Hi everyone!

Welcome to the first entry of my travel blog for my gap semester!

If you don't already know about my semester, you can go to rusticpathways.com and find the "Spanish Immersion and Service" program to see my itinerary and what I'll be doing. I'm going to try to update this blog at least weekly while I'm on my trip.

Everything I've read about travel blogging says that before I leave I should set some goals for my experience and write down a little bit of what I expect so I can go back and read it at the end of my trip. Here goes!

My main goal in this gap semester is really to get a little bit outside of my comfort zone and experience cultures and lifestyles that I haven't before. Part of the reason why I'm not going straight to college is to do some experiential learning instead of just sitting in a classroom. I'm also hoping to get better at Spanish and to help the communities that I'll visit. I'm really looking forward to trying new things, like surfing, trekking, and maybe even skydiving! I'm excited to meet the six other young adults on my trip, and hopefully make some lifelong friends. The biggest things I'm worried about our eating as a vegetarian, the threat of getting sick (I just got all my vaccinations!), living out of a bag for three months, not staying as clean as I'm used to, and meeting the other people on my trip. I don't expect that every day of the next three months will come straight out of paradise, and I'm sure that there will be things that I'm not prepared for, but I know that I am capable of navigating whatever situation life throws at me with the support of the program I'm going on.

The two words that describe how I'm feeling about the trip right now are "nervous" and "excited", which I think is exactly how I'm supposed to be feeling!

Thanks for reading!!

Hola, todos!

(Hello, Everyone!)

I arrived safely in Santo Domingo, the capital city of the Dominican Republic, yesterday afternoon. Fun Fact, Santo Domingo is also the oldest European settlement in the New World, and the first place Christopher Columbus declared a part of Hispaola.

We got to the hotel where I met the group leaders, Alejandro and Sharon, our local tour guide, Jackson, and the other young adults on our trip, Keaton, Rus, Chad, Theodore/Hunter, and Taylor. There's one other girl who's coming on Sunday named Naomi, and she's from the Democratic-Republic of the Congo. Everyone who I've met seems super cool and very interesting! Everyone but Naomi and Alejandro are from the US, but even so we span from Virginia to Southern California and have different experiences up to now and different levels of Spanish understanding/learning. I believe most of them have only taken a couple years of Spanish, so I think I may be at a bit of an advantage there.

We went to eat dinner in Santo Domingo, then headed back to the hotel to go over some basic rules. Everyone described our first impression of the DR in one word, ranging from "festive" to "humid" to "intriguing" (my own!). After that we hung out in Chad and Hunter's room and played Scum, and card game I know from camp. Then Taylor and I went back to our room and talked for a while. She seems like a super interesting and resilient person, and I can't wait to get to know her and everyone else more for the next 3 months!!

In the morning we woke up, showered (I fell in the shower-haha), packed, ate, and went on our way to Rancho Baiguate, the Eco Lodge we'll be staying at for the next 10 days in Jarabacoa. On the way we got some beautiful views of the Cordillera Central mountians, the central mountain range in the DR where most of the countries resources come from. (Fun Fact: Pico Duarte is the tallest mountain in the DR, and also the highest point in the who Carribean). When we got there, we had lunch and did more thorough introductions and talked about ourselves. Everyone said their spirit animals! Mine is a macaroni penguin.

After intros we went on a tour of Rancho Baiguate. They grow herbs like mint, rosemary, and bananas here (Fun Fact: bananas are an herb not a fruit! Also, all bananas of the same species are all technically clones of each other because they reproduce asexually.) They also grow lots of other plants, like macadamia nuts and pineapples and flowers. We got to see the horses, coy fish, and bunnies, and the baby bunnies were tiny and adorable and wrinkly. If you've never seen a baby bunny I suggest google image searching it. They use the bunny poop and plantain leaves to compost, and the compost fertilizes all the plants. They also have a black water filtration system, and we're going to help build another nearby as a service project.

Following the tour, we had some down time (some people went swimming, some napped, I worked on this blog post), and then did three-on-ones where we had a more in depth interview with the group leaders. Then, dinner!

We had dinner at Rancho Baiguate, followed by some more orientation stuff, mainly rules, guidelines, and itinerary. Tomorrow we will start the real work, Spanish classes in the morning and service projects in the afternoon. We follow that schedule for most of the week. This weeks service project will be in Manbao, a valley town in the Cordillera Central mountains where the population of about 1,000 grows squash and other plants. There we will be repairing and expanding an aqueduct so it can bring running water to the people, and later we will be doing a short home stay with members of the community.

Good night all, and Shabbat Shalom from Jarabacoa! Thanks for reading!

Hello again, everyone!

The first full week of the trip has been a great one, we worked on repairing an aqueduct, took Spanish classes, relaxed at the beach, and congealed more as a group.

Saturday was the first non-orientation day of the trip. After breakfast at Rancho Baiguate in Jarabacoa we had our first Spanish lesson with Terry, Brian, and Elanca, an American/Dominican family living in Jarabacoa. We were split up into groups by ability, and Keaton and I were in group 3 (the highest). The first day we spent an hour drilling tenses of Spanish verbs with Terry.

At lunch I took way too many beans by accident, which was funny. Beans, beans, good for the heart! I took a nap between lunch and our first day of service! To get to the service site in Manabao where we are repairing an aqueduct, we took an open-air truck an hour up winding mountain roads. We loaded ten pbc pipes and some shovels and pick axes into the truck with us and drove through Jarabacoa traffic (where red lights and staying on your side of the road are suggestions) up to Manabao. There we met the President of the community, Joselito, who has been working on the aqueduct project for the past 10 years. We also met his 10 year old son, Alberto, and the Mayor of La Vega, the province that Manabao is in. We started to dig the ditch for the pipes to go into, but it started to thunder after a few minutes and we had to drive back to Jarabacoa in the rain in the open air truck! In Jarabacoa I exchanged American dollars for Dominican pesos.

When we got back to the hotel I wanted to go back to the room and take another nap, but Taylor had the key to our room and I couldn't find her so I had to go back to reception and ask for another key, and they didn't speak English so I asked in Spanish! Then I went to take my nap. At 5 we met as a group to talk about ourselves as a community and do some more icebreakers. Then we ate dinner and made a full-value contract (like a Brit Kehillah for my camp friends). After that Chad, Rus and I went night swimming, followed by all of us hanging out in the Cafeteria area waiting for the last student in our group, Naomi, to arrive from the Congo. She is also super awesome, she didn't speak any Spanish but her first language is French and she's a fast learner. She's super nice!

On Sunday, we had Spanish classes again with the same three teachers. With Elanca we listened to a sad song about a man waiting to find out if his girlfriend had been cheating on him, and we changed it from present to future tense. It didn't make a lot of sense in future sense, so it was funny to sing. With Brian we had a great conversation in Spanish about our lives, we talked about studying, siblings, religion, etc. With Terry we played a vowel game that seemed like it was meant much more for beginners at Spanish.

At lunch there was some yummy pesto pasta. After lunch we went to get ready for service, but it started raining so we couldn't go. I took a nice long nap instead, then tried to skype home. When the wifi died I read my book instead. Then we had a Dominican Culture program where we talked about Dominican history, slang, and dancing, and learned to do some dances like Merengue. We didn't learn salsa but we have a salsa class next week in Santo Domingo. After the Dominican culture program we went to dinner, where there were some delicious muffins, and then I talked with Keaton, Hunter, and Shanon for a while before heading back to the room. In the room we had some girl talk and talked about relationships, which is always a fun conversation.

On Monday we realized that it tended to rain in the afternoons, so we switched our schedule around to do service in the mornings and classes in the afternoons. We went back to Manabao in the morning, again with the pick axes and shovels, this time we also brought 4 heavy bags of cement. We worked for two hours there in pairs to dig the trench. One person used the pick axe to loss ten the dirt and the other used the shovel to remove it. I used both the pick axe and the shovel, but the pick axe hurt my back so I like the shovel more. Some local men were also there to help us, their names were Felix and Victor. There wasn't rain that morning so we could really see the mountains, which were beautiful. On the way home from Manabao we stopped in town for Chad to buy a speaker and for me to pee!

When we got back to the hotel we had lunch and I - surprise- napped! Then we had another Spanish class. This time all the groups were together and they had Keaton and I explain how to conjugate in the simple past tense (the Preterite). Terry said that once you could explain something you really knew it, which made me laugh a little because I TA'ed a Spanish 1 class last year that learned the Preterite tense as well. We also practiced singing Spanish songs, like Billy la Bufanda and Viva la Vida and Vamos a la Playa.

I had to leave class a little early to go and get my third rabies shot, which became complicated when we realized that my doctor hadn't written the name of the specific drug on my travel information. So we had to call the hospital, who had to call the doctor, who texted my mom, who called the program, who texted the group leader I was with the name of the drug. We bought the shot at the pharmacy, then went to the emergency room of the local clinic to have it injected. It was interesting to go to the clinic because there was one doctor and a lot of nurses treating a lot of people, but they didn't make us sign in or wait, they just asked to see my prescription and then gave me the shot even though I assume they couldn't read the English. The whole time at the clinic was less than 10 minutes. After I had the shot we went back to the Rancho, where everyone was playing sports with the Rustic Pathways marketing team who happened to be staying in the same place as us. I read my book instead because my arm was sore from the shot. Then we had dinner, followed by a geography/history lecture on the DR, followed by a short night of hanging out and making a playlist to play on Chad's new speaker.

On Tuesday we did service in the morning again. I wore keens and got very muddy while shoveling, so a girl from Manabao helped me clean them off with the water from a broken pipe. Taylor asked how old she was and she said fourteen, though I would have guessed twenty! We finished digging/pick axing the ditch and layed pipes into it before it was time to leave. I was a little lightheaded, so I drank a lot of water and was fine. When we got back to the ranch I showered, discovered I had a bajillion mosquito bites on the back of my legs, then went to lunch.

After lunch we had our last Spanish class with Terry, Brian, and Elanca. We performed the songs we had been practicing the on Monday, and everyone did a really great job. I played Billy in Billy la Bufanda, I couldn't see anything with the scarf over my head! Then we went to the local University to talk with people who were learning English. The idea was that they were supposed to talk to us in English and we were supposed to respond in Spanish, and for the most part I was able to say everything I wanted to and understand their English. The people in the class seemed to be at all levels, one told me he was going to interview next week to be an English teacher, and another only spoke to me in Spanish. My favorite conversation was with three twenty-something ladies who were telling me about their siblings and children. Every time they mentioned a young child I said "aww" and they laughed at me! They said I must really like babies, which was funny.

After class we went back to the Rancho and played sports with the Rustic Pathways marketing team some more. I played volleyball. Well, I tried to play volleyball, but I wasn't really very good. Chad, Naomi, and one of the marketing guys named Stan were especially nice to me, they taught me how to serve the ball and they made a super big deal every time I hit it and didn't lose the point (which was only like twice). There was also one lady there who thought it was really cute every time I tried to hit the ball and missed, and she hugged me a lot of times. After volleyball we had dinner, went over the plan for Wednesday, and swam in the pool until it started to lightning and then we hung out in the cafeteria. Then Naomi and I went back to the room and talked about existential things and American politics, then went to bed.

Wednesday was the first day we broke from the service/Spanish class schedule. In the morning we went white water rafting on part of the Yaque del Norte river, the longest river in the country. We split up into boys and girls (Chad didn't go so they were even numbers) and went down the river! The guide told us the names of the rapids as we were approaching them, ranging from "Toilet" to "Graveyard" to "Monica Lewinsky". He hopped out of the raft at one point, climbed way up onto a tall rock, and did a backflip off of it. The river was beautiful, there were lots of trees hanging over and birds around (although no great blue herons that I noticed, dad). The guide did throw both Shanon and I into the the water at different (gentler) times by literally picking us up by the life jacket and hurling us over the side of the raft. It was super fun.

After rafting, we went back to the hotel, packed weekend bags, ate lunch, and got in the van to go to the beach! We arrived 3 hours later in Sosa, a beach town on Playa Plata. We went to the beach for about an hour before dinner. The water was the perfect temperature, and salty enough that it wasn't hard to float but not so salty that it stung. There were some rocks that we jumped off of into the ocean (less than 10 feet, per Rustic Pathways rules) and I jumped twice. Watching the guys dive and flip off of the rocks was really fun too :) After the beach we went to the hotel, where I showered, then we ate dinner and hung out by the pool for a few hours in the dark listening to music and looking at the stars and talking. Keaton danced a little, and it was super comical and awesome.

We slept in until 10am on Thursday morning, then ate breakfast next to the incredibly blue ocean of Playa Plata (the silver beach). We spent the day at the beach, swimming and floating in the refreshing saltwater and laying under the beach umbrella, talking and reading. Naomi took her GoPro in the water and we dunked under with it on her head. Rus, Shanon, and I had a long conversation about scuba diving and emergency procedures. We tried to give everyone spirit water animals, but that proved really hard. For lunch we had pizza and pasta and salad, then we went back to the hotel for a nap (I face timed with Maya and Mom) then back to the beach for more fun in the sun! The beach we were at, Playa Alicia, had an Israeli flag flying in honor of the Jewish community in Sosa. During World War II, the DR accepted Jewish refugees even though most other countries would not (tbt to my junior thesis!!).

After a yummy family-style dinner next to the ocean where we talked about the lunar calendar and manners, we had a discussion about the differences between being a tourist and a traveler. We talked about the environmental, economic, and cultural influences of travel and how we wanted to be remembered by the people with whom we will cross paths. Then Naomi, Chad, Keaton, Rus, and I hung out in the food area and told jokes and danced.

Friday morning we had our last breakfast by the sea and then got back in the van to return to Jarabacoa. We passed a public university where people were picketing to ask the government for more money for the university. At a red light, a boy who looked like he was 12 years old jumped on our windshield and cleaned the window off! The driver gave him a tip.

When we got back to Rancho Baiguate in Jarabacoa, we had a Facebook Live event with some people on the marketing team for Rustic Pathways, which just means a video that was broadcast live over Facebook. You can watch it below if you're interested. It was really fun to video and the people we were working with kept complimenting us. I got to talk with the social media manager for the company, which was really cool after the LigerBots media work I did last year. After the video, I took a nap and then we met as a group to go over the plan for next week, which is outlined broadly below.

Next week:

Saturday-Monday - we will be in homestays in Manabao, the girls are all staying together with a family with two daughters, and none of them speak English. I'm super excited to practice Spanish and learn about their lives. In the mornings we will be working on some service projects as well. Know that I will be completely offline during this homestay, meaning I will be unreachable September 17-19.

Monday-Friday - we will be in Santo Domingo again, taking Spanish classes in the mornings and learning about GMOs and public health issues in the Dominican Republic in the afternoons. Hopefully we will take a Salsa class too!

Hi, All!

Week 2 of my trip has been awesome! From our first homestay in Manabao to learning about Dominican public health in Santo Domingo to more Spanish classes, it's been a action-packed seven days.

Saturday was the first day we spent in homestay in Manabao. We drove in the morning up the mountain in the same open-air truck that had brought us to service, stopping along the way at the grocery story to buy some snacks. We got there a little late, so the host families had gone to work and were going to return in half an hour. During that half hour, we played with some of the children from the local community. A bunch of the guys went to play basketball and the girls went swimming in the river. There were three little girls, two who were eight years old and one who was ten. They told us about their brothers and sisters and about learning English in school, and they loved playing with some binoculars Taylor had brought with her. They went swimming in the same river we went white water rafting in last week, but further upstream where it was shallower.

Soon, our host families showed up and we got to meet them and go back to their houses. Our host mother's name is Orgullia, and she and her mother-in-law made us some pasta, rice, beans, and broiled vegetables for lunch. We sat at their kitchen table and Orgullia told us about her life in Spanish, and I translated it the best I could because Naomi and Taylor's Spanish isn't quite as far along as mine. When she was 14 her mother and father separated, and her father went off with another woman. She had a sister who was 12, and brothers who were 16 and 7 years old at the time. They had to wake up early to work to support themselves after her father left. Soon she moved to Jarabacoa, the city that is nearby, and when she was 16 she was married to her husband and had her first child that same year. Now she is 32 and she has three kids, aged 12, 13, and 14, and she works two jobs in addition to hosting volunteers for Rustic Pathways. One of her jobs is the secretary at the secondary school in their community, and the other is with an organization that helps teenaged mothers learn trades so they can support themselves and their families. She said her job is to visit the mothers or soon-to-be mothers all over the region. She says they are often seen as worthless or invisible, and thus maltreated. As if all that wasn't enough, she also wants to go back to school for psychology, even though she said it's very hard to learn and her husband doesn't want her to go because she already has enough education for what she's doing. Taylor asked if she had any advice for us, and she told us not to have children, or at least not until we were older. When she was my age she already had 3 daughters. We told her we thought she was very inspirational and resilient, and she asked us what we were going to study. After lunch, we took a nap in the double be we all shared there, which I think was one of her daughters. All of her daughters were at the beach this weekend. We were going to go to an agriculture meeting with her at 3, but we slept through it.

