midterm.  Maybe I have a knack for languages that was then boosted by my study of linguistics?

-So cold I am wearing 3 pairs of pants right now.  Update now that I am writing this: It is not that cold anymore.  Once upon a time I wore 3 pairs of pants at night to keep warm while doing homework because they don’t use heaters in my house, unless company is over.  Then I bought a fleece jellaba in Meknes’ color, olive green, that kept me nice and cozy.  Now, it is getting to be springtime and is much warmer than it was before.  Every now and then I still break out my fleecy, but for the most part, normal amounts of clothing are fine.

-Love it here  Pretty self-explanatory :)

-On that note, kitchen dance party with Amina and Aziza after dinner was super fun

-Oh and that whole roommate sick with leptospirosis and malaria thing, mom visiting, etc.  This has its own post now.

-I LOVE THE HAMMAM: This has its own post, too.

-Poetry Slam, Roxy: There was a poetry slam for Women’s Day at my university here because slam poet Roxy Azari is doing a Watson scholarship year of poetry workshops around the world.  It was absolutely AMAZING.  A lot of it was in English so we could understand it.  The girls spoke about veiling (both wearing one and not wearing one), body image (“I love you body!”) and men (“I DON’T need a man!”) among other things.  After the show, we talked to Roxy, who actually picked us out of the crowd as the Americans.

-The mysterious buzzing noise:  There is a weird buzzing noise that seems to come from somewhere by the dining table, but we are not sure where and have no idea what causes it.

-I am studying abroad in Morocco and the most frustrating parts of my life have to do with Americans: I know it is cold, but please stop complaining about your heaters not working and just wear more clothes in your apartment.  We do not use heaters in our apartment and we have been managing just fine.  Electricity is expensive here so maybe this is a good time to try to ditch some of those American habits of consumption.

-Volunteer day: One of my professors partnered with ISA to plan this volunteer day.  It was very last minute so we only had a couple days to figure out what we were doing.  The basic plan was to donate goods to some Amazigh villages near Meknes, so we pooled money to buy food products and collected clothing and other goods from our group and the people we know here.  We also partnered with some Moroccan girls (who happened to be mostly girls from the poetry slam) which made it a lot more fun!  Michelina and I also invited our host brother, Mamoun, to come so that he could see how some other people live.  When the day came, we loaded the bus with flour, sugar, tea, and rice, as well as bags and bags of other items to donate and some balls and coloring supplies we bought the day before.  Daniel forgot the ISA camera so I became the official ISA photographer of the day.  We drove to the first village with plenty of dancing and craziness on the bus.  First we had tea and some snacks in one of the homes, and then we started distributing the goods and play with the kids.  I was taking pictures the whole time so I was not that involved with the process, but I have two albums of pictures on Facebook!  Unfortunately, though expected, some fighting broke out among the mothers trying to get goods for their families and we had to leave in a hurry.  We stopped at a couple other villages before stopping for a barbeque lunch.  After much more dancing, both after lunch and then again on the bus, we got back to Meknes.

-Why am I so much more homesick here when I actually feel much more at home than I did in Costa Rica?  Second program?  More exciting stuff happening with Isaac?  Regardless, I am having an amazing time so a little homesickness is easy to get over with a nice Skype session with my family :)

Time to start catching up...in Spain

So I have now been in Morocco for three and a half weeks.  Due to some unexpected complications, I am just now going to start getting settled into some semblance of normal life, but I’ll get into that later.  The last time I updated my blog I was on the train from Madrid to Granada to meet my ISA Morocco group.  As you can probably imagine, a lot has happened since then.  This update has been haunting me for a month so hopefully the Spain update will be the start of a long game of catching up to the present.  Since I am just trying to spit out stories, they might be a little messy and for that I am sorry.  Now, on to this update I keep talking about...

My journey to Granada was pretty uneventful actually.  I got to the train station, caught a taxi, and got dropped off a block from the hotel because of the construction being done on our hotel’s street.  Checked in no problem and was directed to my room where I would be rooming with my future roommate, Michelina.  However, she was not there yet.  Some people had arrived already so the front desk gave me a list of the rooms we were in, but I wanted to shower so I just headed for my room to relax a little.  However, as I was about to get ready to shower, there was a knock on my door.  The man there didn’t seem to understand that I knew Spanish so he kept trying to tell me in his very broken English something about having to change rooms, but then he randomly left.  I went down to the front desk and asked what was going on (in Spanish) and was told that I had to switch to a bigger room because they were adding a person.  After moving, I waited a little to see if anyone was getting there soon to try to avoid anyone arriving while I was in the shower.  I watched BBC a bit to find out what was going on in Egypt, but eventually decided to go ahead and shower.  Of course, while I was in the shower the other girl, Meredith, arrived.

After I got dressed, we decided to use the list the front desk had given me to try to find some other students in our program.  We ended up finding people in a few more rooms and ended up hanging out talking with maybe half of the group in one of the rooms before going downstairs to stop in our room on the way to our first ISA meeting.  Already, the group seemed to get along really well, and so far that feeling has held up (knock on wood).  When Meredith and I stopped in our room, we found Michelina there!  Unfortunately, the airline had lost her luggage somewhere on the way from Ghana where she had been traveling with a group from her school for a few weeks.  It took a few days for her suitcase to be delivered to our hotel, but it got there.  Too bad that wasn’t the end of her bad luck with Ghana, but more on that later.

