Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Recap of the past week.

Wow has the time gone by fast here. It is hard to believe that we are already more than half way through the trip and that we only have a whole week left. This week we went to a lot of different activities here in Monteverde.
Over the weekend we went to Manuel Antonio which was a beautiful beach. The public beach we went to on Saturday was a lot of fun and I can now say that I have swam in the Pacific Ocean. I can also say that the ocean at this place had a very strong rip current which was something I had thought I experienced but the current here was much stronger than I had ever felt before. Then Sunday we went to the National Park and saw all kinds of different plants and animals. The one animal that stuck out the most was the sloth that we thought might have had a baby with it. Then when we finally got to the beach there were all of these black dots that were moving along the beach. At first we did not know what to think then when we finally got closer we realized that they were hermit crabs. It was very strange to see all of these hermit crabs just crawling along the beaches.
While we were having fun all weekend we all noticed that we were either thinking in Spanish or having different phrases coming out in Spanish. This made me wonder if the students that come to the United States have that same issue. I found it to be frustrating that my brain was still working on Spanish when all I wanted to do was relax. This is only temporary for me, I can’t imagine this frustrating feeling for the ESL students never going away. If I have a student that is ESL I am going to have to come up with ways to let that student relax otherwise they will just get burnt out.
Sunday night I finally arrive in Monteverde and met my new family. My Papa Tico was all excited to tell me about where he works and all of the different activities that there are here. I found it interesting how different this family and the environment was as compared to my first family.
Later in the week we visited a typical farm which was very interesting. They had bananas, coffee, sugar cane and plantains. It was very interesting to see how coffee is made and how they excreted the sugar water from the sugar cane. Then we were able to make our own candy from the boiled sugar water. Finally before we left the mother of the farm made us this huge buffet of food which was delicious.
It is hard to believe that I had done all of these activities within the first half of the week.

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