I woke up first, and I read until Naomi woke up. Then we walked around outside the house a little bit, there were a lot of people around the front, and Orgullia told us they were bringing some extra fruits to the house to bring it to the Haitian border. She gave us some pineapple to eat and we woke up Taylor so she could eat some too. Then Naomi, Taylor, Orgullia, and I walked down to the river together to see it. It was soooooo pretty! There were trees all around and the water rushing around the rocks, with mountains in the background. There were three pigs tied to trees nearby and lots of chickens and chicks walking and flying around. While we were there, Alejandro and Shannon came to visit and to see how things were going. Naomi took a lot of photos and I'm super excited to see how they come out.

Alejandro and Shannon left, and we went back up to Orgullia's mother-in-law's house. They looked like they were about to kill a chicken to eat, so Naomi and Taylor went to watch, but then they didn't kill any chickens so the three of us took a walk down the hill past some houses, then came back for dinner. We ate an eggplant dish with avocado which I didn't love but it was fine to eat, and Naomi and Taylor loved it a lot. Then we talked in Spanish about dreams, and after Naomi took a shower and Taylor and I journaled before bed.

Sunday morning we woke up and ate a breakfast of papaya, eggs, and chocolate with Orgullia's two daughters, who were 12 and 14, and then went to finish the aqueduct service work nearby. The younger daughter, Annabelle, came with us. It was fun to see the other students on our trip after spending almost a day in separate houses. We finished connecting the pipes, then covered them in the ground by filling in the trench we dug last week. After service, we headed back to the house and talked with the daughters about star signs and friendship bracelets, then ate rice and beans and avocado together for lunch. After lunch Naomi and Taylor took a nap, and I showered and talked with the two daughters and a 4-year-old they were babysitting. The girl was talking at me in rapid-fire Spanish about different animals, and she sang to me in Spanish and I sang to her in English.

After Naomi and Taylor woke up, the whole family an a bunch of their friends and the three of us went to a different part of the river, further down from where we were yesterday and possibly even more beautiful. We jumped off rocks into the river, then floated in the current through rapids and ended up in an area with no rocks and a gentler current. It was beautiful. Then we got out, walked back to where we had started, and sat in the sun on the rocks before eating some rice and beans for dinner next to the warm embers over which it had been cooked. Then we went back to our host house and sat in the living room for a while. We went to stargaze, and there was no light pollution so there were So. Many. Stars. The little girl hopped up on my back and I carried her around like I was a horse. Then they drove a car up and we all hung out in the yard and danced under the stars with family friends. I didn't dance much because I had a little cold, but it was really fun anyway and I got to translate/third-wheel on Taylor and Naomi and some Dominican guys. Then we got in bed and had girl talk. Then the guy knocked on the door to give Naomi his phone number, but it was really weird and our host mom said some stuff to him in Spanish and I think she was telling him off.

Monday we said goodby to our host family and left Manabao in the open air truck. We took some Polaroids with the family first, and they gave us some corn-based hot chocolate, which was a little weird because there were pieces of corn in it and I'm not sure where the chocolate came from, but overall pretty good. We went back to Rancho Baiguate and packed up all our stuff, ate lunch, and reconnected with wifi. Then we got in the van (without Jackson, he'll join us tomorrow) and drove to the Hostel in Santo Domingo, where I got a top bunk! Then we chilled there for a while before dinner.

For dinner we went to a "fancy" Dominican restaurant, which was on a cliff next to the ocean. It was lightninging, so the waves were illuminated which was really pretty. Our driver, Jos�, had his birthday so the waiters at the restaurant sang to him and played some instruments, it was very festive and cool. I ate pasta, lemon juice, and passion fruit sorbet. Then we headed back to the hostel to rest after a full day of traveling. The beds were really squeaky though, so nobody slept very well.

Tuesday was our first full day in Santo Domingo. We woke up and ate breakfast in the hostel, which wasn't very good. We all share a bathroom in the hostel, and Chad broke the shower, but I had already showered. Then we went to Spanish classes. Keaton and I were in a group again, this teacher's name is Dilcia. She gave us a placement test that the Spanish 1 class I TA'ed would have aced by the end of the year, and proceeded to teach us about stem-changing verbs in the present tense (which is pretty basic for anyone who doesn't speak Spanish). She also showed us some YouTube videos of her singing, and that was a little weird as well. We ate lunch at the Spanish language school and then headed back to the Hostel where we napped most of the afternoon. I read for a while, then napped, then was woken up by Chad's speaker.

After we napped, we went to Cueva de Los Tres Ojos, which is a deep cave in Santo Domingo where there are 3 freshwater lakes fed by an underwater stream, and one that is fed by the ocean. They're really beautiful. After that we went to a lighthouse in Santo Domingo which was shaped really strangely. It had the names of some countries written around it and quotes written really large on the walls. The quotes were all about how the Dominican Republic should belong to the Catholic Church and how incredible it was that Christopher Colombus discovered it for the Spanish crown. It was a terrible justification for taking over from the native peoples, and it hardly even mentioned them at all. From there, we had a lovely view of the sunset over the Santo Domingo skyline.

For dinner we went to a buffet-style restaurant where all the food was individually priced per pound, which is even more complicated then it sounds. I think it would have been good if the food hadn't been pretty much all meat. After dinner we went back to the Hostel. There we had a discussion to help frame the rest of our service in the DR. We talked about the UN Millennium Goals, which were goals the UN made to improve the world, and the goal was to complete them by 2015. Then last year (in 2015) they made a new set of goals called the Sustainable Development Goals. These goals were all based on creating a more environmentally sustainable, equal human rights world. Then we talked about public health and how it's a basic human right and what it means and why we should care. After the discussion we hung out in the hostel for a while.

Wednesday morning I woke up feeling sick, so I opted to sleep in the hostel instead of going to Spanish class. While I was there, a lady kept trying to open the door to our room because she thought it was the bathroom. When it was time for lunch, I piled into the van with Chad and Rus (who had also opted out of Spanish class) and we headed to the Spanish school to eat lunch with the group. The teachers were shocked when I ate only rice and beans. After lunch we went to pick up Naomi at the embassy, where she had been working on getting a visa to enter Peru. While we were there, Chad saw a Baskin Robbins but we didn't have time to go.

In the afternoon we went to ZooDom, the Dominican Republic's national zoo. We took a train around the zoo and saw all the animals while the tour guide told us facts about them in Spanish over a loudspeaker. Then we hung out for a while in the snake area, and we watched a boa constrictor hunt in it's cage. It was huge, and watching it move was SUPER cool. I really wanted to watch it eat, but it didn't eat while we were there. Then in rained so we had to leave, and we stood in the rain while waiting for the driver to come back. I really wanted to play Wa, but nobody else was into the whole back pocket games thing so we didn't. Then we went back to the hostel where I skyped with Maya and Mom.

We walked to dinner along the main commercial drag of Santo Domingo, which reminded me of a cross between Ben Yehuda street in Jerusalem, Quincy Market in Boston, and Pearl Street in Boulder. I had pasta and fried plantains for dinner, then bought some postcards on the way back. Back at the Hostel I wrote my ten postcards and kept my journal before going to bed.

Thursday was a long day. It started with pancakes and fruit for breakfast in the hostel before we headed off to a public hospital to meet with a doctor named Dr. Gonzalez. The hospital we visited was 52 years old and funded by the government. It didn't look like a hospital I'd ever been to, there was no bathroom and the whole place was pretty dirty and crowded. The people who go to it are mostly the poorest of the poor and very old people, most of their patients were born before the hospital was started. These people's health care is payed for by the government, they only pay for somethings like certain lab procedures and big surgeries. The hospital has 23 specialties, which is the most of any hospital in the Dominican Republic. My nose started to run like crazy while Dr. Gonzalez was talking about the hospital's history, so I stepped out for a minute. When I came back, he was telling the group about how the mind and the mental/emotional/social state of a person effects their physical wellbeing, and about how society as a whole is responsible for public health. It made sense for a while, but then we got off track and he was preaching in Spanish about how abortion, pornography, and birth control were all huge problems, and everyone got pretty confused. By that point I was also feeling really sick, mostly congested and nauseous, so the group leaders told me to go rest in the hostel instead of Spanish class again.

In the hostel, I read for a while then took a Benadryl and fell asleep. I woke up a while later and my cheeks felt kind of weird, almost like my mouth was swollen, and I couldn't breath through my nose but it wasn't because of congestion. I sat up and Taylor came in, and told me my lip was really swollen. I looked in the mirror, and it looked like I had had whatever Kylee Jenner pumps into her lips pumped into my whole face and my hands. My skin and scalp were really itchy. I went to show the group leaders, and they said it looked like I had an allergic reaction to something I ate, but I hadn't eaten anything extraordinary recently. Jackson took me to the private hospital emergency room to check it out. On the way, it got really hard to breathe. The private hospital was really nice, it looked the way I imagine a hospital looking in my mind. We waited for a long time to go in, then we waited for the doctor to come. By the time we were done waiting, I was breathing fine and the swelling and itching were all but gone. They took some blood and a urine sample, so then we waited for those results to come back. The results didn't say anything helpful, so they wanted to do some more intensive blood work and take a sonogram of my stomach. It was pretty unclear why they wanted to do those things, so after talking with Mom and Dad I decided against them. Then we paid for the doctor visit (it was super expensive) and left the hospital.

While I was at the hospital, the group had visited an NGO for women's health, and then had a conversation about Machismo and what it means. I met up with them at dinner, and it felt really good to go back into the group. They said they missed me. For dinner we went to a restaurant called Jade Restaurant, it was Chinese food. I finally got to eat some tofu, which I've been missing for the last two weeks! After dinner we went to Baskin Robbins for ice cream, where I ordered for a bunch of the other students. At the end, one of the group leaders Alejandro asked how we did in Spanish, and the barista said I got a 100% but a couple of the other kids "quemanlos". Then we went back to the Hostel and I talked on the phone for a while, hung out, journaled, and went to bed.

Friday morning was out last Spanish class in the DR, and I ended up in a private lesson. Dilcia, the teacher, and I went over the differences between Preterite and Imperfect past tenses and when to use the Conditional and the Subjunctive, which was a helpful refresher. She also told me a lot of home remedies, for allergies and for acne. We ate lunch at the Spanish school and headed back to the Hostel, where we packed up everything to go to the Batelles.

In the Batelles, which is a poor area of the country on the southern coast where there are a lot of Haitian immigrants, we are staying with two nuns who own a house called Ascala. We'll be there for the next 10 days. We're staying in dormitory style rooms, and all the power in the house is solar. The two nuns are both Brazilian born, and they seem super duper nice!! When we got there, we went over the plan for next week.

Next Week:

Saturday-Tuesday - Wilderness First Aid (WFA) training in the mornings with an American instructor named Steven, and community service in the afternoons.

Wednesday-Thursday - Community service all day!

Friday - Beach day!!

Hey, party potatoes!!

Week 3 of the trip was long, tiring, and fulfilling. We got WFA certified, helped construction on a black-water filtration system, saw the poverty in the Bateyes, constructed the walls for a latrine, learned about ASCALA, and survived Hurricane Matthew!

Our first full day in the Bateyes was Saturday. We started off our morning in Ascala with the first of our 4 4-hour WFA (Wilderness First Aid) certification courses. We talked about general principals of Wilderness First Aid, CPR, and general emergency scenarios. Then we split into three groups of three, and each person got a chance to act out emergency situations as a primary responder, secondary responder, and as the patient themselves. All of the scenarios today were CPR scenarios, the first one was simple CPR, for the second one we had to transport the patient to perform CPR, for the third one our patients vomited while we were administering CPR (they held oatmeal in their mouths and then spit it out), and for the last one the patient was bleeding out from a leg wound (with fake blood). The responders never knew what the scenario was beforehand, so each time we had to locate the person playing the patient, assess the situation etc, then decide what to do about it. It was really interesting and even fun, although the oatmeal vomit grossed everyone out and the fake blood sent all the guys into fits of period jokes.

After the WFA class, we had lunch outside then took a nap before service. The service we're doing at Ascala is working on a black-water treating system. Black water is water that has human excrement and urine in it, and the treating system cleans it at least 90% so it can go safely into the river or, at ASCALA, irrigate crops. The system was mostly built by Rustic Pathways summer program students, so our job now is to fill in the area around the tank with dirt. That job sounds simple and easy, and it is simple, but the sun here is really really hot and it rains most nights, which means the earth is wet. It also feels more like clay then dirt or mud, which means it's super hard and heavy to shovel. We ended up using a pickaxe to loosen the soil and then shoveled out the drier bits and scooped out the wet, clay-like bits with our bare hands. I shoveled for a while, then when I got blisters I joined the bare-hands crew. Bare hands felt much more productive than the shovel, and I felt surprisingly calm the whole time. There were a group of local, first-generation Haitian immigrants working with us, who spoke French to Naomi and made fun of us in Spanish. After service I took an awesome shower, there was no hot water but I was hot from work so it was refreshing and amazing. After everyone had showered, a group of us walked 5 minutes to a Colmado, a little Dominican convenience store, and bought Chinola (Passion Fruit) juice for 50 cents a cup. Then we had dinner as a group.

After dinner we had a discussion on the Bateyes as a region and about Ascala. If you don't want to read about the Bateyes and Ascala feel free to skip this paragraph. The Bateyes were originally set up as shanty towns for Haitian workers to live while harvesting sugar cane in the DR 6 months a year. As time went on, more of the Haitian workers started families in the DR and had children who then grew up in the DR as well. The Bateyes are the group of neighborhoods in this area of the country where these mostly first- and second-generation Haitian immigrants live, now for the whole year instead of just 6 months. A huge issue in these areas is that they haven't been improved on from the original shanty towns meant as only semi-permanent housing. Another giant issue for these communities is documentation. The DR doesn't have naturalized citizenship, so even people who have been here for 20 years or who were born here are still undocumented. The house we are staying in is part of ASCALA, which stands for Asociaci�n Scalabriniana al Servicio de la Movilidad Humana (in English, the Scalabrinian Association for Service for Human Mobility). Ascala is a world-wide Order of Catholic Nuns who work in migrant communities to help them. Here in the Bateyes, the ASCALA house is run by two Brazillian nuns named Maria and Marisete who work on a variety of projects in the nearby Bateyes, including documentation/legal rights and education programs (teach a man to fish types of things). The black-water treating system we worked on is at the Ascala house, but it is also a trial run with the goal being that they can be implemented in the Bateyes themselves to irrigate more sugar cane. After that discussion, we hung out for a while and went to bed.

Sunday was Shannon and Alejandro's day off! Other than the fact that they weren't there, it was a pretty standard day. We started off with WFA training, today we talked about how to conduct a field physical exam, and how to find and provide immediate treatment for issues with the "big 3" (the nervous, respiratory, and circulatory systems). The scenarios we enacted were 1) that someone had fallen off their horse and their brain was swelling 2) someone had fallen a few feet off a tree and had shock and 3) there had been a cooking fire explosion resulting in a range of respiratory issues. The class was informative, but it felt reeeeeeally long, especially because it was so hot at ASCALA.

After class we had lunch with the nuns. I complimented the woman who cooks food here on her pants, and she told me her name was Johana. While we were having a break, it started to thunder so our service work was cancelled. That meant that we hung out from 1:30 until 5 at ASCALA, and I mostly slept and read, and contemplated but decided against shaving my head. At 5, we headed into town to walk on the pier and go out for dinner. The pier was really pretty, the water reflected over the ocean and there were some local boys jumping off and swimming around. There were also some big rocks, and it was really cool to watch the waves crash over them and then see the water streaming out of the crevices, only to be filled again with ocean spray. For dinner, we went out to a good Mexican restrurant. I had beans and a quesadilla. Then we went back to ASCALA and stargazed and hung out before bed.

On Monday morning, we continued with the WFA training course. We talked through allergies and anaphylaxis, burns, transporting potentially spine damaged patients, and cleaning wounds. Everyone transported me as a patient, which means they lifted me up in the air and carried me a few feet, it was pretty cool. The scenarios we played out were 1) that a patient had fallen off a bike and hurt their wrist and head, causing a traumatic brain injury (I was the patient for that one, and I had retrograde amnesia which was fun to act out) and 2) that there had been a bunch of bees and they stung a bunch of people (I accidentally gave a patient a fake epi pen when she didn't need it in that one-oops!).