We had ISA meetings almost every day about Granada, as well as about Morocco and the culture and just some general information about our lives for the next few months.  We met Daniel, our Resident Director, Laura, the ISA Assistant Director of European Operations who is based in Granada and stayed in Meknes with us for the first three weeks, her husband, Manolo, and Mohammed, the Resident Director of the new ISA program in Jordan.  Let me just start out by saying that they (and everyone I have met so far) are all awesome and amazing people.  Daniel studied abroad with ISA in Granada while he was in school while Laura was Resident Director there and then started working with ISA in Granada.  He worked there for 7 years, I believe, before helping start up the program in Meknes, which is now in its third year.  At the rate I am going with studying abroad with ISA, I will probably ask him more about all this at some point since working with ISA seems a probable part of my future.  Plus I now know Laura, who told me if I ever need a job, to send in my resume :) Laura is traveling around right now, visiting ISA programs to basically do some quality control, and she said that this program is definitely doing well since the students seem more enthusiastic than at many other sites.  It was also fun to learn that she helped set up the program in Buenos Aires that I did almost two years ago, and knows most of the people who work there.  Then there is Mohammed, a Jordanian-Palestinian who got his Ph.D. in Arizona and teaches at refugee camps.  Given that, it may not come as a surprise that I, along with a lot of other students in the group, had a lot of good conversations with him about life and teaching and politics and culture.  He also told me that he is trying to get the ISA volunteer branch, ELAP, set up in Jordan which means I might be able to do some stuff there sometime, even after I am done with school.  However, I did ask Laura and she said that I do not have to be a current student to participate in ISA study abroad programs so Morocco may not be the end of them for me just yet :)

As usual with study abroad programs, there are a lot of students here who are majoring in some form of international studies/relations and we are from all over the US.  One of the things you don’t think about when studying abroad is how many people you’ll meet from all over your home country.  Anyway, we all have been getting along very well and so we had a lot of fun in Granada.  We spent most nights out getting drinks and tapas, and had tours 2 of the days.  Now let me explain tapas: Granada has this thing going where you can go to a bar and order a drink, and it comes with free tapas, or some sort of small plate of food/snack.  I believe just about all of Spain does the tapas thing, but I have heard that Granada is the only place that gives them to you for free with your drink, and the drink can be anything ranging from bottled water (because free food with free tap water would be too cool) to soda to alcoholic beverages.  On a different note related to food, Michelina and Meredith discovered this place with these small donuts that reminded me of Trish’s Mini-Donuts at Pier 39 in San Francisco, but these ones were covered in chocolate syrup :)

"La Media Luna"

During the days, we had a couple tours and went adventuring.  On our first day, we toured Granada and the neighborhood Albaicin, which is the traditional Moorish neighborhood.  One of the most amusing parts of this tour to me was this one door that was very Moorish in deisgn and had what appeared to be Arabic script over it, but as I looked closer I noticed it actually just said “La Media Luna” (“the half moon” in Spanish) but written so that it looked like Arabic.  Oh and to backtrack slightly, my alarm clock on my phone plays the introduction to “Circle of Life” so Michelina had started calling me Rafiki because it means “friend” in Swahili and in Arabic.  Back to the tour: we were walking and she points up to this balcony where I see a stuffed Rafiki sitting.  That is when we decided the nickname was permanent.  Anyway, we got our first little taste of Moorish architecture and the Arabic language, and made it up to this church square that had an amazing view of the Alhambra.

Alhambra from the church square

The next day’s activity was a tour of the Alhambra, an old Moorish palace and probably the largest example of Islamic architecture in Spain.  You know, Christians built great churches and cathedrals, but I think the Moors win as my favorite castle architects.  When the Moorish reign ended and Spain was ruled by Christians, they built more in the Alhambra and it just does not compare to the original Islamic architecture.  Mosaics, woodcarvings, and bright colors definitely win over big, gray stones :)

By the way, my pictures on Facebook probably say a lot more about the Alhambra than I can write here since my memory for history that I hear is horrible.

Anyway, the next day, Kyle, Meredith, Mike, and I decided to go explore the hills where the cave-people live.  Now let me explain: there are these cave-homes in the hills of Granada and people can just go find an empty one and move in.  As you might be able to guess, they are known as being the hippies of Granada and they have their own little community up in the hills, but come down to the city to get food and other supplies to bring back up in backpacks.  I thought they sounded cool, so I asked about going to see them and had some friends who wanted to go, too, so we traipsed up the hill to explore.  We were told to be careful about the stuff we had with us because it was not the biggest tourist area, and the people there may not be too fond of us being there so we had to be respectful (not that we were planning on being rude, but ok).

Hillside where the caves are

Stairs down to Granada

We wandered up through the Albaicin, tentatively following a map to keep track of where we were and where we wanted to be while trying not to stand out too much as tourists, before we got to the place where we had been told to go up the stairs.  The only place we could see stairs went up along/behind a house, so we decided to try them since there was no “do not pass” sign or anything, figuring if anyone yelled at us, we would know that they were the wrong stairs.  Turns out they were the right stairs and took us up to a church on the top of the hill.  We saw some cool graffiti on the way, and then proceeded around the back of the church as instructed to find the caves.  We ended up spending most of our time just wandering around the hills, enjoying the amazing view into the mountains and over the city, but did find a few caves.  The first one we found was one we were on top of.  They remind me of hobbit holes from the way the doors are just sitting in the hillsides, and chimneys sit poking out of the ground.  We saw this one front yard that was elaborately decorated with recycled materials and had a sign about hours, so I went to ask the man working on the roof what the place was.  From what he said to me before he just ignored me, I think it was both his home and a church.  I don’t know if it is because we were clearly not from there (even though I was speaking Spanish) or if he was just busy fixing something and didn’t feel like talking, but he did not seem to want to talk to me so I left.  More willing to talk were two girls sitting on a bench overlooking the hills and the city of Granada.  They did not live in the caves, but one of them lives in Granada for 6 months out of the year.  They were very nice, told me I had to go to Chefchaouan while in Morocco, and gave me some good Spanish practice.  I told them that it was really easy for me to understand them, and they told me that since they were from Catalunia, they learned Spanish as a second language after Catalan.  Since we had made plans to meet up with Michelina for lunch, we started our descent and got yelled at by someone for going the wrong way, but quickly corrected our path and made it down safely.  We even managed not to get too lost on the way.

