General Discomfort

I can't remember where i left off so i will start off in an arbitrary spot in my memory which has failed me with regularity so far on this trip. And i know what some of you may be thinking and no, i haven't been smoking pot on this trip. We woke up to head over to the waterfall by the arenal volcano (which has been hidden in the clouds the entire time we where hanging out in La Fortuna. The waterfall is this nice 70 meter drop into a turquoise pond and a easy hike. The locals realize it is a pretty sweet view and extort about $10 a head just to glimpse at the falls. The hike down the hill to the water fall base was moist and potentially ankle breaking but we made it there with little complaint.

We then took a trip to Monteverde whcih involved taking a car to a boat ot a car on a dirt road, but was supposedly twice as fast as taking the local bus....plus the lake was sweet. (still no views of the arenal volcano). The amuzing thing about this trip was there were 5 people doing this trip, us, a local, and 2 israeli's who we met at the waterfall. The bus and boats could handle maybe 10 people yet 2 different companies managed the trip. As a result, 3 of us were in one boat and the 2 girls were in the other. Monteverde is in the "cloud forests" which means there's almost a perpetual layer of fog, but not sweating my balls of is a plus. Today we took a hike into the forest, saw a small watefall and a monkey. Without a guide it's pretty tough to see any animals but we did ok. Similar to before, i set the alarm for 6:40 PM and we woke up late and had to rush out without all our supplies which made things difficult. There was an area with humming bird feeders and some 200 birds buzzing around. Pretty awesome. Tomorrow we head to the west coast to relax on the beach... Pray for good weather.

Eating and buying food so far has been interesting. Lora and my combination of spanish knowledge pretty much gets us where we need but there are of course the few things they do different. For example, the vegegtable counters require you to give them to someone to weigh. It is similar to europe, except they don't trust you to weigh it yourself. The non-corporate breat goods are often a crapshoot, but overall you end up with something tasty. To manage our budget we are trying to figure out the cheapest way to eat, which means breat, veggies and maybe beans for protein. I am doing ok so far, but we'll se after a while. Hopefully we can get under budget and eat out more, but until then pasta it is!