After class, we had lunch and some free time before service. At service, we were filling in the same pit, and also carrying a bunch of rocks. Shannon, Taylor, Hunter, and I were transporting the rocks, and we had a great system going where Taylor would fill up the buckets, Shannon and I would carry them the 10 feet we were transporting them, and Hunter would lower them into the pit. We all got so dirty that after service, I wore my clothes into the shower then hung them out to dry. We had some more free time, and I went downstairs. Johana (the cook) found me and she gave me a pair of leggings she said she bought for me as a gift after I said I liked her pants! At first I thought something got lost in translation, but Samuel (another guy who works for Rustic Pathways) told me it was like a thank you for coming gift and it was really nice, so I thanked Johana profusely then went to dinner.

After dinner at ASCALA, we tried to watch the Presidential debate. The wifi wasn't really working at all though, so we couldn't. Shannon tried to drum up some interest it playing a game like Mafia or cards, but there wasn't really much there. It was just another night, this time without the internet. I was a bit homesick. We ended up having some girl talk though, and our room was sweltering so we ended up dragging our mattresses on the porch and sleeping out there, doused in bug spray.

Tuesday morning was our last WFA training course! We talked through a whole range of health problems, from UTIs to appendicitis to pinkeye to overhydration. We also went over some legal stuff, like when you are obligated to help and what your obligations are. Then we took the 10 question test (almost everyone got a perfect score) and got our certifications.

After the WFA course, we had lunch and I read though the presidential debate. Then I took a nap, but when I woke up for service I was lightheaded and my head hurt so I stayed in bed all afternoon until dinner and hydrated and ate almonds. After dinner, we had a special optional lecture on altitude sickness from Stephen (the WFA teacher). I was still exhausted, so I went right to bed.

Wednesday morning we had service again, carrying gravel and dumping it into the pit for the black water filter system. Shannon explained to me that the way it works is that there are different sized particles in the tank, with the big rocks on the top followed by gravel, sand, and fine sand. In the fine sand, they will plant special aquatic plants that eat bacteria, aka poop. Then the black water will come into the system, and the water will sink through the sand and gravel and rocks to the bottom, where it drains out to be used to water crops. After an hour of service, I felt really lightheaded again so I had to sit out. I was really scared that when I stood up, I'd pass out. Taylor walked me up the stairs and I slept for an hour before lunch, where I still felt shakes but better. After lunch I skyped with Mom, and gradually felt better.

For our afternoon service, we talked through and planned for a day camp that we're running in a nearby Bateye called Monte Coco. The day camp is scheduled for next Saturday (tomorrow when I post this entry), and I'll talk more about it in next weeks post. I'm super duper excited because it will be total immersion and running camp for 7-14 year olds is something I feel like I know how to do pretty well. After our planning session, we headed to the pool where I didn't swim (it was actually kind of chilly) and ate some French fries instead.

We went back to ASCALA for dinner, and then had a talk about feelings. We sat in a circle and threw an orange around, asking and answering questions about how we felt about the trip, both what had happened so far and what was coming up. After that full group discussion, I had my second 3-on-1 with Shannon, Jackson, and Alejandro to talk about the same thing in a more personal light.

On Thursday morning, we did our community service work in La Jagua, another nearby Bateye. We were helping a local family build a latrine, which is a huge sanitary benefit. The family we were helping was an old woman, her daughter, and her grandson. The pit for the latrine had already been dug and finished with cement, so we were building the walls. We mixed cement and used it to pave the cinderblock walls. It felt really good to be back in the fray of service, and especially to be doing a service project that was building up instead of down! My favorite part of the morning was lining the cinderblocks with cement before the next stack was added.

We went back to ASCALA for lunch and a nap, then headed back to La Jagua for more service. We were doing the same work, and by the end of the afternoon we had actually finished laying the cinderblocks for the walls! It was the most visible service work we've done so far in that we could really see what was accomplished. While we were there in the afternoon, a bunch of neighborhood kids were hanging around to watch us work and talk with us. There was a group of girls who pulled Taylor out to do her hair in cornrows, and when I came over to see what was happening a girl named Marian braided half my head and then took it out and put my hair half-up with one of their hair bands, which they had me keep at the end. Then we all went and played a version of baseball that didn't make full sense, but it was still fun!

After service, we had dinner and a shower at ASCALA before a talk with Maria and Marisette, the nuns who work here. They told us more about ASCALA, their work here, and why they became nuns. The conversation was really moving because the two nuns are such incredible people who have dedicated their lives to helping others, currently people in the Bateyes, and they are doing so much to help but there's so much to do that they still feel like it's not enough. They kept saying how grateful they were that we had come to see what they are doing and bear witness to the lives of the people in the Bateyes, and they said their own government would do neither of those things because they don't care. They told us about a community of people who the sugar cane company had displaced from good homes that they owned, and sent to worser homes and told they had to pay rent to the companies and the people lacked the confidence to argue. They told us about elderly people who are alone for a variety of reasons and walk ten miles for food from ASCALA that the nuns aren't able to provide because there's not enough in their budget. Maria told us that "si no vives a servir, no serves a vivir" which means "if you don't live to serve, you don't serve to live," which I think is a testament to how much these women have given up to help others and the fulfillment they feel in that. For more info about ASCALA, you can go to ASCALA.org and translate the page.

Friday we went to las Cuevas de la Marvilla, literally translating the Caves of Wonders. It's a really old limestone cave with stalagmites and stalactites, and it was super duper cool! We walked around above the caves first and looked at the plants that are native to this area of the DR. Then we went down into the cool dark caves. There were lights illuminating limestone pillars, which our guide told us grow at 1 cm/100 years. We could hear the constant drip of water from the top of the cave, and we saw restored cave art drawn by the Tainos, the people indigenous to this island. They used the caves as a burial ground, a shelter from tropical storms, and a place for their medicine men to have rituals and fasts. When we left the caves, we saw where the park is keeping iguanas, which are protected in this country. There were so many iguanas!! Baby iguanas, grownup iguanas, iguanas napping, iguanas chasing each other, iguanas mating.

After las Cuevas de la Marvilla, we went to lunch at an Italian restaurant. I had linguine pomodoro. After lunch we were supposed to go to the beach, but Hurricane Matthew (Hurac�n Mateo) had just become class 3 and the tides were too dangerous. We went to the supermarket and I tried to ask where candles were, but I didn't know the word so I kept saying "it's the things where you put fire and it makes light, and on your birthday you" and pantomiming blowing out birthday candles until the salesperson understood. If you're wondering, "candles" in Spanish is "velas." Then we went back to the hotel for a little bit to put our stuff down and Naomi, Chad, Rus, Keaton, and I went to the pool with Shannon and Alejandro.

After the pool, we had Shabbat dinner in honor of the last Shabbat in this Jewish year. We lit the birthday candles I bought earlier, and drank slightly frozen grape juice from the freezer and ate white bread because there was no Challah, and it felt really awesome to be able to celebrate and have everyone wait for me to sing the blessings. We also sent our Shabbat light to different places and people in our lives, which was really cool.

Next Week:

Saturday - Run Kids camp in Monte Coco

Sunday-Tuesday - Juan Dolio (the beach)

Wednesday - Santo Domingo

Thursday - Travel to Costa Rica

Friday - first full day at Earth University

Shabbat Shalom!

I landed safely yesterday in Costa Rica, and am writing from EARTH University, discussed later. Overall, week 4 of my trip was fun, lazy, and interesting. We ran a kids camp for children in a Bateye called Monte Cocoa, watched the news during Hurricane Matthew, and traveled to EARTH University in Costa Rica. I would like everyone to know that I will be off wifi from tomorrow (Oct 8) until Oct 19, but I am still planning to post my blog updates weekly on Fridays.

Saturday was one of the best days so far, we went into a Bateye near ASCALA called Monte Coca to run a "kids camp" for the local children. The group was split into 3 groups and they rotated between art with Naomi and Taylor, sports with Chad, Rus, and Keyton, and back-pocket games with me. Hunter was supposed to do back-pocket games with us, but he was sick so he was in the clinic. Art and Sports were more straightforward, so some of the kids skipped my station which was cool because it meant I had a smaller group to work with at any given time. We made a human rainstorm, played the paper game (a Hebrew school favorite, but we used Spanish and English words instead of English and Hebrew), cat and mouse, wa, tag, etc. It was So. Much. Fun! The kids already knew some of the games, and they were so into it the whole time. I had said beforehand that I was confident I could entertain kids for 2 hours (especially after working as a counselor this summer), but I was nervous about doing it with kids who speak only Spanish and Creole. It was fine though, because m Spanish is best when I'm relaxed and they understood my pantomiming when I didn't know how to say something. At the end, we took a picture and I carried a little girl around on my shoulders while cleaning up. On the way to ASCALA for lunch we stopped and had Chinola (passion fruit) juice.

After lunch, we went back to Monte Coca. We hung out for a little bit on a basketball court, throwing a ball around and I let kids climb on my back and shoulders. One girl started to teach me a song in Spanish that seemed like "rain rain go away", but then it started to rain so we went inside. Inside, we watched some Spanish videos about children's rights (like the rights to protection, love, education, inclusion, health, etc) and about protecting the environment. The kids told us in Spanish what they thought the rights meant and drew pictures representing rights. They had some trouble sharing the crayons, but not too much. One girl was especially vocal while we were talking, and she seemed super smart. One guy asked me if I was from Spain and then asked me why someone from the US would speak Spanish. After it stopped raining, we went outside and played zip zap zop, human knot (which was mayhem), and duck duck goose. Then we took one more photo of all of us, and headed back to ASCALA for dinner.

At dinner, some issues involving certain members of our group being racially, religiously, and generally insensitive came to a head, and they had to have conversations with our group leaders about making other people uncomfortable. Then, because I was the main person in discomfort, the group leaders came up to apologize and told me I was in the right to be upset. After that whole ordeal, we had a bonfire on a patch of sand on the lawn at ASCALA. It was a warm night, and it felt really nice to have a bonfire on Havdallah like we do at camp. Jackson sang to us, and showed us a spoken-word thing that was kind of a song from last year's gap semester, which felt like it belonged to another trip but it was still pretty cool. We all talked about our pets, and then Shannon, Naomi, and I talked for a while more and sang some campfire songs under the stars.

We got to sleep in on Sunday morning! In fact, Sunday as a whole was a very lazy day. We packed in the morning and left ASCALA (One of the nuns, Maria, told us we weren't allowed to leave and hugged us goodbye). We got to Bayahibe around 2pm, and checked into our hotel. I shared a room with Taylor at that hotel, Naomi got her own room. We walked to the beach and hung out there for a while. I found some pretty shells, which made me think of making shell necklaces with my grandma (Dabi) when I was little. Then we stopped by the grocery store and went back to the hotel before dinner. I took my first shower with hot water in 10 days and shaved, which felt wonderful. Then we went to dinner. It was really weird that night to be sitting in the Dominican Republic at dinner eating regular food instead of going to Dorshei Tzedeck services at Gann and eating round challah and apples and honey. I did eat a round piece of yuca bread, which was nice, and I drank some grape juice. Then we went back to the hotel to go over the plan for the next day and go to bed. Taylor and I stayed up talking about Hamilton for a little, then went to sleep.

Monday we were supposed to go on a Catamaran, but because of Hurricane Matthew the DR government banned sea travel, so we planned to go Kayyaking in the mangroves instead, but it rained. We ended up wandering around a mall for a few hours and eating lunch there (I hadn't realized how much I missed pizza). Then we went back to the hotel, where I listened to audio recordings of the shofar blasts and Rabbi Toba's d'var torah, then read for a while. We also had laundry done before dinner. At dinner we did some conversation starters (like "name one thing about Costa Rica that you know" "What are 5 fun facts about the person next to you" and "What's something interesting about one of your grandparents"). After dinner, we had 15 minutes of free time which I spent listening to the three-year-old son of the hotel owner tell me the backstory of the episode of Curious George he was watching in Spanish, which was incredibly and unsurprisingly adorable. Then we had a long conversation about the upcoming month in Costa Rica, touching on schedule, cultural differences, etc. During that conversation, a fluffy black dog that belongs to the hotel owner came and sat on my lap and reminded me of Jazzy. Then I went to bed.

Hurricane Matthew was still in the same place on Tuesday, so we couldn't go on the catamaran or go sea kayaking. Instead, we went in a van to Punta Cana and ate lunch there. I had ravioli, which was great because I really wanted some ravioli. When we got back, Shannon took me to the clinic (I've been having a little bit of diarrhea, not a huge deal) and the doctor is having me be a vegan and avoid fried foods and lettuce for six days. Then we headed back to the hotel, where I read and hung out until dinner. We went to a woman named Frita's house for dinner, and she brought us food and it was delicious. Shannon said it was not only her favorite food in Bayahibe, but in fact her favorite food in the whole country. After dinner we had a conversation about the DR, since it was the last full night we spent there. We talked about our first impressions, current impressions, and most memorable moments.

Wednesday was long! I woke up before everyone to go back to the clinic for a blood test, then headed back to the hotel where we packed and ate a light breakfast before driving back to Santo Domingo. In Santo Domingo, we had lunch (we saw a girl taking Quinceera pictures) and then did the very abbreviated version of the historical tour. We saw the church, which is the oldest church in this hemisphere, and then Christopher Columbus's house. We talked about how the root of the word "colonize" is from "Cristobal Colon", which is "Christopher Columbus" in Latin. After our abbreviated walking tour, we had some free time to shop and wander around. I bought a few souvenirs and gifts (no spoilers!), but not many because my ATM card wasn't working and I was low on cash. Naomi and I walked around together too, and we gave a man dressed up like Michael Jackson some change so he sang to us and danced. Then we bought Chinola juice.

After that, we went to dinner at a fancy Dominican place. I had rice and beans, and we watched some performers dance salsa in the restaurant. The woman was wearing a sparkly yellow skirt that swirled around in the limited light, and both of them looked so graceful. In the second dance, they took turns standing on a bottle neck and spinning around. Then they danced with us a little, although I didn't dance still.

After dinner, we went back to the hotel and did a ceremony called Rustic Ties. We'll do it again at the end of our month in Costa Rica, and then again at the end of the month in Peru. The goal of the ceremony is to reflect on the trip, and in this case, to think about what we want to improve for the month ahead. We also talked about our favorite memories of Jackson, the local guide in the DR, and about good qualities in the other members of the group. Then we tied on the "ties", which were actually bracelets. The bracelet for each trip is different, and our DR bracelet is brown with a fuzzy seed and beads in the color of the Dominican flag strung on it.

Wednesday night rolled into Thursday morning, because we didn't sleep on account of the fact that we had to leave the hotel at 1am to make our plane. All the students had a quick meeting without the leaders, and then Naomi, Taylor, and I lay next to the pool and talked for a while before we had to go. We said goodbye to Naomi (her Costa Rican visa won't come until next week unfortunately), and then to Jackson and Jorge (the driver) at the airport. In the airport, I fell asleep until it was time for our flight to board. On the flight (which was from Frankfurt, and actually just stopping in Santo Domingo for a layover), I happily discovered that nobody was in the two seats next to me, stretched out, and slept most of the way. I only woke up because Chad was reminding me to fill out my immigration forms.

After we landed and went through customs, we got to meet Ava and KiKe! Ava is our local guide for Costa Rica, and KiKe is the driver. We drove straight out of San Jos towards EARTH (Educaccion Agricultura de la Region Tempuratura Humido) University, stopping briefly for breakfast. EARTH University is a university with around 400 students, mostly from rural and impoverished locations around the world, dedicated to teaching sustainable farming practices and giving the students the tools they need to go back into their communities and improve on what is there and/or start an entrepreneurial business related to sustainable agriculture and create job opportunities. We are staying in their guest spaces for a few nights and getting to do some workshops with them, learning things that aren't taught anywhere else. When we first got there though, we were all wiped from all the travel so we had a few hours of free time to settle into our rooms. Taylor and I are sharing a triple, which makes us glaringly aware of missing Naomi (even more than we would be anyway) and during the settling in time we DMC'd a little. Then we had lunch. On the way back from lunch, I ran into an ADORABLE 10-month-old chihuahua that was tiny and amazing and I pet it and held it in my hand and I think I almost cried and I know I'm gushing but oh well. In retrospect, I was exhausted at the time so any puppy would have made me emotional, but this puppy was particularly cute. After the whole adorable-chihuahua thing, we had a short intro and tour of the university given by the student counsel president, a second-year student named Norman from Rwanda. We watched this video about EARTH University: https://youtu.be/iKkOBFWkF9M and went on a short walking tour around a small part of the campus. After that we had some more free time (everyone was exhausted) and I napped. Before dinner, we had a group meeting with Ava which was basically just another orientation like we had at the beginning of the trip, but this time tailored towards Costa Rica and what to expect. We ate dinner (the pineapple here is delicious) and then had a quick presentation by a couple of second year students who are running an on-campus business which sells hot sauce and jelly in order to help fund their education. After that, we went to bed.