Enjoying the view

Hobbit hole :)

Fun Facts:

-The “Al” in “Alhambra” means “the” in Arabic, so calling it “the Alhambra” is actually redundant, just like the Rio Grande River

Granada

 -Granada means “pomegranate” in Spanish and there are pomegranates hidden (and not so hidden) all over Granada

Moving

 -Furniture, such as bookshelves, are moved into these tall, narrow houses via ropes and pulleys on the outside of the building, while tourists stand in the street and watch

Time-sensitive Shots, Tall Buildings and Train Rides

Over one month later, and here I am again!  I meant to write some updates while I was home about Costa Rica reflections and Morocco preparations, but I failed.  A quick summary of my life since my last post before I go into details: about a month at home including a trip to San Diego and Disneyland, flying to Frankfurt, visiting friends in Brussels and Groningen, and taking a lot of trains to Madrid before I go to Granada tomorrow to meet my program group.  Now for the details:

Home

After being gone for 3 months, being home felt surreal, almost as if I had just gone back in time to before I left, except that it was winter instead of summer.  Surprisingly, the reverse culture shock did not hit me as hard this time as after my month in Argentina, probably because I was mentally preparing myself for it for weeks.  What was so strange about it the first time was not so much that being home felt weird, but how wrong it felt for home to be so weird.  You expect to feel like a stranger in a new place, but you don’t expect to feel so out of place at home.  I think being ready for it actually made it a lot easier because it took away that extra layer of shock, if that makes sense.  I also think I may have culture shocked my family a bit since I brought some of the pura vida lifestyle back with me…

The other big change for me was my nephew!  When I left in September, he was only 2 months old.  When I came back in December, he was just about 5 months old!  Even though I had seen a lot of pictures and a video, I could not believe how much bigger he was and how much more he was doing!  He went from smiling by accident and making a few cooing noises to smiling all the time and babbling; from not even rolling over to rolling and scooting and almost sitting and standing!  He even has 2 teeth!  However, I have to do another long gap again.  He was 6 months old when I left and will be 10 months when I come back, so I will have a whole new set of things to miss and catch up on.  But I did make good use of my time at home and went with my mom every Tuesday (her babysitting day) to spend all day with them, except for the day I went later in the day because of my rabies shot.

My stupid rabies shot.  This is the only vaccination I have ever heard of with such specific time rules.  You have to get 3 of the same shot on days 0 (so whenever you decide to start it), 7, and 21 or 28.  I forgot about needing this shot until I only had about 21 days left so I had to get them on a Tuesday schedule which meant going to Kaiser with my mom and my nephew.  And if I get bitten by something and think they might have rabies, I still have to get more shots!  But it does reduce the number of shots I need and I don’t need the one that can be hard to get so I guess it was worth it.  However, between that shot and having to pay full price for extra orders of my prescription, I am ready to be done with hospitals for a while.  Hear that body?

Other than all this, my time at home was spent relaxing and hanging out with friends and family.  Oh, and trying to make my wardrobe more modest by non-southern-Californian standards meaning higher necks and longer sleeves rather than the tank tops I can usually get away with.  Also made a trip down to San Diego to visit some friends and went to Disneyland with the Hawaii Club Disney Crew :)

Come January 19 and it was time to head to the airport.  I had packed my big backpack, my small suitcase, a laptop messenger bag, and my purse.  I would have shipped some stuff so I could travel lighter for the first 2 weeks but shipping to Europe is expensive and shipping to Morocco is about double that.  Since I planned on using trains, I thought multiple smaller, lighter bags were better than one massive, heavy bag and I think I was right.  I had a 5 days in 2 months Eurail Pass and plans to visit a couple friends before meeting my program in Granada for our Spain orientation (before going to Morocco).

The Benefits of Traveling During the Low Season

Not only was SFO practically empty, but my plane was only 40% full.  Oh yes.  11 hours from San Francisco to Frankfurt and I managed to sleep for about half of them, sprawled across 3 seats.  I arrived in Frankfurt at 9:45 am local time on Thursday and due to my bags already being on the claim when I got there and no stopping for customs, I made it on the train to Brussels at 10:32 am.  Paid for some wifi on the train and looked at the snow outside before napping.  For the sake of my train count, I will mention that something was wrong with this train and we had to switch somewhere so that’s 2 trains to Brussels.

Train total: 2

Brussels

Remember those Belgian guys I met on the journey back to San Jose from Panama?  Chris was in Brussels for a few weeks before going on more adventures so I visited him there for 2 days.  Jet lag left me tired, but the party schedule of those 2 days worked well with it so I consider it a fast adjustment.  I climbed a lot of stairs since I was staying on the 4th floor of his house (well American 4th, European 3rd), listened to a lot of French, drank a lot of wine, went to my first wine and cheese party, and had a great time!  I learned how to say in French that I don’t speak French, but I must say it too well because both times I have used it now I have gotten very strange looks…  We wandered around the center of Brussels and I saw some stuff I remembered from when I was there with my dad, and I now have a membership at Carré, a big club outside the city that I definitely did not go to with my dad.  I would offer to take you next time, but I don’t think you would like it…

To get to Groningen on Saturday to visit Maren where she goes to Uni in the Netherlands, I had to take 3 trains: first to Amsterdam, then to Hilversum, and then to Groningen.  I will say that some of these train rides were short, but those were usually the ones that did not have luggage racks so I had to sit/stand awkwardly with my stuff by the doors and therefore count them separately in the train count.

Train total: 5

Groningen

There may have been a lot of stairs in Brussels, but there were very steep and narrow stairs in Groningen.  Even though my first night there was a Saturday, we decided to stay in and watch a movie because jetlag and Brussels nightlife had worn me out and Maren was getting over being sick.  We actually did a lot of sleeping during my visit and it was glorious!  Next day, we wanted to go to the town center and the best way to get around is on bikes (as it is just about everywhere in the Netherlands).  Since I didn’t have a bike, I borrowed her roommate’s, which was too tall.  I learned that first night that it was better if I used Maren’s and she used her roommate’s, and that the bike paths move in a certain way that I did not quite understand, but not without falling first.  Yes, I did bump my head and I’m sorry mom, but no I was not wearing a helmet (no one there does) but I was very aware of how I felt for the next few hours and days and my head only hit the ground after a few other points of contact so it didn’t hit very hard.  I can tell you this because I am no longer there, riding a bike without a helmet, and it has been long enough that any damage would have made itself known by now.  Luckily, the only things that actually broke were the rear bike light, my gloves, my sunglasses (in my purse), and some skin.  All replaceable.  Turns out I had just bought another pair of my sunglasses at Disneyland to leave at home in case anything happened to my old pair, and my H&M gloves were sitting in a bin at the H&M in Groningen.  Took us a few days to remember to buy a new bike light and I am still working on re-growing the skin, but compared to the last bike accident I saw where one guy lost a tooth, this was nothing.

Other than falling off a bike, I had a great time seeing Maren.  For those who don’t know, she is from Germany and was an exchange student at my high school my senior year and we got pretty close.  We chilled, cooked, hung out with her friends, and I rode on the back of a bike for the first time when her roommate wasn’t around to let us use hers.  On Wednesday, due to bad train schedules, I had to start my journey to Granada.  I left Groningen at 3:46 pm for Gouda, then Rotterdam, then Paris (3 trains).  Then I took the metro to another train station in Paris (1 train…yes, I am counting metro) to catch a night train to the Spanish border town of Irun where I could get a train to Madrid (2 trains).

Train total: 11

Madrid

Well, this was supposed to be my catch-up-on-sleep night, but this blog is taking forever to write and I am actually not that tired.  Guess all that napping on the trains really did count as sleep!  I got here in the afternoon and reserved my train to Granada for the morning, then headed to Hostal San Martin.  I booked it on hostelbookers.com where it had good reviews and was one of the cheapest single rooms I could find in a building with an elevator.  It seems nice enough, and the room has a TV and a small shower and sink with the room, as well as free wifi and a lot of storage space.  For the price and location in the city center, it is very nice, but it is definitely more of a guesthouse than a hostel as far as the atmosphere is concerned.  But since I was not planning on going out tonight, that is perfect for me!  I got food at Maoz, my favorite chain from my European adventures 3 and a half years ago, and even found my favorite gelato place.  Unfortunately, it has a sign up saying it is only open Friday-Sunday, my guess being those are winter hours since even I was considering skipping it even though it is my favorite and I am not in Madrid very often to get it!  I wandered for a few hours and found my hostel from last time, as well as the area that my guidebook said it was (the one time Let’s Go has ever let me down was when they mismarked my hostel on the map in the book) and even the restaurant I stopped at to see if they knew where my hostel was where one of the waiters got a phone to call and find out so that he could direct me!  I love going to new places, but I also love going back to places I have been to before and wandering into places I recognize :)

Tomorrow I go to Granada and meet up with my ISA group for a few days of orientation there before we go to Morocco on Tuesday, and Meknes on Wednesday!  I’ll try to find time to write again soon!

Montezuma’s... what’s the opposite of revenge?

Started writing this December 12, finished it December 18 in the Houston airport.

I can say with certainty, now that I have returned from my last weekend trip before I go home, that my weekend in Montezuma was my favorite weekend in Costa Rica.  From the weird adventures and the people I was with to the amazing weather and beautiful beaches, everything about this weekend was extraordinary.  I guess the only place to begin is at the very beginning...

But first, sunset at Playa Grande in Montezuma

For my Ecotourism class, we had two planned field trips this trimester: Tortuguero and Montezuma.  I already wrote about how amazing my trip to Tortuguero was, and now I will be writing about how amazing Montezuma was.  Can’t you tell I just hate that class? ;)

Now, this story really starts the week before in Panama.  I had planned to go a week earlier with some girls from my dance class, but I got sick so I waited a week and tagged along with some girls from my program.  Two went on Thanksgiving, and then I went on Friday with another girl.  As for the return, two girls had to return on Sunday, but I planned on staying until Monday and the fourth girl was planning on staying until Monday with me.  However, and I didn’t find this out until Sunday morning because we ended up staying at different places due to personal preferences, that other girl ran out of money and had to go back to San Jose on Sunday, too.  Since I had already booked and paid for two dives that day, I decided to stay in Bocas del Toro by myself for that last day, figuring I would make some new friends...