Friday has been full of workshops! After breakfast in the dining hall, we met Diego (from Ecuador) and Malumbo (from Malawi), both second year students, and they gave us a tour of an area that was dedicated to growing crops without much space or materials. We saw lettuce, onions, and parsley that was grown with no dirt at all! Instead, they were in. troughs filled with equal parts charcoal (for nutrients), cocoa shavings (for water) and rice stalk (for space). The onions have a smell that repels insects, so they don't ruin the crop. Additionally, they plant flowers around the insects so that they pay attention to the flowers instead of the crops. Then we saw the same plants grown in a pyramid system (which saves space as well as reusing water), grown in compost around a trashed bicycle and car, and grown in only water. The water one was really cool, they had fish swimming in nutrient-filled water, and then the water with the fish excrement in it was used to give the plants nutrients without any soil or solid mass at all. We saw the compost system, and then did a trust walk. After that we walked through an herb garden where every herb was labeled in Spanish and Latin, and their medicinal uses were written under. Shannon ate all the ones that said they were good for asthma. After that we went to a pineapple field, which was super cool. Then we had some free time before lunch.

After lunch, we had another workshop, this one was run by a second-year student named Carlos (from Guatemala), and the topic was trash. We watched a video about Guajeros, the people who lived and worked in the dump in Guatemala City until a big fire happened in 2005. Then we had a tour of EARTH university's garbage disposal areas, where they dispose of all the waste differently. We saw the center for sorting waiste, and we used a piece of plywood and bottles to make a window fan. After that tour, we had some more free time before dinner.

Next Week:

Saturday-Wednesday - Homestay

Wedneday-Friday - Adventure/Extreme Sports in Costa Rica

�Pura Vida Muchachos!

Week 5 of my trip was terrific! We finished our stay at EARTH University, did a 5-day homestay in an area of Costa Rica called La Argentina, and went canyoning in Turrialba. Quick reminder that, while it may appear that I must have internet to have posted this, I am in all actuality still offline until October 19.

Special shoutout to anyone who is the parent of one of the other students on my trip (cough cough Hunter) and reads this blog! I'm pretty honored that you found it. If that's you, know that I was in a homestay and didn't see anyone but Taylor between Saturday and Thursday, so if you're just looking for news of your kid you should feel free to skip those paragraphs. The other homestays did vaguely similar things, but not the exact same. Thanks for reading my blog though!

Saturday was our last day at EARTH University and our first in our 4-day homestay in La Argentina, an area in Costa Rica. After breakfast in the cafeteria of EARTH University, we had two more workshops. The first was with a second-year student named Hallil from Somalia, and it was focused on the animal products area of campus. We saw the pigs that they keep and Hallil explained how they filter the waste and use some of the gases to power the rest of the farm. Then we saw how they shred up sugar cane and corn stalks to make food for the animals. The second workshop we did Saturday morning was about the bananas they grow at EARTH University, and it was run by a second-year student named David from Kenya. We went to see the banana forest, and David told us that it was actually there when EARTH University bought the campus, and EARTH University only decided to maintain it because Whole Foods made a deal to buy the bananas and the profits go towards giving students scholarships. The bananas there are grown with minimal pesticides, instead they spray them with micro organisms that prevent fungi from destroying the crop. They also cover the bananas with blue plastic bags to keep the insects off and also to block UV rays while they are maturing. Then we hopped on the bus to go to the plant, where they wash and package the bananas for distribution. While we were on the bus, David asked what we were doing after the trip, and it turns out he applied to be a transfer student at Brandeis! He finds out in December if he got in, so we exchanged Facebook information to keep in touch. After the banana tour, we had lunch in the dining hall, finished packing, and got in the van to go to our home stays in La Argentina (which is in Costa Rica, not Argentina).

Taylor and I were dropped off first. Our host father, Fernando, met us with his daughter, Ebania, and her 4-year-old daughter, Kiara. Their house is very nice, and they clearly host a lot of students because Taylor and I each got a bedroom with multiple beds in it and their kitchen table is huge. We put our stuff down, and right away we got to work helping Fernando and Kiara bring in firewood. Taylor and I pushed the wheelbarrow (with Kiara in it), watched Fernando power saw up some wood on the road, put the wood into the wheelbarrow, watched Fernando push the wheelbarrow back to the house, and stacked it under the house. Taylor had a little stomachache, so she went to lay down and rest while Fernando refilled the power saw and I hung out with Kiara, and then we did it all again. After we chopped firewood, I napped and listened to an audiobook for a couple of hours.

When I woke up, I went into the kitchen and met Lydia (Fernando's wife) and Sebastian (Lydia and Fernando's eight year old grandson, Kiara's cousin). Sebastian, Kiara and I played an intense game of keep away with a stuffed animal dog, pausing every so often to answer Lydia's questions about my and Taylor's dietary restrictions. When dinner was ready, I went to get Taylor. She said her stomach still hurt and she didn't want to eat, but Lydia's offer to make her tea with medicinal herbs was enticing enough to get her up and she even ate some rice. When we got to the kitchen, we met Fernando Jr and Paula (Sebastian's parents) and Sandra, a student from Malawi who is living there to learn Spanish before starting her studies at EARTH University. Fernando Jr told me in Spanish that he works at EARTH University as an assistant to a professor over our dinner of rice, beans, tomatoes, plantains, and saut�ed vegetables. Sandra (who speaks perfect English) asked us about our trip and plans for what we're doing after, and we talked about the difference in temperatures between Malawi, Costa Rica, and Massachusetts. After dinner, Taylor went to bed and I stayed up a bit playing dominos with Fernando and Lydia. Fernando is learning English from a book, and he says that he can speak more than he can understand, but he can read the best! I told him he was my opposite, because I understand the best in Spanish and read the worst. Lydia showed me photos of her family who I hadn't met yet (she has 5 sons and a daughter, and they all have kids) and I showed her photos of my family and some friends from home. When she saw a picture of Olivia, she said she looked familiar which is pretty cool because Olivia came to Costa Rica with Rustic Pathways a few years ago so maybe she stayed with this same family. olivia if you're reading this let me know if they sound familiar!! After that we went to bed.

Sunday morning we had breakfast at seven with Lydia and Ebania. We talked about vegetarianism and about religion, all in Spanish. After breakfast, Taylor, Lydia, and I went to do some work on the farm. Fernando is almost 71 years old, and he does almost all the work to maintain the farm. Lydia is 67, and she does all the housework and cooking, with help from Ebania. On Sunday morning, we were helping them bring wood through a cow and horse pasture to a fence next to the river. The wood was really tree trunks, and we were planting them in the ground along the fence. Lydia told us that they would grow into trees, and the goal was to reforest that area to protect the river. It was really hot and the pasture was on a hill, so we talked a lot about that and about drinking water, and some more about religion and about our families. Partway through Sebastian came to help us, and he pretended to be a dog while we were going up the hill. He raced us up and down too, it was fun and also exhausting in the hot sun. When we finished, we sat in the shade for a while eating fresh leechi fruits from a tree and fresh oranges from Lydia's daughter in law's farm. Sebastian threw the orange peels as far as he could when we finished them, every time he told Taylor and me to look as he threw them. On the way back to the house, we stopped to get more leechis, Sebastian hit the tree with a stick and I ran around picking up the leechis as they fell. Lydia and Taylor picked some lemons at the same time. Then we went back to the house and I took a shower.

After my shower, I was sitting and typing stuff up for this blog and Sebastian came and thought the Bluetooth keyboard that my uncle Adam lent me for this trip was the coolest thing ever, so I let him type on it in Spanish. He wrote out his name, how old he was, his favorite food, his favorite sport, etc. It was super cute! Then I read for a while before lunch. At lunch, there were a couple of fourth-year students from EARTH University who spoke English, so we talked about the university and their plans for after it. They only have 50 days left, so they're making plans to go back to their respective countries and of what to do there. After lunch, I took a really long nap! We had been planning to go to the river and swim, but it was raining very hard so we couldn't. After my nap, Fernando, Sandra, Taylor and I played dominos and then Sandra told us about her life in Malawi. It turns out she was a model and a TV anchor there, and her boyfriend is a pretty big singer. If you want to look her up, her Instagram and Snapchat handle is sandra_peachy and her YouTube is Sandra Peachy MW. We watched a little bit of her being an anchor and of her boyfriend's music videos, it was pretty cool. Then we went to bed!

On Monday morning we had breakfast at seven again, and we met Lydia and Fernando's son Javier. Then we went to carry tree trunks in the pasture again. It was still overcast from the day before, and cooler as well. We weren't going up and down the hill, just across a flatter part of the pasture, so it was much easier than the day before. There were also cows there! Lydia told us that they have 15 cows, 6 males and 9 females, and she pointed out one that was a grandma and a couple which she said were born last March. They all had names, and they knew their own names, and she said they sold the males when there were too many or when they needed to for financial reasons. The cows were pretty majestic, walking over the hills and letting Lydia pet them. We also talked more about Lydia's life. She was born in a town on the Pacific coast, and met Fernando when she was 16 and he was a conductor on a train. He was born in Turrialba, the town that my group went to on Wednesday. They got married two years later and lived in Lim�n, a nearby region (where they ironically don't grow lemons). They have 6 kids, named Carlos, Larry, Diego, Fernando, Javier, and Ebania. We had already met Fernando (Sebasitian's dad), Javier (who was there that morning), and Ebania (who lives in the house and is Kiara's mom), and Lydia said that Carlos was planning to come for dinner that night. While we were carrying the tree trunks, Lydia was also trying to call a branch of the government. She said that she was trying to get them to install a landline in her house because the phone reception there wasn't very good, but she had been calling since Tuesday and the line was always occupied. On the way back to the house, we stopped by the house we had gotten lemons at the day before and gave them some eggs in return. Then we went back to the house.

At the house, we washed off our feet and had some fresh juice (I'm not sure if it was orange or lemon) and cookies. Taylor washed some of her clothes and I relaxed. About an hour later, we had lunch with Lydia, Ebania, Kiara, and Fernando. Then we had some time to rest. I was napping, and Taylor came to knock on my door because Shannon, Alejandro, Ava, and a man named Miguel came to visit us! It turns out that they were wrong when they said we were going to leave Wednesday morning, and it was Thursday morning instead. We talked a little, and then they left and I went and napped again until it was time to work some more. In the afternoon, we worked on the part of the farm right next to the house. We fed the birds, there were hens, roosters, quail, a turkey, and even some that I couldn't identify. It was really fun to watch Kiara chase the turkey around. After we fed the birds, we weeded the garden. Either the weeds grew really fast or they hadn't weeded in a really long time, but in some places it was really hard to tell the weeds from what was supposed to be growing there. Looking back at a bed that was totally weeded was super satisfying, as was throwing the weeds over the fence into the compost pile. After we had finished that, we hung out on a swings eat with Lydia and Kiara for a bit before going back in to rest, shower, and relax. Taylor and I talked for a bit before dinner, and then we talked for a while with Sandra and Lydia too. There was a big spider in the kitchen, but it disappeared before Sandra could kill it. Then we went to bed!

On Tuesday we had cornflakes for breakfast at seven, I watered the garden, but right after breakfast Ebania looked out the window and said it would rain. The lush green plants were blowing frantically and mist was rolling through the pasture. Sure enough, a few minutes later it started to downpour, and it rained with varying intensity for the rest of the day. In the morning we did some work in the kitchen, chopping vegetables for lunch and squeezing oranges for juice. Squeezing the oranges was especially satisfying. Then we relaxed until the vegetables were cooked for lunch, and then after lunch we relaxed some more. It was still drizzling in the afternoon, and Lydia was worried about us getting wet because I had a bit of a cough. We convinced her it would be okay if we wore raincoats, so we went outside and planted some "guavabana" trees next to the pond where they grew Tollapia fish. Every time someone said "guavabana," I thought of the muppet song that goes "manamana doo doo doo-doo-doo." After planting the trees, we carried some other saplings out into the rain so they could drink it. Then we weeded a little bit, and Lydia picked lemongrass, ginger, and mango leaves for tea to make my chest better from my cough. Then Taylor and I went inside and I showered, while Lydia fed the chickens.

I came out of the shower and put all of my snacks in a bag in Taylor's room before my Yom Kippur fast started. Taylor and I watched a telenovela for a little bit before Lydia called me in to have dinner at 4:15, before the sun went down. I ate rice, beans, and eggs, and talked with Fernando about Yom Kippur. Then he and I read some phrases in English off of a handkerchief someone had given him from Austin, and translated them to Spanish. Sandra came home, and we talked about how EARTH University grades things. I went and sat with Fernando and Kiara for a while and watched a Costa Rican game show where the contestants competed to win the equivalent of a couple hundred dollars by answering general knowledge questions. After that I sat with everyone as they ate dinner, and then talked with the group leaders on the phone for a few minutes before sitting with Taylor and Lydia for a while and drinking the tea for my cough. Yes, I know that you're not supposed to drink anything on Yom Kippur but here I think I would get dehydrated sitting in bed all day so my fast doesn't include water, and tea is just flavored water. Taylor and I talked for a while more about religion and philosophy before bed.

Wednesday was Yom Kippur, so I was fasting all day. I still woke up at seven, so I could water the garden. Then I did an abbreviated service in my room, which was really mostly just me chanting the prayers from Shabbat morning services that don't need a minyan (because I don't know the high holy day services by heart) and listening to a clip my mom sent me of the Shofar being blown from Rosh Hashanah. Then I crawled into bed and read for a few hours.

Around 11, Lydia, Ebania, Kiara, Taylor and I walked into the center of La Argentina in the rain, which is about a kilometer walk. The center of La Argentina is hardly even a town, Lydia pointed out the church (there are services there on the 1st and 3rd Sunday of each month), the clinic (there's a doctor who comes on Wednesdays), a convenience store, and eventually we got to our destination: the primary school. They were having a world culture festival at the primary school that day, but we got there just as it was winding down. Still, it was fun to see the kids dressed up in clothes from different world cultures and their projects set up around in the hall. There were some kids playing hopscotch, and we saw Sebastian shooting a bow and arrow. He told us he was dressed as an "ind�gina," meaning an indigenous Costa Rican. Once it was clear that the fair was over, we started to walk home and were picked up by one of Lydia's friends in a car. We drove around and bought some food, then went back to her house to eat it (or in my case, almost fall asleep on the couch). At her house there was a parrot that imitated our laughs and sang "la cucaracha." The TV was playing a show about a Jewish bakery in Brooklyn, which I found equal parts funny (because Jews don't eat on Yom Kippur) and annoying (because I was a Jew not eating on Yom Kippur).

After that, we went back to the house and I read a bit, felt homesick, wrote, and then fell asleep until 5:30, at which point the sun was down so I had some grape juice and cheese and crackers to break my fast. Taylor and Sandra and Kiara came and sat with me, and then Kiara and I chased each other around the kitchen in circles until dinner was ready around 7. I ate lots of rice, beans, and French fries. Sandra, Taylor and I talked for a while, we said goodbye to Sandra (who leaves for school before we wake up), and went to bed.

Thursday morning we woke up in La Argentina for the last time, I watered the garden, and we had pinto and egg for breakfast. Kiara and I counted down before each bite- "tres, dos, uno!" Taylor and I signed a book that they keep as a guest book in Spanish, and wrote them a thank you for having us and teaching us Spanish and how to cook and dealing with our dietary restrictions. Ebania and Lydia french-braided my and Taylor's hair and Lydia gave me a piece of aloe to smear on my face, which she said would help with acne. Then Taylor and I strapped on our packs and walked down the hill to be reunited with the rest of the group.

From La Argentina, we drove a couple of hours to Turrialba, our home base for the next 22 days. We stopped at a restaurant called Rice And Beans for lunch and ate, you guessed it, rice and beans! Our next stop was a Spanish language school, where we took an oral placement test and got in a heated debate about Star Wars. Then we stopped at a supermarket and an ATM (where my charge card finally worked- hallelujah!) on the way to the rental house we're staying in for the next few days. There, we went over the plan for the next few days and chilled until dinner.

We went canyoning on Friday! After breakfast at the house, we got in the van and drove to the beginning of the Explornatura course. They gave us a quick tutorial in repelling and zip lining, and then we were off! The first thing was repelling down a little waterfall, and we all got soaked. To repel, we had to hold tight to the rope and let it slip through our hands slowly to lower ourselves, bracing our legs against the slippery rocks. The next thing was a zip line, over the waterfall we had just repelled down and through the trees! We repelled more, a few times dangling over the waterfall and lowering ourselves for a few seconds before we could touch it with our feet. The zip lines were my favorite, one of the guides even asked me if I always smiled so much! I told him always when I'm on a zip line! Everything was so beautiful and green, there was a rainbow at the foot of every waterfall and lots of butterfly's around. The most adrenaline inducing challenge was a ladder-bridge over the forest, with about a 25 meter drop! The last thing was repelling, and we swung for a bit then went down the waterfall. The last person to go was Chad, and just before he went one of the guides lay down across the stream at the top of the waterfall and stopped a lot of the water. When Chad was halfway down the waterfall, the guide stood up and the water cascaded onto Chad! I don't thing I've laughed so hard in a while.

After the trip, we went to the Spanish language school for lunch and then back to the house for a rest. Around 3, we got up to go into Turrialba. There, we walked around the town and learned about the town's history. It used to be where they would drop off convicts who's time in jail was over, then it grew when the railroads went through it.

Next Week:

Saturday - Visit National Park

Sunday-Tuesday - Rafting trip!

Wednesday-Nov 2 - Homestay in Turrialba! We will be taking Spanish classes and working on a service project during that time too.

Hey guys!

Week 6 of my trip was transformative! We visited Guayabo national park, went on a magical 3-day white water rafting trip on the Pacuare, and settled into homestays, Spanish classes, and service work in Turrialba (where we will stay until November 2).

We visited Guyabo on Saturday morning. Kuke (our guide) told us that Guayabo is one of many ruins in Costa Rica, but it is the only one that allows tourists to come, and it is officially "Patrimonio Mundial de la Ingenieria", one of only two sites in Latin America (the other is Machu Pichu). People lived in Guayabo from 1000BCE until 1300CE, and nobody is quite sure who they were or where they went. There are no written records, so what we learned there was mostly speculation based on a mix of archeology and knowledge of other nearby tribes. The people there lived in cone-shaped houses built on round stone mounts, and the mounts are how they found the site. They were mostly farmers, and they likely settled there for the fertile soil and also because it is on the trade road that used to carry goods and gold through Central America. We saw stone carvings of combination animals, the coolest was part fish, part monkey, and part snake. We also saw old tombs, aqueducts, and cobblestone roads. All of it was hidden under a layer of sediment not long ago, before the site was a national park it was a farm for cows and coffee beans. At the end of the tour, I poked around the gift shop and then we went to lunch.

After lunch, we went to the house for a siesta (nap) and then went back into Turrialba for some more free time, and then we went to play sports at the University of Costa Rica. I tossed a frisbee around with Keyton, Chad, Rus, and Alejandro and then talked for a while with Taylor and Eva (I misspelled her name in a prior entry as Ava, my mistake. She's the Costa Rica local guide). Then we went back to the house for dinner. After dinner, the group leaders told us a bit about what to expect on the Pacuare, the river we did our 3-day white water rafting trip on, and then we went to pack.

Sunday morning started the Pacuare! We drove in the van for about an hour, then switched to an open-air truck pulled by a tractor for about half an hour. We had to get out and walk the last bit because there was a bees nest. When we got to the river, we met our guides (David, Sosy, and Carlos) and put our bags in dry bags. Then we split into rafts! I was in a raft with Taylor, Hunter, Keaton, and Alejandro, and our guide was David. David went over the safety instructions and commands (such as "forward"), and then we were off! The rapids the first day were class 1 and 2 (out of 5). It was sunny and hot, but the water was cold and refreshing. The first day, the river was wide, with round rocks lining the edges. Mountains rise steeply on either side, blanketed in gentle green. The sun made the water look like glitter in some places, and we splashed it at each other. We saw a couple of bees nests, a jumping fish spider, some awesome butterfly's, and a tiger heron on the way (but no great blue herons dad!).

We stopped a few times along the way. The first was to walk up an adjoining stream to a waterfall. There, you could actually swim into the space between the waterfall and the rocks that is cascaded down. The noise was deafening there, and the water made a bright, beautiful wall that obliterated the rest of the world. There were also lots of cool pebbles there, and I took a few of them so I can ask my cousin Ben what kind they are when I get home. The second place we stopped was for lunch on a rock beach. While we were waiting for lunch to be ready, we walked to another waterfall. There were beautiful rocks there too, and some pieces of carbon that looked like rocks but broke easily in my hand. At the base of the waterfall there was a deep pool, where I floated for a while looking up at the leaves. Hunter's swimsuit went down the waterfall and got lost for a little bit. Luckily he was wearing compression shorts under! David the guide found the shorts after a little while, but it was really funny! While we were eating lunch (sandwiches) it starts to drizzle. When we started again, the river wasn't any harder to raft, but it looked angry. The water between the rapids didn't look calm, and there were lots of little streams flowing through the foliage into it. We went "surfing," which meant keeping our raft under a rapid and letting the water rush over us.

After about three hours total of rafting, we made it to the lodge. We hauled the rafts ashore and toted the supplies into the kitchen, and that's when the rain really got started. It was like it had been waiting for us to get inside, and then the sky opened up and downpour end. We had some free time, then a snack at five. Keyton, Shannon, Hunter and I talked until dinner at 6:30, and after dinner Eva ran an activity with the group. The activity was discussion-based, and we split into pairs for each discussion then came back into the group to share. It was sort of like chavrutah at Hebrew school. My partner was Keaton, and the questions were about who we are as people, how others perceive us, and where who we want to be/become. It was a really cool activity!

The next morning, Monday, we woke up in the lodge and had coffee, tea, and breakfast. Alejandro and I played cards for a while, then went upstairs to pack up our stuff. We left it in the kitchen area and left for a short hike to a natural water slide. We threaded up the mountain on one side of the river, through the foliage that made it look gentle. David pointed out leaf-carrying ants, which carry prices of leaves bigger than they are to their nests and spit on them. Fungi then goes on them, and the ants eat the fungi. We also saw bullet ants, butterfly's, and a lot of different plants. The hike was up stairs, through mud, and over slippery rocks, so I was watching my footing a lot of the time rather than looking up at the impressive foliage. Our destination was a waterfall, and it was beautiful! It was at least 12 feet of smooth rock, and we all took turns sliding down It on feed sucks into the deep, freezing pool below. Then we walked to another waterfall, were a giant tree had called across the deep cliff and people could climb the truck and jump the six or seven feet into the water. After that, we hiked back to the lodge for lunch.

After lunch, we rested in hammocks next to the river for an hour before loading our things into dry bags and loading everything onto the rafts. My group for the second day was Rus, Chad, Eva, and Shannon, and David as our guide. By the time we got onto the rafts, it had started to drizzle again. The part of the river we went down that day was narrower, with large rocks rising out of the water on either side, occasionally broken by a huge waterfall. Between rapids, Chad and Rus pushed each other and Shannon out of the raft and threatened to push me too. The rapids that day went up to class 4. When we got to the campground, we unloaded the rafts and were assigned to some very nice tents. I showered and read until it was time for a snack at five. I talked with Shannon for a while, then she, Eva, Alejandro, Chad, Keyton and I played uno until dinner.

After dinner, we interviewed the rafting guides as practice for our homestays. Rus and I interviewed David. David is from a town outside of Turrialba named Pabones, he's 28 years old and he lives with his wife of one year. They don't have any children - yet. She works in a restaurant, which is good because he isn't home very much due to the rafting trips. He got into rafting when his parents sold their property to the rafting company, it's the property that is now the lodge that we stayed in the night before. He liked school when he was growing up, and went to the Universidad de Latin America in San Jose to study Tourism Administration. Most of the English he knows comes from working on the rafts with English-speakers, although he learned some very basic English in school too. After the interviews, the students all sat for a while in the kitchen, then I talked with the group leaders for a little bit (they told me about La Mona, the more-scary Latin American version of Bigfoot, and La Llorona, who I learned about in Spanish class in school). Then I went toned in my tent, lulled to sleep by the roar of the Pacuare and the sound of cicadas.

Tuesday morning we woke up, ate breakfast, packed up our things, and set off! My raft group on Tuesday was Chad, Rus, and Shannon (Eva ditched us) and our guide was Sasy. Sasy is super bad ass, he's super zen and happy and one of his legs is quite literally half as long as the other so he has to use crutches, but he's also super into martial arts and his job is white water rafting so clearly the leg thing doesn't slow him down. Anyways, we set off with Sasy in the raft for a day of mostly class 3 and 4 rapids, with one five towards the end. It was sunny and hot, so the water was refreshing again each time it splashed over us, which was quite often. I jumped in in between rapids to cool off. We stopped along the way at a cliff made of clay, and people smeared it on their faces as a mask. Whenever we got close to the other raft, we splashed at Eva because she abandoned us :P. On one rapid, Chad fell out of the raft and bent his paddle, but he was fine so the whole thing was hilarious.

The most magical moment of the entire rafting trip was on Tuesday after that rapid, when we came in between two exceptionally steep cliffs covered in leafy green. The water was deep, and everyone hopped out of the rafts to swim. The Pacuare swept us along, and we floated between Los Dos Monta�as (the twin mountains) in the cool water, with the sun warm on our faces. We paddled around in the current. When we looked up, there were butterfly's and leaves silhouetted against the blue sky. It was like the most incredible lazy river ever, but that's a feeble comparison. The moment was enchanted, it really felt magical.

After a few minutes, we had to get back into the rafts because the biggest rapid of all was coming up! It was class five, and we went over it with gusto, paddling and leaning hard. After a couple more rapids, we got to an old not-in-use red train bridge with a rope swing hanging down that Keaton swung from. When we went around the corner we saw a bridge with cars and trucks, and laughed that we were back in civilization. We paddled our last paddle and hauled the rafts ashore, got our things out, and went to eat lunch at a restaurant and change out of our wet clothes. After lunch, we said goodbye to our guides and drove the two hours back to the rental house in Turrialba. There, we relaxed, had a conversation about homestays, had dinner, and packed.

Wednesday was a whole new day! We woke up in the morning, ate breakfast, and headed off to Spanish class! The first day of school was really great. Keaton and I were predictably in a group together, and our teacher was a young Tica (Costa Rican woman) named Nicole. We didn't have a formal lesson, but rather we talked about ourselves and told her about our lives and about each other. Then, we each chose a famous person to talk about for a while. I'm currently listening to the audiobook of A Fighting Chance, so I talked about Elizabeth Warren. After class, we went to lunch at Soda la U and then to service.

Service was in an area of Turrialba called Noche Buena, which was described to us as the "ghetto" of Turrialba. We were working in an area of Noche Buena with several disabled people, and our task was to build a more accessible sidewalk. I had a bad headache, so I sat out of the first half of the service. When I rejoined the group, we were hauled earth to the mixing site, mixed cement, and then made a human conveyor belt to transfer buckets of cement to the area of sidewalk we were paving, dumped it on the ground, and smoothed it out to make a flat surface. Then we repeated. There were a lot of little children watching us, and we were working with three local men. I got to talk with one of them for a while in Spanish before it was time to go.

From the service project, we went to meet our homestay families. My host family is the Agulairs, the parents are Katrina and Fabrizio, and the children are 15 year old Maria Jose, 20 year old Fer, and 23 year old Christian. They live in a very nice and artful two-story house. Katrina is an artist and she runs a clothing store in town, and Fabrizio is a professor of accounting. They have two dogs, and a cat that Maria Jose just got today as an early birthday present. Katrina and Fabrizio have been married for 24 years, and they met at a dance in Turrialba, where they both grew up. In the homestay, we got situated in our separate rooms, I showered, then I watched some TV with Fabrizio and reconnected with wifi before dinner. For dinner, we had noodles with vegetables in some kind of Asian-esque sauce. Then after dinner, Taylor and I watched the last presidential debate on Twitter live.

I woke up early on Thursday to FaceTime with my mom, then had breakfast with Katrina, Fabrizio, and Taylor before Spanish class. In class, we talked about our homestay families briefly and then moved on to reading. We each read a children's book, looked up the vocabulary we didn't know, drew a picture of the story, explained the story out loud to the class, and then wrote an alternate ending to the story. My story was "El Soldadito de Plomo," and it was a love story about a toy soldier who went on a very long adventure and ended up melting in a fire with the toy ballerina he was in love with. It was a strange story. After the children's books, we reviewed the past tense and asked each other questions in it. Class ended 15 minutes early so we could go to our next activity!

Our next activity was a tour of Finca Monte Claro, where we went on a hike through a secondary rainforest and toured the coffee production plant. Before all that though, we had lunch at the farm and petted the three huge dogs that lived there. The hike was about 45 minutes through luscious green forest. Our guide (Juan) pointed out some soldier ants, which are carnivorous and eat other insects, and they don't have a nest but rather sleep in a big ball with their queen and larvae in the middle. Eva almost stepped on a probably-venomous snake, so we were on our toes for the rest of it. The guide also pointed out three different specific plants, all of which you should google image search. Shampoo Ginger is pink and beautiful, named because it's nectar was used by indigenous people as soap and it is part of the same family as ginger. The rattlesnake plant is yellow, and it's leaves are incredibly flexible (used by indigenous people as plates). The third plant was pink bananas! They have a lot of huge seeds though, so people can't eat them. As we were leaving the forest, three Pezotes (a relative of raccoons) crossed the path ahead of us. We also saw some prints in the mud that were too big to be from the huge dogs, so we think they were from a jaguar.

After the hike, we went to tour the coffee plant, called Naturalba. It is one of the smallest in the country, and it is a cooperative between 51 local families. The guide, whose name I can't remember now, showed us how they pick the coffee beans by hand, a machine splits them open, then they are dried for about eight days in a quasi-greenhouse so they decrease from 80% humidity to 12%. After that, they are stored for 4 months. If during those 4 months they go above 20% humidity, they are no good. Then they are refined and made into coffee grounds. He gave us coffee, chocolate, brown sugar candy, and banana vinegar to try. While we were trying our coffee, he told us that the new project that the farm was working on was "green" coffee, which just meant that it didn't dry for as long and wasn't refined. He told us it was faster to produce and more valuble, because one cup of green coffee has as much energy as seven cups of normal coffee. It was pretty cool.

After the tour, I went back to the homestay and tried to figure out my absentee ballot and class registration for a while, then Fer took me to her yoga class. Taylor wanted to go too, but her ankle was hurt that day so she went and hung out in town with the rest of the group instead. We walked there with her cousin, Avery, and it was in a gym. The teacher was an English professor, but the class was all in Spanish so it was kind of hard to follow along. I was able to see what everyone else was doing most of the time though, so I think it turned out fine. I really liked it! She goes every Tuesday and Thursday, so I'll probably go again with her. Then we got a ride from Fer's friend back to the house and ate dinner.

Friday was a pretty regular day. We had Spanish class in the morning at the Spanish language school. We kept talking about the past tenses in Spanish, and asked questions in the past tense to each other and then to the group leaders. Then we talked about legends for a bit, and the second half of class took place in a museum at the university. The museum was about the geological history of Turrialba, the people of Guayabo, and the modern history of the city of Turrialba. The teachers made us go through the museum faster then I wanted to (I wanted to read the information), but then they let us have free time so I went back and read about the geological formation of Central America. After the free time, we went to make visual aides to explain a part of the museum, and Keyton and I were assigned the Legend of the Volcano of Turrialba.

The Legend of the Volcano of Turrialba is about Cira, the daughter of a chief of an indigenous tribe, long before conquistadors came to the Americas. The chief was very proud and protective of his daughter, and he wanted her to marry the most brave, smart, and handsome man in the tribe. However, at a ceremony with another tribe, Cira had seen a man from the other tribe and fallen in love with him. She didn't know his name, but she thought of his face all the time. One night, she heard voices calling her into the woods so she rose from her bed and walked deep into the woods. She was afraid because it was dark and she started to cry, and eventually she fell asleep at the base of a great tree. She dreamed of the man she was in love with, and awoke calling out for him. Behold, there he was! They hugged and kissed. Meanwhile, back in the tribe her father, the chief, was very worried. He was convinced she had been kidnapped and organized a search party to go and find her. When he came across her in the woods embracing a man from another tribe, he was so angry that he wanted to kill them both! In that moment, the earth opened up and swallowed the lovers, and the volcano is in that same spot to commemorate their love forever.

After the museum, we went to Soda la U for lunch before community service. We worked on the same project in Noche Buena as we did on Wednesday, building a smooth sidewalk. I mixed and shoveled cement. It was dark when we drove back to our host houses.