When I arrived at the dive center for my first dives as a certified Open Water Diver, I saw that the guy I had gotten certified with the day before was there as well.  Unfortunately, I forget his name and haven’t been in touch with him, but we’ll call him Dive Guy.  (We have since connected on Facebook and I remembered that his name is Devin, but I am too lazy to change all the Dive Guys to Devins.)  Anyway, we take off in the boat for the first dive and I am talking with Dive Guy when I think I hear one of the girls with the group, Julia, say California.  It was really loud on the boat, so I decided not to ask her about it until I heard her say San Francisco.  Turns out she is from Sacramento and goes to Chico, but was studying abroad in Puntarenas for the semester.  After the dives, since diving seems to leave you starving, a group of us went to hunt down a place to get some lunch.  After lunch, I went with Julia and her friend from her program, Corbi, as well as another guy from our dive group to go to Dolphin Bay.  We had a great time, even though we were probably in the slowest boat in all of Bocas, and I found out that Julia and Corbi were taking the bus back to San Jose on Monday morning, too, as the first leg of their journey back to Puntarenas.

Devin and Julia are the people right in front of me

Come Monday morning, I get to the boat to find Dive Guy and his friend there, but no Julia and Corbi yet.  Let me explain the journey back to San Jose from Bocas: boat to Almirante, van/taxi to Changuinola, then a bus to the border where you have you get off to go through customs and then get back on to go to San Jose.  Anyway, I figure they caught an earlier boat or will catch the next one, so off we go to Almirante.  When we get there, most of the vans fill up and leave for the bus stop, but ours is not quite full and wants to wait for the next boat.  So there I am, sitting next to Dive Guy with what looks like room for maybe two more people, with the driver telling us he knows we have to catch the bus and that it will all be fine.  Half an hour later, the next boat arrives and the driver crams maybe 5-7 more people in the van, including Julia and Corbi in the front seat and a couple guys who are sitting about two feet away facing me and Dive Guy.  Well, Dive Guy ends up sleeping and I decide that if the backwards-facing, French-speaking guys and I don’t talk to each other, this 45-minute ride is going to be very awkward due to how close we were all sitting.  Best.  Decision.  Ever.  Chris and Francois from Belgium ended up being some of the coolest people I met in Costa Rica, who I hope to stay in touch with.  Long story short, we ended up passing the 9-10 hour journey from Almirante to San Jose talking pretty much the entire time with each other, Julia, Corbi, and some other travelers.  This was facilitated by the fact that when we finally got to the bus, it was full and our driver had to talk to the bus driver to get him to let us get on the bus even though it meant we had to stand in the aisle for most of it.  We also spent 2-3 hours at the border, chilling and eating ice cream while we waited for everyone on the bus to get through the border crossing.  Was I irritated with the driver for making us wait back in Almirante?  A little, but Pura Vida.  Do I wish I could go back now and hug him because if we hadn’t waited I probably would not have become friends with Chris and Francois?  Definitely :)

Crossing the border back to Costa Rica

How does this relate to Montezuma?  Chris had just finished his program in San Jose and was talking about his plans for his last week in Costa Rica when he mentioned going to Montezuma that next weekend, a.k.a. the weekend my class was going to Montezuma!  Francois ended up deciding to go, too, and together they convinced me to take the bus with them on Friday, the day before my class went.  This journey consists of taking a bus to Puntarenas, a ferry to Paquera, and then a bus to Montezuma.  Unfortunately, my cell phone does not have the clearest reception so I didn’t hear when Francois told me to go to the Coca Cola bus station instead of the Puntarenas station to catch the bus straight through to Montezuma at 2 pm.  This was further complicated by Chris being later than he expected and going straight to the Coca Cola station, but getting there a few minutes after Francois had left to come to the Puntarenas station since I was at the wrong one.  After much confusion, we were all at the Puntarenas station to take a bus around 2:40 pm to Puntarenas and make the journey piece by piece.  At 5:30 pm, we arrived at the bus station in Puntarenas only to hear that there was no point in taking the ferry that night because the only bus from Paquera to Montezuma is the bus that goes from San Jose, which caught the ferry at 5 pm.  After about 20 minutes trying to come up with a way to get from Puntarenas to Montezuma that night, we decided it could not be done within our means.  Since we knew that Julia and Corbi lived near the ferry, we decided to take a taxi there and then hunt down an internet café to try to contact them via Facebook about staying with them for the night so we could catch the ferry in the morning with the morning bus from San Jose.

When we got out of the taxi by the ferry, a man asked me if we were taking the ferry that night and I said no.  He then said something about a bus and I stopped and looked at him.  “What bus?”  “That bus over there.”  “Where is it going?”  “Montezuma, Mal Pais...”  “Wait, wait, wait.  There is a bus going to Montezuma tonight?”  At this point a man walks by and tells me that the bus missed the ferry at 5 pm and had to wait for the next ferry at 9 pm.  We can’t believe our luck, so we go over to the bus and talk to the driver and sure enough, we can get on the bus after taking the ferry to get to Montezuma.  At first we were worried that the bus missed the ferry because Chris had made it wait a few minutes back in San Jose, but it turns out they had a flat tire on the way and got to the dock just as the ferry was leaving.  While not really important, we were glad to know we were not about to get on a bus full of people who had missed the ferry because of us.  Instead, it was just bad luck for them, great luck for us!  We found internet, messaged Julia and Corbi that we had 3 hours to kill in Puntarenas, left them our phone numbers, and went across the street for some dinner.