Next Week:

Saturday - Visit Cartago

Sunday - Free day with host families!

Monday-Friday - Normal schedule, class in the morning & service/other activities in the afternoon. (Other activities: Tues - Aquares Cascada, Thurs - Pejibaye)

Live from Costa Rica, it's Lily's travel blog!

(Excuse my terrible SNL reference)

Week 7 of the trip was quite a week! We continued our homestays, Spanish classes, and service, and visited Cartago, the Aquares Cascada (twice!), and the Pejibaye River. I also filled out my absentee ballot!

Saturday morning was pretty chill, Taylor and I hung out with our host family and lazed around. It was Maria Jose (our youngest host sister)'s 16th birthday, but she slept in so we didn't see her in the morning. The family was preparing for her birthday party in the evening. I helped Fabrizio (my host dad) separate the white part of some coconuts from the brown outer shell. I wasn't very good at it, and he made fun of me a lot but it was all in good fun. We chattered in Spanish about sports, theater, and school. Around eleven, the bus came and we joined the group for lunch.

After lunch, we drove two hours to Cartago, the city on the other side of the Turrialba Volcano. Cartago is a bigger city than Turrialba, and it boasts Costa Rica's most important pilgrimage site, the Basilico de Nuestra Se�ora de los Angeles (Basilica of Our Lady of the Angels). The Basilica is located at the site of a miracle from 1639. There, at a spring, and indigenous girl found a statue of a Mary carrying a baby Jesus carved in black stone. The Mary has a very indigenous looking face. The girl took the statue back to her house, and the next morning it was gone. She found it back at the spring, in the same place she had found it. She's took it to a priest, who locked it in a box, but the next morning it was back at the spring again. The small statue, known now as La Negrita, is considered a miracle by Catholics. The Basilica was built around the statue, but was destroyed by an earthquake and rebuilt in the early 1900s. We admired the ornate front of the church and I walked around in the high-ceiling, columned, ornately decorated inside of the church. Every year in August, Costa Ricans make pilgrimage to the Basilica to pray to La Negrita. (If you're Catholic skip the rest of this paragraph) Historians believe that the statue was a tactic to make Catholicism more accessible to the indigenous population, both through magic and because the features of the statue appear indigenous and are made in indigenous art form, and the statue has dark skin. They also note that the type of stone that La Negrita is carved from is not found anywhere in Costa Rica.

After we went to the Basilica, we went to a mall where we had the option to hang out in the mall and shop, or go see a movie. Eva, Alejandro, and I went to see Ms. Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (with Spanish subtitles, but not dubbed). Then we took the 2 hour bus ride back to Turrialba. When we got back to the house, Maria Jose's birthday party was in full swing! There was music and family, and people were eating coconut rice and beans. I was introduced to family and talked with some cousins, then watched Karaoke. I went to bed before cake though, because it was late.

Sunday morning I slept in! When I woke up, we had breakfast as a family and Katrina (our host mom) asked if we wanted to go to the river with them, and we said of course! It took us a few hours to get ourselves organized, but then we left! We went with the whole family, Karina, Fabrizio, Christian, Fen, Maria Jose, and Maria Jose's boyfriend. We took a taxi our of the city and went on a hike down a steep and heavily vegetated hill to the river. We later learned it was the Aquares Cascada, and we went again on Tuesday with the group. The river was beautiful, and we swam in a pool at the bottom of a short waterfall over a flat rock that served as a natural water slide. The water was freezing cold, but it was hot so we jumped in and went down the waterfall! We had a picnic lunch of hotdogs (for the meat-eaters) and hotdog buns with beans and vegetables (for the vegetarian/vegans). Taylor and I DMC'd for a while next to the pool, and then we all packed up and hiked further down the steep hill. When we got to the bottom, we could see that we had been swimming at the top of a giant waterfall! It was the biggest one we'd seen so far, and beautiful. We took some more photos in front of it, and then started the trek out to the road. Along the way we saw some beautiful rainbow eucalyptus trees. If you've never seen a rainbow eucalyptus tree, you should google image search it because they look like they came out of a children's book, maybe Dr. Seuss. After walking through the rainbow eucalyptus forest (like I said, children's book), we got out to the road and took a bus back home were we chilled out for the rest of the day.

On Monday it was back to school! We were in separate classes for a few minutes, where we talked about our weekends and I told the Legend of la Segua (the legend I learned about from my family). Then we joined the full group, where we presented the information from the museum last Friday and I told the Legend of the Volcano of Turrialba (Keyton was sick so he didn't talk very much). We then talked about the D�a de las Mascaradas Costaricences, or the Day of Costa Rican Masks, which is on October 31 and children wear full-head paper-mach� masks designed to look like animals, witches, pop figures, etc. The teachers had us blow up balloons and paper mach� them to make masks on Tuesday. After that we went to the park and played some more active games that didn't seem to have that much to do with learning Spanish.

After class, we went to Soda la U for lunch and then everyone went to service. I had a headache and I couldn't deal with the group anymore, so they dropped me off at my host house and I relaxed in the afternoon and talked a little bit with Katrina and Maria Jose. When Taylor came back from service, we ate dinner with Katrina and Christian and then went to bed.

We did a lot of things in class on Tuesday morning. Before class started, the teacher asked me what I was reading and I said the newspaper, which led to a discussion about the presidential election and me explaining the basics of the electoral college in Spanish. The beginning part of class was putting more paper mach� on our balloons for our mascaradas. Then we split into levels and my class talked about our favorite holidays and how we celebrate them. We talked about fireworks (the Fourth of July), the "three sisters" vegetables (Thanksgiving), miracles and story's (Hannukah), and extended families (Christmas). After that we went to the supermarket to buy ingredients for empanadas. I also bought some snacks and the book "Paper Towns" by John Green in Spanish.

After class we had lunch at Soda la U, and during lunch we hid Rus's phone and passed it from person to person so he wouldn't know who had it. That sounds meaner than it was. After lunch, we got in the van and drove back to Aquares Cascadas, the waterfall we went to with our host family on Sunday. We did the same hike (with KoKe, the guide from Guayabo) and stopped to swim in the same pool. After going down the waterslide and spashing for a while, I sat on a rock and something bit my toe. My toe turned a little yellow and stung a bit (kind of like there were fire ants on it, and worse with pressure), but felt better in the cold water so the guides decided it was fine. Then I read the beginning of Paper Towns in Spanish. We did the hike down to the bottom of the waterfall, and I sat down on a rock to try to meditate, but then I heard a yell and I looked up and Taylor had slipped on a rock and fallen! She was okay, but her knee really hurt and the other one had some cuts on it. Alejandro and Shannon cleaned the cuts and put a bandage on her knee and Rus carried her partway to the bus piggyback, and she walked the other part. We stopped on the way back to our host family house to print my ballot!

When we got home, Katrina welcomed us and Taylor and I sorted laundry and had another DMC before dinner with Christian and Katrina. Then I filled out my ballot and read some more before heading to bed! (Unsolicited political opinions: vote Clinton/Kaine and if you're a MA voter vote Kennedy and "No" on 2)

Wednesday's Spanish class was cool, we told legends from different cultures, paper mach�'d more, and made bean and cheese empanadas. I also took a nap during the break. During the last part of class, we wrote stories using five random verbs and a picture from a magazine as inspiration. My picture was a cartoon of a cat curled up in someone's office or library, with the light on and the door open to the rain, and the verbs I got were cook, read, turn off, sell, and write. I wrote a story about a professor who spent every Sunday reading papers to grade and working on the book she was writing, and then at night she hosted dinners for her classes. One night, she realized she didn't have any oil to cook the dinner with and the store was about to close, so she ran outside and forgot to turn off the light or close the door. Everything was ok, because she got to the store just in time to buy the oil and then go home in time to cook for her students.

After class and lunch at Soda la U, we went to Noche Buena for service. There, we worked sifting rocks to get sand for a fine cement, which we then spread on the sidewalk to make it smooth. It was kind of dull work, and there were more people than needed to do it. I ended up playing with three seven-year-old girls, who told me the English words that they had learned in school and had me spin them around in circles. We ended up leaving service a little early, and I had no idea why until we had already left. Nobody was hurt, but somebody had stopped their car and gotten out of it near where Hunter, Rus, and Chad were standing, thrown a home made bullet at them, mimed gunshots with his hand, and then driven away. When confronted about it, he said it was just a joke, but it had seemed like a threat to the guys and to our program leaders, and if it was a joke it wasn't funny, so we left right away. Back at the house, we talked, had dinner with Karina, Fabrizio, and Christian, and went to bed.

Thursday we mixed up the schedule! Instead of Spanish class, we started the day with kayaking on the Pejibaye! We went down rapids in inflatable two-person kayaks. My partner was Shannon. Our guide, Chino, gave us the safety spiel and explained that the person in the back would give the commands (like "forward") and the person in the front would be in charge of pacing the paddle strokes. I sat in the front. The water was jade-colored, freezing, and particularly high so we moved fast. At first we over-steered, but eventually we mostly got the hang of it. We only tipped the kayak twice. We saw lots of birds, mostly cormorants and vultures, along the way. The shores of the river were mostly forested, but in some places we got a glimpse of mountains rising up. The most fun parts were when we got the kayak stuck on rocks, and we had to get out in the middle of the shallow rapid and pull it until it came unstuck, then hop in before it floated downstream! At the end of the trip, we had lunch by the side of the Pejibaye and I read Paper Towns in Spanish and asked the guides about all the words I didn't know. I finished the prologue!

After lunch, we went to the Spanish language school for an afternoon class. There, we read newspaper articles from a Costa Rican newspaper, and then played a matching game with Spanish adages. The adages translate to things like "When the river makes noise, it's because there are pebbles beneath it" "The pitcher will keep pouring water until it breaks" and "The devil knows more because he is old than because he is the devil." During the break, I had some coffee and then Chad made another holocaust joke to Rus, which felt like the last straw to me. I talked with Eva about it, and she called Shannon and Alejandro (who were in another meeting) and Mauricio, the Costa Rica country manager. I was shaking with anger when they came, and then the four of us had a long conversation in the park about disrespect and bullying and xenophobia, and essentially that saga was the rest of my night. I'm not going to say any more about it because I don't want to slander Chad and Rus.

Friday morning we had class in Turrialba center. We started in the "Green Market", which is a farmers market. The professor had us taste a Cas fruit, and it was super sour! Then it turned out that there were some kind of white maggot/worm things in there, which I thought was disgusting but the professor said was normal for Cas. Then we went to the Cathedral of Turrialba, and some of the stores around. After that we went to the university, where we played a Spanish version of musical chairs before eating lunch in the university cafeteria.

After lunch, we went back to our host houses for a break. I played with the kitten, talked with Fen, and called Mom and Maya. We were supposed to be picked up between 3 and 3:30, but the bus didn't come until 4:30. When it came, Chad was not on it because the Rustic Pathways office had decided that his comment was too far over the line and he had been sent home. We had a very tense conversation in the park about it, and everyone blamed me for getting him sent home. I think he got himself sent home by making holocaust jokes, among other things. I talked more with the group leaders later, and the outcome is essentially that it will be a rough week but hopefully the other students will eventually move on and not be mad at me any more.

Hello folks!

Week 8 of my trip was fantastic. We went mountain biking on Irazu Volcano, said goodbye to Turrialba, and spent the second half of the week in Uvita on the beach! If you haven't voted yet, don't forget to vote on Tuesday (*cough* for Hillary *cough cough* and No on 2)!

Saturday and Sunday we didn't do very much. If you read last week, you'll remember that Chad left a week ago today on Friday evening. Later that night, Rus drank a bit too much and had to go to a clinic, so he had to leave Saturday morning. Because Naomi is in France (she never did get her Costa Rica visa, she's planning to rejoin us next week in Peru), that left only Taylor, Keaton, Hunter, and I on the trip. On Saturday we had a somber lunch and walked around town for a little bit. It was Cancer Awareness day, so there was a fair in the center of town. Sunday was a day with our host families, but we woke up too late to do anything and just lounged around the house all day instead.

Monday was Halloween, but more importantly it was Taylor's birthday! We got up bright and early to go mountain biking at Irazu Volcano. After a two-hour van ride, we got to the top of the volcano (it's inactive- don't worry, Mom!). We got to walk around the craters and look down into the biggest one. Apparently it's usually filled with water from rain, but that day it was empty and we could see the rocks all the way down to the bottom. It was really beautiful with the fog rolling over it. After we saw the crater, we hopped on the mountain bikes and headed off! The first part was paved, and pretty easy if winding. By the time we got to the unpaved portion, it had started to drizzle so I Eva and I opted to get in the van and ride behind the bikers. Not five minutes later, Hunter and Alejandro both fell and hurt themselves a bit, leaving Keaton the only biker. After an hour the rain really started to come down, so we pulled over and had some sandwiches for lunch before driving back to our host houses.

The guides told us we had two hours to chill, and then we were going to go to a "cultural activity" led by the Spanish teachers. We would take notes about a coffee farm and then they would quiz us on what we knew on Tuesday. They texted us to say to bring a bathing suit, we would go to the pool if there was time after the "cultural activity." They picked us up (late as always) and Eva and Keaton argued jokingly in the car about the worth of the activity. We drove through the gates, got out of the van, and SUPRISE! It wasn't a Spanish school thing, it was a birthday party for Taylor! THere were balloons, soda, and cake, and we talked for a while then watched a movie from Netflix. For dinner with our host family, Katrina made Chinese food in Taylor's honor.

Tuesday was our last full day in Turrialba! We had Spanish class in the morning, per usual. However, Tuesday was the first day of the test that all students in Costa Rica take their last year of high school to determine where they can go to University, so our usual professor Nicole wasn't there because she was a proctor. Instead, Keaton and I had a new teacher named Maria Jes�s. We worked on our paper mach� mascaradas, Taylor and Hunter made a Rus mask and Keaton and I made a rabbit mask. Then we separated into classes, talked in Spanish for a while, and filed out feedback firms for the Spanish school. The director of the school, Melvin, gave us diplomas for having "graduated" the school.

After our last lunch at Soda la U, we drove a couple of hours through stunning rolling hills to the town where KiKe lives (KiKe is the bus driver). We visited the church that he goes to for mass every Sunday. The church is dedicated to the Virgin of "Rosarios" and it's patron saint is San Ignacio de Los Bueyes. A Bueye is a castrated bull, raised to pull a cart. After the church, we stopped by the primary school, which was built in 1958. We walked around and saw the cute classrooms and murals, one was painted by a Rustic Pathways summer program and there was one of a map painted by aPeace Corps group.

On our way to our next stop, KiKe's brother's cow farm, we saw a cart pulled by Bueyes! It ended up going into the farm, so we got to pet the cows and even climb up on top of them for some photos! The Bueyes were named Kuzuko and Paruzko. After the photos, we went into the cow barn. We got to see baby cows, one that was born just the day before! The cows get milked at 6am and 3pm, and we overlapped their 3pm milking. The people filled a long trough with feed and grass, and opened the gate to let the cows in. The cows had to put their head through slats to get the food, and then the people closed the slats so the cows could keep eating but couldn't back away from the trough. Then they took the cows one by one, cleaned their udders, put a grey machine on to milk them, then put some iodine on their udders to prevent infection before letting them back into the pasture. On the way out of the farm, the cart with Bueyes was leaving and so we all got in the back of the cart and they drove us out to the road!

After the farm, we went to KiKe's house. His house is pink and cute. We met his wife, Felicia, and his youngest son, Kendal, who was studying for the big test that our Spanish teacher had been proctoring that morning. KiKe proudly showed us his chickens, pigs, dogs, cat, and told us the names of a lot of different kinds of oranges, herbs, and berries that were growing on the property. Felicia made us coffee, agua dulce (which is a hot drink made with sugar cane), fresh bread, and a few different tortilla things made with beans and cheese. We sat outside at a table behind their house. KiKe and Felicia told us about how they had known each other since they were kids because everyone knows everyone in their town, but they fell in love at a dance when he was 19 and she was 18. KiKe walked Felicia home and kissed her outside her front door, and they got married a year later. Now, 34 years later, he brings her a gift every day when he comes home (usually something like a chocolate, a flower he cut from the side of the road, or a little stuffed animal). KiKe and Felicia have a cousin who lives in Boston, so we talked a little bit about snow and frogs that freeze in the winter and then unfreeze in the summer and jump around. Then Kendal came out of his room from studying and showed us some of his paintings and looked at Taylor's drawings. Eva wanted to take pictures of us at KiKe's house, so we took some photos before going home. It was really, really awesome to get to visit KiKe and meet his family, and it felt like one of the most authentic experiences we've had on this trip so far.

At home, I had dinner with Karina and Maria Jose (Taylor was feeling a little sick so she skipped dinner). Maria Jose told me about a project she was making about voting and government participation, which was pretty cool. Then I packed to leave.

We had to say goodbye to our host family on Wednesday morning. Karina gave Taylor and I each a bracelet and Fabrizio added me on WhatsApp. Then we got in the car and made the almost 6 hour drive to Uvita, a beach town on the Pacific coast. It was really foggy, so we drove slowly. We settled into our hotel room in Uvita, a town on the pacific coast. I got my rooming assignments for next semester (I'll be in a single), and we watched the last World Series game together. I won't lie and say I stayed up until the end, I gave up and went to bed during the rain delay.

Thursday was our beach day! We went to three different beaches, all of which were part of the same national park. The first was a rock formation called "Cola de Ballena," which translates to Whale's Tail. From the sky, it looks like a giant rocky humpback whale tail jutting out into the ocean. There were lots of cool sea shells there, some were pink! It was really beautiful to watch the fog rolling over the sea and the mountains and trees. At the end of the formation we could see the waves crashing up against the rocks, and the breaking wave blended into the clouds. As we were walking out onto the tail, it started to rain. It was a warm rain, and it felt refreshing because it was hot despite the clouds. Being at the beach in the rain is underrated, especially when the rain is warm, because it means you get the whole beach to yourself. Shannon and I had a good conversation about college housing, and she told me a lot of stories about her roommates and college friends.

After Cola de Ballena, we stopped at the hotel for a few minutes before lunch. Lunch was at a cute resturaunt, and it started raining again while we were there. The second beach we went to was called "Ventanas," which means "Windows." It stopped raining just as we got there. The rock formations at Ventanas are places where the rock has eroded a cave through the cliff, and the water rushes through it. The tunnels are like Windows because you can see through the cliff. They're gorgeous, and the water rushing through them is beautiful. There's also a beach there, with super tall waves so swimming is a bad idea. Eva and I talked about religion and meditation and then Keaton, Hunter, Taylor, Alejandro, Shannon, and I had a hermit crab race. Mine came in second (to Shannon's). After Ventanas, we went to a third beach which was more commercial but just as beautiful. The waves there were tall too, their foamy breaks blending into the clouds. I waded in to my knees and let the water move the sand under my feet and break against my back. I talked with Alejandro for a while, then with Eva, and then made a sea turtle in the sand.

We went back to the hotel, where I showered and then relaxed until dinner. After dinner, I had another 3-on-1 with Shannon, Alejandro, and Eva to talk about the homestay, how the month had gone, emotional check-in, and some goal-setting for Peru. I love talking with the three of them, so it was nice to have a time carved out for it.

On Friday we went repelling!! This repel was much much bigger then the other ones we've done, Shannon told us it was 175 feet! We drove to the site, hiked half an hour downhill to the Nauyaca waterfall, and got suited up in harnesses and helmets. Then we walked to the waterfall. It was huge, and pretty awesome to look over. The water thundered down the rock face into a pool below, then filtered through huge boulders to another smaller waterfall. Alejandro looked over the edge and asked "why didn't I become a doctor?". I was the first to repel down. The very beginning was easy, then it got harder as we got into the waterfall and the rocks were wet and slippery. My favorite part of the repel was the last part, when the rock cut out and we repelled through open air. The waterfall felt like heavy rain, and I could look out over the river below. It was beautiful. Then the repel ended and we swam for a while, first in the pool at the bottom of Nauyaca, then at the pool at the bottom of the other, smaller waterfall. We hiked up to a kitchen area, ate lunch, then hiked all the way up the steep hill to the van.

After repelling, we stopped by an ice cream parlor and then went souvenir shopping on the beach. Then we went back to the hotel for dinner.

A note that I leave Costa Rica on Wednesday, and the wifi in Peru will be much spottier than it has been in the past two countries.

Another note to remember to vote!!! #ImWithHer (everyone) #NoOn2 (if you're a MA voter)

Next Week:

Saturday - Surf Lessons

Sunday-Monday - Overnight in the cave under the waterfall

Tuesday - drive to San Jose

Wednesday - fly to Lima!

Thursday - fly to Cuzco!

Friday - start our week-long Peru homestays.

Hello from Peru!

Week 9 of my trip was awesome! We took a surf lesson, slept over night in a cave behind the Diamonte waterfall, saw San Jos, flew to Lima, Peru and then to Cusco, and settled into our homestays just outside of Cusco. Quick reminder that wifi in Peru is much more sporadic and less reliable than the wifi I've had for the first two months of my trip.

We started the week off in Uvita, Costa Rica. Saturday morning we had surf lessons at Playa Dominical. The beach was gorgeous and the weather cooperated, so we spent two lovely hours trying to surf in the foam near the shore. We started by talking about the theory of surfing, then practiced jumping up on "surfboards" drawn in the sand, then got out into the ocean. I thought I would be completely hopeless at it, but by the end of the lesson I could get up to a standing position and hold it for a few seconds, so long as the instructor was shouting instructions to me before the wave came. It was pretty awesome! After the surf lesson, we had some free beach time, and I read Paper Towns in Spanish out loud to Eva so she could correct my pronunciation and be my dictionary when I didn't understand something.

After the beach time, we went to a restaurant with absolutely gorgeous ocean views out the windows on both sides. There were some white-faced cappuccino monkeys that crawled around the porch of the restaurant while we ate. They were adorable and human-like, and so cool! After lunch, we went back to Playa Dominical and picked up trash for a while as our service work. Then we went back to the hotel and relaxed until dinner. After dinner, I had a heart-to-heart with Shannon and Alejandro and then we had a group discussion to debrief Costa Rica a bit and set up expectations for Peru!

On Sunday morning we got in the van and drove to Diamonte, a huge waterfall with a cave behind it where we would spend the night. We met Gretel, our Tica guide, and started off on the hour-long hike up through the rainforest to the cave. Gretel and I talked in Spanish about our siblings and schools, and then Alejandro joined the conversation to talk about vegan/vegetarianism. It rained on us a fair amount as we made our way up the steep, muddy path through the lush forest. We stopped every 5 or 10 minutes to regroup and drink water. One of our stops was in a lovely garden, where we refilled our waterbottles from a spring where the water came out of the mouth of a stone figure. When we got to the cave, which was wide and shallow with ribbons of water cascading over its entrance on one side, we stripped off our wet shoes, met our other guide, Diego, and had lunch. There was an optional hike in the afternoon, but it was overcast so everyone opted to take a nap instead.

When I woke up, I went and sat with Shannon, Alejandro, and Diego, and we played Hearts for a while. Then Keaton, Hunter, and Taylor woke up and we all played Uno until dinner. After dinner, we told scary stories around the table and took a night "hike" about 20 steps out of the cave to see the stars. It was still overcast, but when we turned off our lights we could see that there were glow worms all over the rocks, so the "stars" we saw were on the ground. Then we went to bed. It was hard to sleep in the cave, I felt like there were bugs crawling on me (which there probably were), and there was lightning. I woke up a lot at night. Once when I woke up, there were actual stars in the sky.

When it was finally Monday morning, we got up and had breakfast. There was an option to go repelling, but nobody had brought appropriate repelling clothes. Instead, Diego took Keaton, Alejandro, and I on the hike that had been an option the previous afternoon. We hiked out of the cave and down through the forest to a lower waterfall. This was the ginormous waterfall we had been able to see from the road. From the top of the waterfall, we could see the forest sprawled out below us. The mountains rose up, covered in a thousand shades of green, split only by roads and houses. Beyond the mountains, we could see all the way to the Pacific, the white of the surf and the blue of the sea blending into the white clouds and the blue sky. It felt like we were on top of the world. That is, it felt like we were on top of the world until we turned around and saw where the water that made the ginormous waterfall was coming from. Behind us there was another waterfall, framed by the green forest, and beyond that waterfall another, the one where we had slept. We hiked to the smaller waterfall, where Alejandro swam, Keaton took photos, and I admired the light streaming through the trees and illuminating the spray from the waterfall. We stayed there for a while, then hiked back up to the cave where we slept, collected our things, and everyone hiked back down the steep, muddy path to the van. We put our muddy shoes in a bag, stopped at the program office to rise off, and hopped in the van.

On the way to San Jose, we stopped twice. The first was for lunch at a Taco restaurant where I had a yummy grilled veggie taco. The second was to go souvenir shopping. By the time we got to San Jose, it was dark and we checked into our hotel. We had dinner in the hotel restaurant and then did Rustic Ties with Eva in the hotel hallway.

Tuesday was a travel day. We slept in, finished packing, and headed to the airport. I had about $6 left in Colones (Costa Rican currency), so I bought a Starbucks drink while we waited in the terminal. We boarded and had an uneventful flight to Lima! In Lima we met up with Naomi again, which was super exciting!! She had changed her hair again and it looks awesome. In the car on the way to the hotel we told her about Costa Rica and she told us about France. At the hotel, we checked in and ate Pizza Hut for dinner, then stayed up all night watching the election results come in. My statement about the results is on all my social media and in the photo section below if you'd like to read it.

On Wednesday morning we woke up early, made earlier by the lack of sleep and time difference, and went to the airport again. Our flight to Cusco was delayed, but not by much and once we started it was an uneventful flight. The Andries were really beautiful out the plane window. When we got off the plane we met Raul, our local guide for Peru. He's a native Quechua speaker (Quechua is the native Incan language), and he speaks to us pretty much exclusively in Spanish. He's super cool. I felt really altitude sick when we got off the plane in Cusco, which is at about 11000ft, but I took a motion sickness pill and felt better as we moved into the Sacred Valley, which is at about 8000ft. I predictably slept in the car, but every time I woke up the view was incredible. Cusco's storefronts were colorful, lively, and quaint. Once we left the city, we threaded through steep red-brown mountains rising up around green picturesque valleys. The sky was blue with white puffy clouds.

We stopped for lunch all together then drove the last half hour to Pachar, the community where we will be in homestays for a week. Pachar is a small community in the Sacred Valley with about 80 families. When we got there, our host families put confetti on our heads and gave us fresh flowers. Then we went back to the house and rested all afternoon. Taylor, Naomi, and I are staying together, our host mom's name is Magaly, her husband is Javier, and their sons are 4 and 8 years old. There was also a gaggle of cousins and friends playing in the house and on the road. We drank tea and ate dinner as the sun set, leaving the air cold and dry. Magaly talked with us about a traditional Quechua dance, religion, university, different types of meat, medical school, and the US elections. She told us that she's Catholic, and she's about to go back to nurse school next month. She said that people here eat guinea pig, but not cats or dogs like they do in Lima. We played catch with the kids until Shannon and Alejandro came to visit, then went to bed.

Thursday was the first day of our Sacred Valley routine. We woke up for breakfast at eight, which Javier made for us. Then we met the rest of the group at nine, walked through the street of Pachar, and got on the public transportation van to Ollantaytambo (the larger city 10 minutes away by van. Ollantaytambo is an ancient town, it's where Raul lives, and it's a tourist stop on the way to Machu Picchu. We walked through the center of town, with vendors calling out to sell brightly colored textiles and souvenirs, to the Sacred Valley Project dormitory.

The Sacred Valley Project is a project in Ollantaytambo to help girls from rural villages get an education. There are 37 communities near Ollantaytambo, some as close as Pachar and some a few hours away. In most of those communities, there is a kindergarten and a primary school, but students have to walk to Ollantaytambo to go to secondary school. A lot of the time, it's a long walk and not very safe. If a family can afford to send one child to school, they will send the boy. The Sacred Valley Project seeks out smart, driven girls from these communities who's families are supportive of their desire for further education. The project started in 2010, and they now house and feed 17 girls who otherwise wouldn't be able to get an education. They also provide the girls with extra tutoring, and help them learn Spanish (most of them grew up speaking Quechua). On Wednesdays, they have special programs to help prepare them for after high school, such as money management. The project also recently opened a bakery in Ollantaytambo to give the girls experience and to help fund the project, which runs solely on donations.

The girls were at school when we arrived, but we met Gabi, the woman who runs the dormitory, before Spanish class. Keaton and my teacher is named Maria Theresa, and she had us talk a lot and read an article about stereotypes to gage our Spanish language knowledge. Then we went for a walk in the market to practice some Spanish before lunch. After lunch, we went to a hardware store and bought paint, masks, and some other materials for service. Then we walked back to the dormitory and sanded and painted the bottom half of a wall white. The girls arrived back from school just as we were finishing, so we drank some tea together and tried to learn each other's names. They were really excited about the fact that Naomi is from Africa, and they sang English songs with us. We sang a lot of "You're the One that I Want" from Grease. Then we took a photo and headed back to our host house.

At the house, Javier tought us how to turn on the "hot" water in the shower, and we rested for a little bit before dinner. Alejandro came to say hi, and I played catch with some little kids. After dinner (lentils!), Magaly showed us videos of traditional dances in Ollantaytambo and Pachar, and of the kids swimming in the river. We talked for a long time about traditions, holidays, language, and an evangelical congregation nearby that her son went to. The most touching part of the conversation was when we were talking about the difference between the word "casa" (house) and "hogar" (home), and how a home has family and live in it, and she said that this was a home because there are two sons and three daughters, us being the three daughters. We all hugged her, it was really sweet.

On Friday we followed the same routine as Thursday. We had breakfast with Javier, and when we were packing our day bags we found a scorpion in our room! Raul came and trapped it and took it away, he said that it was only a little bit venomous, and it wouldn't have killed us, just given us a fever. Then we took a van into Ollantaytambo and walked to the dormitory for class. In class, we talked about irregular verbs in the past tenses, then read an article about service work and designed logos for imaginary service organizations. Mine was "Un Mundo Que Habla," and it's imaginary goal was to teach people around the world a second language. Then we walked around a touristy market and the teacher quizzed us on the names of animals and different types of clothing.

Because my internet is unreliable here, I am posting this during lunch where there's wifi. I'll post about the second half of my Friday next time I post.

Hiya, friends

Week 10 (wow, has it really been 10 weeks?) of my trip has been educational. We started the week in Pachar in the Sacred Valley, then visited a hot spring before hiking to Machu Picchu!! Only two and a half weeks left! Happy Thanksgiving to all who celebrate!

Note: Next week's blog post will be late because on Friday I'll be in the Amazon and completely offline!

Last week I posted halfway through the day on Friday, so here's for the afternoon and evening. After lunch and some free time (which is when I found wifi to post), we went back to the Sacred Valley Project for service work. That day, we started painting the inside of a second-floor room used as an office and spare bedroom. First we sanded the walls, then we painted them white. To get to the top of the walls, Raul, Hunter, and I stood on a bench and used paintbrushes (everyone else was using rollers). At the end, Gabi (the director of the project) and I scrubbed the bench clean. There was an amazing red-brown shadow on the mountains, and it turned out to be from a red cloud of smoke that Gabi said was from people burning grass so they could plant a field of corn on another mountain. It was really beautiful, especially against the blue sky with the white moon.

On the way back to Pachar, I told Alejandro the Watermelon Story (if you don't know the Watermelon Story you should ask my dad, he tells it best), and Alejandro told me a story about his dad too. When we got back to Pachar, people were rehearsing a traditional dance in the street. We greeted our host family and rested for a little bit before dinner. After dinner, Magaly, her son, a couple of cousins, and I went on a night walk through the street of Pachar. There weren't clouds, so the stars and the almost-full moon were visible overhead and we could see the outlines of the mountains rising up towards them. The light glinted off the leaves of the trees, and Magaly pointed out the highest hotel in the world (which is dug into a mountainside nearby), the river where they swim, and an old church. The cousins and Magaly asked me how to say things like "stargaze" and "low water level" in English and I asked them the difference between the Spanish words "chiste" (joke) and "broma" (prank), both of which I had heard translated only as "joke." When we got home, I wrote in my journal (much to the interest of everyone, because I draw in addition to writing every night), hung out some dirty clothes, and went to bed.

Saturday morning we had breakfast with Javier (there was some disgusting papaya juice), and then met the rest of the group and went to Ollantaytambo. In the van, I looked out the window to watch the giant mountains go by and listened to the gentle Peruvian music, and it felt pretty surreal. When we got to the Sacred Valley Project, we met a young woman named Kati from Boulder who is here to run the bakery that the project is trying to start.

When our teachers arrived, we started off the class all together (instead of split by level). We sang a Spanish 80s song about a girl who's boyfriend bought a drum and played in a band called Beat, but when he got successful ad recorded a CD he left her for richer, more beautiful girl with bottle-blonde hair. When we split into levels, my class went over the subjunctive and we did an activity where we chose six people in our lives, described them, expressed hopes or wishes for them, and said what they would wish or hope for us, all in Spanish. Then we walked into the town square and used the subjunctive to talk about people we saw there until lunch.