When we walk in the restaurant, who do I see but a group of people from Veritas, including my friend, Kelsey, from my Spanish class back in October.  She starts hanging out with Francois, Chris, and me as I eat gallo pinto and scrambled eggs for dinner, with an Imperial, before we decide to walk the few blocks to the beach.  We get there and chill for a bit and then Julia calls, so we go and find her back by the ferry.  While we walk around with her, we meet these people who drove to Costa Rica from the US in a giant bus-van, and then happen upon Corbi.  We hang out some more, and then it is time to go back to the ferry to cross to the peninsula.  On the boat, they have music and lights and the sky is clearer than I’ve seen in a long time, so we dance and stargaze our way to Paquera.  Stoked off of our luck, we get on the bus and head for Montezuma.  However, one more bump along the way, we have to switch buses in Cobano and our new bus is belching black smoke so we have to go back and get on another new bus before making the last trek to Montezuma.

When we get to Luz en el Cielo, the hostel Chris’ friend recommended and that I now recommend wholeheartedly, it is 12:30 am so we ditch our stuff and head to the local bar, Chico’s.  After some dancing, we go out to the beach and watch the stars.  Chris mentions that he has never seen a shooting star and I tell him that if it is clear enough, you just have to look for a while and you will probably see one.  Well I think there must have been a meteor shower last weekend because we ended up seeing more shooting stars than I could count!  Since we were on the beach, I decided to take off my Rainbows (flip-flops), and left them next to Francois’ shoes by a rock.  After a while spent stargazing, he left, and then about half an hour later I left with Chris and his friend Sina.  However, I could not find my shoes.  The three of us combed the beach looking for them with no luck so I walked back barefoot, and I even went back around 8 the next morning but they still were not there.  I decided I would buy some new ones later that day.

At the bar the night before, Kelsey had asked Chris, Francois, and me if we wanted to go to the waterfalls with her, so that’s what we did.  This hike was probably the most untamed hike I have done.  There was barely a trail visible, so we jumped and climbed our way to the first of the three waterfalls.  As Kelsey said in her blog, it was like tree-root hopscotch!  The first waterfall ended up being so beautiful that we didn’t make it to the other two.  There was a rock that we could climb up and jump off of, and the weather was beautiful.  We took turns taking pictures with my camera, and Chris added to the rock towers off on the side.  After the waterfalls, we hiked back to town so I could meet my class for lunch.

Tree-root hopscotch

Jumping off the rock

Rock towers

At lunch, I learned that one of the girls in my class, Jackie, knew the girl who owns Luz en el Cielo (the hostel I stayed at) and so she came up with me after lunch to go hang out for a bit.  While there, I was talking about how I lost my shoes at the beach and had to buy overpriced flip-flops from one of the little touristy shops.  I went to dinner with my class, since all meals were included, then showered and met the guys back at the hostel.  Again, we went to Chico’s, and it was there that Jackie told me she thought she had found my shoes.  After I had been talking about them at Luz, she walked back to the hotel where our class was and found a pair of Rainbows sitting on a rock on the side of the road.  I still have no idea how they got from the beach to a rock a couple blocks away, but I got my shoes back.  This second stroke of amazing luck led Francois to decide that weird things happen around me.

Sunday morning, before my class left, I decided to stay for one more night at Luz with Chris and Francois and take the bus back to San Jose the next morning since I didn’t have class until 4.  The rest of my time in Montezuma consisted of meals with my class, hanging out at the beach and pool with them before they left, chilling at the hostel, and making the half hour trek to Playa Grande with a group of people staying at Luz.  Monday morning, I had to catch the bus at 6 am, so I got up a little early so I could watch the sunrise.  Well, waking up at 4:30 ended up being very easy since a pack of howler monkeys went by at 4:25 and made so much noise I am sure they woke up the entire hostel.  I said my goodbyes to Chris and Francois, and headed down to town in the dark to park myself on the beach with my camera and wait.  I am not a morning person, but this was definitely worth it.

Sunrise in Montezuma

Under the Sea

This post is about my PADI Open Water Certification.

Part One

While this was not originally in my study abroad plans, I have always wanted to get scuba certified.  I love snorkeling, so why wouldn’t I love scuba?  So when I saw that my university in Costa Rica, Universidad Veritas, offered a program to get certified, I decided to go for it.  It cost $525 (not a cheap hobby to pick up, is it...) and included the online theoretical course through PADI, the practical course with a PADI Dive Instructor, transportation to and from a Dive Center, 2 nights stay by the Dive Center, 2 breakfasts and lunches, and dive gear rental.  Looking back on it, I definitely could have done it cheaper, but oh well.  What’s done is done, and if Veritas didn’t have the program, I may not have done it so I guess I’m paying for the convenience that got me to actually take the plunge ;)

I gave myself 2 weeks to complete the online course before the weekend I had set aside with another girl to go do the practical portion of the course when we actually do the dives.  She had already done the theory part of the course and the confined water dives at home, and just needed to do the open water dives.  Oddly, we were the only two getting certified this semester at Veritas, so she was my dive buddy.  As for the online course, I ended up cramming almost all of it in to the week before we were leaving due partially to internet troubles and power outages, but due mostly to procrastination.

Punta Uva Dive Center

The university works with two dive centers: one in Quepos and one in Punta Uva.  Due to the heavy rains that week that actually made it impossible to get to Quepos and closed down the dive center, we went to Punta Uva (just south of Puerto Viejo).  Looking back on it, while Frederick was nice and seemed qualified to be our instructor, it seemed that he was not following all the rules I had learned about in my online course.  Anyway, funny story, he was staying at the same hotel as us and came to talk to us the night before to go over when and where to meet in the morning.  Then the next morning at breakfast, he must not have recognized us because he and his friend asked to sit with us, introduced themselves, and then proceeded to tell us about how drunk they had been the night before and how he had not slept much because his friend kept him out late despite protests that he had work in the morning.  When he introduced himself, we thought he had just forgotten our names from the night before, but then when we told him where we were staying, he said, “Oh, I’ve got a student named Anna who is staying there too”.  That was when we realized he didn’t recognize us as his students and told him that yes, that was me, Hannah, and we were his students for the day.  Of course, this made him blush and apologize and appear quite embarrassed.

After breakfast, we agreed to meet at the beach right out front in a bit to do the confined water dives.  He sized us up and called someone from the dive center to bring gear for us.  The weather was not great and it was raining, but as he pointed out, rain doesn’t matter much for scuba.  Wind matters because it stirs up the water, but that was not an issue until later.  Anyway, we completed the required tasks that are mostly comprised of practicing what to do in case something goes wrong in water shallow enough that you can stand up if you freak out.  As I expected, the part that freaked me out the most (and it is the part that freaks everyone out the most) was when I had to remove my mask under water and then put it back on and clear it.  I have always had issues with water getting in my nose, and it was even harder when I had to keep breathing through my mouth.  However, after many tries, a break when we did the other tasks, and then coming back to it, I was able to do it without a problem.  Hear that out there?  If you think you can’t get certified because of having to do that, I was able to get it so you can too :)

Giving the "OK" sign

 After the confined dives, we drove to Punta Uva for our first Open Water Dive.  Unfortunately, it was too windy and the water was so stirred up that we could barely see each other from only a few feet away.  We decided after that dive that we were done for the day and would resume on Sunday.  That night, I started feeling sick.  I called my instructor who said that we were not deep enough for it to be related to the diving, so I just tried to rest and hope I felt better in the morning.  I wasn’t feeling great the next day, but my instructor said I could try if I wanted to, so I decided to go for it.  This dive we actually saw some stuff.  We took pictures with the instructor’s camera, which I am still waiting to receive from him via e-mail...  (*I have them now!)  I was fine for most of the dive, but near the end we did a safety stop, where you stay about 5 meters under for 3 minutes to make sure the nitrogen properly dissolves out of your body.  While there is not much movement of the water near the bottom, at 5 meters you are definitely moving up and down with the waves.  Since I do get seasick sometimes and I was already not feeling good, this did not help.  I was fine, but I decided I couldn’t do another dive that day and would just have to finish my certification some other time.  Turns out I made a good choice because the water was rougher when they went out for the second dive, and the other girl who went with them got sick on the boat.  Due to the weather and time constraints, neither of us finished our certification that weekend, but that’s ok because I had a great time in Bocas del Toro, where I did finish it two weeks later.

Part Two

Since I came down here early, my stay in total is over 90 days, which is the limit on a tourist Visa.  This meant that I needed to leave the country at some point so that I would get a new Visa upon reentry.  I have heard great things about Nicaragua, but the political situation between Nicaragua and Costa Rica right now is not that great so I decided to go for Panama.  I had also heard great things about Bocas del Toro, the closest Panamanian tourist destination to Costa Rica, and I knew that they had dive centers there so I looked into finishing my certification at Starfleet Scuba.  Starfleet was recommended in my Let’s Go travel book, as well as by an office member at my university who dives a lot, and I have to agree that it is a great dive center.  It felt a lot more professional than the center in Punta Uva, while still being very chill and friendly.  Since I had done two Open Water Dives in Punta Uva, I only needed two more to complete my certification, but the center gave me a deal on four dives so I took it.

Saturday morning, I completed my Open Water Certification, along with two others who had been working on theirs there.  I am happy to say that when it came time to remove and replace my mask under deeper water, I had absolutely no problems!  An interesting part was when we had to practice a kind of emergency ascent used to safely ascend if you run out of air and your buddy is not close enough to give you their alternate regulator.  He had us go in order of who had the most air left.  I seem to be good at not using up my air quickly, so I was last, but one of the girls had to do it twice so I started running low.  In the Confined Dives, one thing you have to do is feel what it is like to run out of air.  Your instructor closes the valve and you wait until you feel that there is no air left, then you signal that you are out of air, and the instructor opens the valve.  During this, the air cut off pretty quickly which I found surprising and a little disconcerting.  However, during this dive, I learned that you in fact have a decent amount of time in which only the second half of each breath feels labored, but you can still breathe fine.  It did make my ascent more realistic in that I was actually running out of air, but I was more comfortable knowing that you actually can tell at least 5 minutes in advance that you are running low on air.  I don’t know how much longer I could have kept breathing from my tank, but I think there was still more time left before it actually ran out.

About to make my first dive as a certified Open Water Diver

Anyway, after the two dives, I filled out a card so that they could submit it to PADI and get my certification processed.  Funnily enough, I saw a new kind of typo in my name in the confirmation e-mail they sent me so I will have two cards: one correct, one incorrect.  Then on Sunday, I did two dives just for fun, as a certified Open Water diver!  I realized during these dives that not only is scuba cool because you can stay under the water and get a closer look at the fish and other marine life, but it is a completely different world with different laws of physics.  It was interesting discovering new ways of moving around in the water, and feeling like a part of the underwater world around me.  Sebastian sure got it right when he sang, “We got no troubles, life is de bubbles, under the sea!”

Bananas, Flooded Roads and Turtles

Note: I started writing this November 9 so pretend all my references to time are from that day, not today.

Last week, we had more rain.  And by more rain, I mean a lot more rain.  Thanks to Tropical Storm Tomas, we had another round of closed roads and mudslides (can’t get to Manuel Antonio right now), full with a Red Alert and National State of Emergency.  A mudslide in Escazu, a town outside of San Jose, resulted in over 20 deaths.  Many class field trips were cancelled and ISA recommended that students stay in San Jose this past weekend, but my Ecotourism class field trip to Tortuguero was allowed to go because the Caribbean side of Costa Rica was still in pretty good shape.  I can say with certainty now that I am very glad we were able to go on our trip.  This trip is worthy of its own blog post.

At 5:45 am Saturday morning, I found myself sleepily joining my sleepy class at the university to leave for Tortuguero.  One girl’s parents decided they did not want her to go on the trip because of the weather, so she wasn’t there.  Of course, seeing as it was before 6 am on a Saturday, she was not the only one missing.  Two of the three guys in my class did not show up, so there were many girls, our professor and his wife, our guides, and Mike.  Our guide started something on this drive that he would keep up the entire trip: He would address us as “Ladies, and Mike,” then he would laugh to himself, and continue.  This got to be so expected that we all would laugh at him laughing at himself.  So there we were, bright and early and giggling, and on our way to Tortuguero.

Banana plantation

Getting to Tortuguero consists of driving to a city in Limon Province, Caño Blanco from what I could tell, and then switching to a boat to go along the Canals of Tortuguero up into the town.  While a lot of the road was nice and paved, we did eventually have to turn onto bumpy gravel roads after our breakfast stop.  We passed a lot of banana plantations, and even stopped at one to take a mini-tour, take some pictures, and buy baby coconuts for snacking.  We learned that the banana bunches are covered in blue bags to protect them from weather and bugs, and that the blue helps keep animals from trying to take them because there really is not a lot of blue in plant life.  We took some pictures of the washing stations, and said hi to some of the workers.  There was a man with a cart selling baby coconuts that some people bought for the coconut water, but the part I discovered I like is the coconut meat.  The baby ones are a little sweeter and softer than mature ones, and a lot of the people who bought them to drink didn’t like eating them so I got a lot of free coconut!  Yum :)

Cutting the bananas off to rinse them

Then we continued on our way, until we saw that the creek along the road had flooded from all the rain.  For the most part, the flood was away from the road, but then we reached a part where it covered the road.  And I don’t just mean a little bit of water; I mean enough that we were nervous we might not make it.  Well, we did.  Continuing on, we came to many more parts like this where the road was completely flooded, but we also passed cars driving the other way and would ask them how bad it was.  Since they had all made it through, we figured we could too.  At some point during all this, the juice and coffee from breakfast kicked in and I had to pee.  I asked our guide and he said we were only about fifteen minutes away.  Unfortunately, he did not take the dead van blocking the road about 500 feet from our destination into account.  We had to stop in one of the shallower parts of the flooded road because we couldn’t get around the van, and nothing seemed to be happening.  Meanwhile, my bladder was getting quite annoyed with me so I asked the guide and my professor how much longer it would be, and they did not know.  Long story short, I peed behind our van into the water flowing off the side of the road as the class waded to a van on the other side of the roadblock to take us to the boat waiting to leave.  If it weren’t inappropriate, I would have asked for a picture because it was just that interesting of an experience.  Speaking of pictures, I would love to see a picture of the place where we got on the boat on a normal day when it isn’t entirely submerged.  Our van had to drive through more water and we had to jump a little to get from the van to a dry spot on the ramp up to the dock.  We got on our boat, and headed up the river to Tortuguero.

Hmm can we make it?

Flooded boat station

After this adventure, the trip consisted mainly of touring the canals, walking around the park and the village, and seeing a lot of wildlife.  The town was adorable, possibly one of my favorites, and they were having some sort of festival that I never did figure out what it was for.  During the boat rides, we saw a toucan, a few crocodiles, a caiman, some monkeys, some sloths, and many birds.  Apparently it was migration season, so the sky was full of birds just about every time I looked up.  While we were a couple weeks too late to witness sea turtles coming onto shore to lay their eggs, we were lucky enough to see quite a few eggs hatching and the baby turtles making their way to the ocean!  The first day, we only saw a couple and I was already ecstatic because my friends had been to Tortuguero the week before and did not see any turtles, big or small.  However, the next day was amazing.

Town of Tortuguero

First, we went on a long boat ride on which we saw most of the wildlife from the weekend.  Then, to get to where we were eating lunch, we had to walk through a flooded town.  We all took our shoes off/put on flip-flops to walk through the layer of water that covered most of the streets.  That was definitely an experience.  After lunch, we stopped to take a quick walk through the National Park.  While interesting, it was also very hot and humid, the air was full of mosquitoes, and the ground was covered in ants that started climbing up our legs every time we stopped to discuss something we saw.  Overall, we were a very grumpy bunch and could not wait to get back on the boat and just head home.

These guys blend in surprisingly well

Right before it dove in the water

But then we walked out of the forest onto the beach right as what appeared to be an entire nest of turtles had just hatched and were crawling out of their ditch in the sand towards the water.  Excited beyond belief, we followed the bunch of them, cameras in hand, as they scurried to the shoreline.  I couldn’t believe I was seeing this, but I was also saddened by the amount of trash on the beach that they had to crawl over, and by the woman in our group who would pick them up and get in their way despite our guide explicitly telling us not to.  Yes, she was just helping them over tough spots, but when I asked the guide, he said that other than turning them around if they start to crawl in the wrong direction, it’s better to leave them alone because they will make it on their own.  However, despite this, it was an amazing thing to witness before we got back on the boat to head home.

I think I can...  I think I can...

Amazing