After lunch and a few minutes of free time, we went back to the Sacred Valley Project and kept painting. We finished painting the room we worked on on Friday and kept working on the wall we started on Thursday. To sand the top of the wall, we leaned out the windows and sanded off the brown paint.

After service, we went back to Pachar where there were a lot of people dancing again and hanging out in our host house. I was feeling the altitude, so I fell asleep instead of talking with them. Then we had dinner and talked with Magaly, her sons Farid (9) and Safir (4), and some cousins and Magaly sang the song we had learned in Spanish class! Then we went into our room, where Taylor cast a spell and then we went to sleep.

On Sunday morning, we had breakfast and then headed to Urubamba for a walking Spanish class. Urubamba is the largest city in the Sacred Valley, but much less touristy. It's also where our Spanish teachers live. We walked through a park (which was mostly cement with benches and organized patches of grass and a fountain in the middle), asked a restaurant hostess about the specials of the day, walked through the market, bought groceries for our teacher, found the center of town, asked the owner of a hair salon how much a haircut would cost, and then played chess in the town center. I lost chess heartily, but I hold that it was unfair from the start because everyone who walked by and helped helped the teacher, who was learning chess for the first time! After class, we had lunch at a mostly-vegetarian restaurant in Urubamba and then headed back to Ollantaytambo in a public van.

In Ollantaytambo, we went to the Sacred Valley Project. There we met Alex, the Rustic Pathways Country Manager for Peru, who's seems really cool, was wearing a felt hat from Cambodia, is coming with us to Machu Pichu, and went to Brandeis for university. We painted the outside wall of the project brown all in one day, partly because we attached the paint rollers to sticks so we didn't have to use the scaffolding as much (thanks for the the-dye duct tape, Mom!). After service, we headed back to Pachar for dinner with Magaly and a gaggle of host brothers and cousins, then DMC'd in our room for a while before falling asleep.

We had our last Spanish class on Monday morning at the Sacred Valley Project. After breakfast in Pachar, we hopped into public vans, walked to the Project, and met our teachers. They were late because of a miscommunication about what time class should start, so I read Ciudades de Papel with Alejandro for a while first. In class, we worked more on the subjunctive tense and went over the rest of the uses. Then we did an activity about getting ready for events, like a house party, a trip to China, or a wedding. At the end of class, we walked into Ollantaytambo and said goodbye to our teachers.

After lunch, I face timed with Mom using the restaurant's wifi, then headed back to the Sacred Valley Project to finish painting the wall brown. Actually, Raul, Shannon, and I painted the wall and everyone else cleaned up the entryway so that there wasn't litter everywhere. I had a nice conversation with Raul about religion and family history while we were painting. His family is indigenous and his parents are Catholic, but he's not really so into the Catholicism thing and he's really interested in Incan religion and spiritual practice. During service, we took our first Snapchat for the Rustic Pathways Snapchat Gap Takeover! It lasts all week, so check it out at rusticpathways. After we finished service, we said goodbye to the girls. Shannon thanked them in Spanish for welcoming us to their house and told them that they are an inspiration to us. They said thank you to us for coming, and said that even though we think they are inspirational, they think we are because we came all the way there to paint their wall. We took another photo all together, hugged and kissed goodbye, and left.

When we got back to Pachar, we ate dinner and then I played a couple of games of chess with Farid, our 9-year-old brother. The first game he beat me heartily, and the second game I won, not heartily but decisively. Naomi thinks he let me win, but she doesn't know how to play chess so I think that's pure speculation! Monday night was the supermoon, so we went out and moongazed for a few minutes before going to sleep.

What the New York Times' Nicholas St. Fleur says about the supermoon:

"The supermoon on Sunday and Monday nights is supposed to be special because it is the closest the full moon will be to Earth since 1948. That means it will be the biggest and brightest full moon in about 68 years. Compared to an average full moon, this supermoon will be approximately 7 percent larger and 15 percent brighter. But most people won’t be able to tell the difference between it and a regular moon."

Tuesday was our last day in Pachar as well as Incan religion/spiritual practice day. My apologies in advance for how convoluted the next couple of paragraphs are in my attempt to explain Incan religion after having had it explained to me in Spanish translated to English.

We slept in an extra hour or so in the morning, then met up with the group for a hike. We met ChiChe, the driver for the rest of the week. On the way to the hike, we stopped to see some cave art on the side of a mountain. It was of llamas, which the Incan people found holy. Raul explained to us (and Shannon translated) that they were walking in the direction of a particular "Waka," or holy site, and that these particular llamas represented the "Pacha Mama," meaning Mother Earth. The first day of the Incan year is August 1, called the Día de Pacha Mama, and it marks the beginning of the agricultural season. Most of the other Incan holidays are related to the solstices, such as June 1, the winter solstice, when they prayed for the sun to come back. The Incans worshiped Pacha Mama, as well as local "Apus", which are the spirits of the mountians. The most important/tall one in this area is called Veronica, and she has a beautiful glacier on top. They also put a lot of importance on male and female energies, saying that they must balance each other out. One example of this is the Indian Goose, which mates for life and if the female dies first, the male commits suicide rather than living without her. Another is that in Incan stonework (which is all done by hand), the granite represents the female energy and the dianante represents the male energy. One of the Wakas we planned to visit was a waterfall, in which the water represents the female and the earth represents the male, it is a symbol for fertility because the plants grow around where the water meets the earth. These energies are reminders of duality and flexibility.

Back to the the cave art, there was a sun shining above the llamas as well as a cross. The cross was added by Catholic Spaniards who had come to convert the native people, mostly Franciscan and Jesuit. These missionaries had also made art to connect Jesus and Catholicism to the native culture. Raul said it was clear that the Spanish had added the cross because the Incan cross is very different. It is called a Chackana, and it has three levels to represent the three "pachas" or worlds. Those worlds were the world of the G-d s, often represented by a condor, the world of the living, often represented by a puma, and the world of the dead, often represented by a snake (which also represents wisdom and knowledge). Because of these three worlds, and the three levels of the Chackana, the number three is very sacred in the Incan religion.

After we stopped to look at the cave art, we started on our hike. It was a little part of the Incan Trail, and it was super steep in the sunlight. We made it a little over halfway to our destination (the waterfall that is a Waka for fertility) before turning back. Taylor felt sick, I didn't have enough water, and the rest of the group come back with us. After the hike, we stopped to eat a boxed lunch of sandwiches and empanadas in front of a primary school and talked some more. After lunch, we were scheduled to go to a Waka in a cave and have an Incan ceremony (led by Raul), but it was up a lot of steps so they decided it wasn't a great idea to limb up there after the morning's hike. Instead, we went to the homestay home of the guides to do the ceremony.

Raul told us (and Shannon and Alejandro translated) that the ceremony we were about to do is called Kin-tu, which means "three" in Ketchua. It is a very common ceremony that gives thanks to Pacha Mama and people offer blessings. The centerpiece of ceremony is Cocoa leaves, which are sacred in the Incan religion. Cocoa leaves are chewed because they have lots of good things in them, like protein, calcium, and alchaloids. Because of the calcium, people who live on a natural diet can chew them instead of brushing their teeth. They're also used as medicine. To begin the ceremony, we each took three leaves and used them to send a prayer for a place, a person, or an idea). Raul told us that this particular ceremony was to ask permission to enter some of the most holy Wakas (like Machu Pichu),and to ask for protection from the Pacha Mama. While we all had our leaves, Raul took a trinity of leaves for each Apu (mountain spirit) in the area and placed all the leaves in a circle. Then he added our leaves and intentions. In the middle of the cocoa-leaf circle, he put a shell and some Wayuro seeds, which come together as the male and female parts. The male seed is orange with a black spot and the female seed is all red. On top of that, he put a piece of Llama fetus, because it's a holy animal that has never known this world, so it will help transfer our intentions to the G-d s. Then he put on llama talo on, which is sacred because it is so useful to Incan culture. Then he piled on a sacred volcanic rock, cocoa seeds, Wyakar (a medicinal herb), Kaneiwa (which is like a very fine Quinoa), lots of other seeds, rice, anis, raisins, quinoa, animal crackers (to represent animals), and some special flowers that only grow on the coast. In the package that Raul had bought for the ceremony, there were also some gold and silver bars, a cross, and some other things that he said had been added since the missionaries had come but that he chose not to put in the offering. Once he had finished the offering, he tied it up in a white package and we went outside to burn it. The smoke from the fire brought our intentions and offering to the G-d s. It was really cool!

After the ceremony, we went into Ollantaytambo for some ice cream, and then back to Pachar for our last meal with our host families. We ate with the whole group and all of the host moms at our house. They wouldn't let us help prepare dinner, so we made up a story and played with our host brothers. Then we ate dinner all together and made speeches thanking the host moms for having us. I thanked Magaly for always answering my questions and letting us see her beautiful family and her life. Then they said thank you for coming, and to come back and visit. After dinner, the moms wouldn't let us help clean up, so we played with our host brothers some more. I showed Farid the rocks I've been collecting for my cousin Ben, and then he went and got some rocks from next to the house for me to bring for him. Then we played another game of chess, but my side was taken over by a cousin pretty early. When I went downstairs to brush my teeth, Magaly and both of her sons were down there too so we all brushed teeth together. Farid was really interested in my face wash, and he asked me what the four seasons in Boston were like.

We woke up early on Wednesday morning to say goodbye to Farid and Magaly, because they go to school and work early in the mornings. Then we finished packing and got on the bus. We drove through the mountains, up and up and up towards Veronica (the tallest mountain in the region, with the glacier on top). We stopped on the way to see some ancient storage units, which Incan people used to keep their food preserved during the 9-month dry season. Then we got up almost to the glacier, where we got out of the car into the freezing air and saw her up close. We also took a pretty awesome snapchat up there! We drove down a little through a cloud (yes, we were high enough to be inside a literal cloud), then Keaton, Hunter, and Raul got on mountain bikes to bike the rest of the way down. I would have biked, but we were at about 4,000 meters (as opposed to Ollantaytambo's 2,000 meters and Boston's 0 meters) and I was altitude sick, so I stayed on the bus instead. We drove through lots of different biospheres, along a road carved into the edge of the mountian. When I looked out the window, it looked like the view out of an airplane we were that high.

We stopped at a viewpoint along the way (where it was actually a quite nice temperature) and Raul told us that the river that was down in the valley we'd been driving along was a depository into the Amazon, and talked about how large the Incan empire was. The Incan empire as we think of it only existed for about 90 years, and it was formed essentially by taking over other empires. It covered parts of Ecuador, Chile, Brazil, etc, and was split into four sections like the Chackana. That's how they were able to have so many different seeds for their religious ceremonies. The Incans never went far into the Amazon (because they never figured out how to combat yellow fever), but they took over some areas at the edge to grow the sacred Cocoa leaves. The people were split into two classes, the royal elite and everyone else. The Royal elite were allowed/able to eat meet, cut their hair, and wear Vikuña wool (a camelid which lives at a higher altitude than Al Paca or Llama but lower than Guanaco, and has very fine wool), but everyone else was allowed to serve in the army.

After the mountain bikers were finished, we stopped for lunch before driving further along the river towards Santa Theresa. In Santa Theresa we went to some hot springs! They weren't really naturally occurring, because the water was pumped in, but it was still suuuuuuuuper nice to sit in the hot water and talk and relax. We watched storm clouds roll overhead as we floated. When I got out to get changed, I stepped on a bee which hurt, but isn't the end of the world. Then we drove into Santa Theresa to check into a hostel and get dinner. At dinner, the group leaders told us that the plan for the rest of the week was going to change because of a strike. The plan had been to hike into Machu Picchu Village on Thursday morning, sleep over, go to Machu Picchu on Friday, and take the train back to Ollantaytambo Friday night. However, the people who work for the train company, a British company called Perurail, were striking because of unfair conditions, high prices for the trains, and discrimination (because Peruvians cannot ride the nice train, their only choice is to ride in cargo trains). The strike had expanded, and Machu Picchu had been closed as well. There was some worry that the strike would expand to Santa Theresa as well, so we decided to leave while we could and go back to Ollantaytambo.

On Thursday morning we got in the bus and drove five hours to Ollantaytambo along the same winding road cut into the mountains. When we got to Ollantaytambo we checked into a hotel, went to lunch, and spent the whole afternoon lounging around. I had a stomachache, so I just rested in bed. At dinner, we found out that the strike had ended and we would go to Machu Picchu the next day! I also realized that I had left my keyboard in the hostel in Santa Theresa, so we called them and made a plan to pick it up in Machu Picchu Village the next afternoon.

Friday we finally made it to Machu Picchu!! We woke up right and early, ate breakfast in the hotel restaurant, and went to catch our train on Perurail. The train was super nice, we sat around a table and were served a drink and a quinoa pastry. There were announcements every twenty minutes or so in Spanish and English to tell us about the area we were passing through. After almost two hours, we pulled into the train station in Machu Picchu Village. It was raining, so we opted to take the buses up to the site instead of walking. The line was super long, and we all stood together and measured the time in how many bridges we passed. The forty minutes passed by quickly and we had a beautiful view out the window on the way up the mountain to the site. There were clouds above and below us. When we got there, we all used the s/1 bathroom and Alejandro found us a guide for the site (it was Raul's daughter's birthday so he had stayed in Ollantaytambo to celebrate with her). The guide's name was Sonya and she led us through the gates where they checked out passports. She only spoke Spanish, so I asked in Spanish if it was okay for me to take notes during the tour and she said yes. Prepare for facts! (The next paragraphs are mostly facts about Machu Picchu)

We walked over the uneven cobblestone between the ancient rocks and came upon our first site of Machu Picchu. We stood on the five hundred year stone old terraces 2,000 meters above sea water and Sonya told us about the history of Machu Picchu, which literally translates to "Old Mountian". Machu Picchu's history starts with the 9th Inca (Inca is the title of the emperor of the Incan empire) sometime in the early/mid fifteenth century. The 9th Inca is credited with having formed the Incan empire, by taking over other existing peoples. Machu Picchu was built as a vacation home for the Inca, who lived most of his time in Cusco, the capital of the empire. It was probably built in the spot it was built in for a few reasons. One was trade, it was on the trade routs between Cusco and the rest of the empire that brought corn, quinoa, etc from the mountains and cocoa from the jungle. Another reason was spirituality, Machu Picchu is literally among the clouds, as I mentioned earlier there are clouds both above and below the site. Machu Picchu is also thought to have been a university for young students (16-18 years of age and about evenly split in genders) to have gone to master astrology, astronomy, textiles, and agriculture, as supported by the 178 tombs of people of those ages found there. Machu Picchu has two main sections, the agricultural section (where they would have grown corn, beans, etc) and the urban section (composing of a neighborhood to house 300-500 people, religious temples,and an industrial area for textile making). Unfortunately, Machu Picchu was never completed. Construction on the site was abandoned in 1536, four years after the Spanish arrived in the empire. The ruins eventually became farmland, and were undisturbed until 1911 when a Yale University archeology professor named Hiram Bingham stumbled across them on a quest for the last city of the Incas and made them famous. What we saw of the site today was 70% original and 30% reproduction.

The first thing Sonya brought our attention to in the site was the small canals running along the ground carrying water. They are original, and they still work. Part of their purpose was to carry water, but it was also to redirect water so that it would not break the walls holding up the terraces. She explained that the terraces were really there to support the mountain from erosion. The water in the site came from the mountains, and the Incans used a filtration system to make it potable.

The next thing we saw was the Templo del Sol, or the Sun Temple. The walls of the Templo del Sol are made up of rocks carved perfectly against each other in Incan Imperial architecture. They require no mortar, and it's pretty amazing that they're still standing 600 years after they were built. The Templo del Sol has windows that light shines through and the room works essentially as a giant sundial. The different windows function at different solstices and seasons. The Templo del Sol is impressive, but as we got closer we saw that it was really just eh crown above another temple, the Pacha Mama Templo. This temple is seen as a true example of Incan architecture, and it is full of meaning. There is an alter there for especially important sacrifices, of the first harvest of the season or of perfect black llamas. There were enclaves for religious decorations, and a set of three steps leading up to represent the three worlds (g-d s, living, and dead).

Next to the Pacha Mama Templo stood another building, this one in classical construction not imperial construction. Classical construction also doesn't use mortar, but the stones are not smoothed the same amount. Imperial construction was used for religious buildings, like the temples, while classical construction was generally used for important people. This building was the home of the Incan High Preist, who lived there full time and was generally in charge of the site. (The third type of Incan stone construction was called Rustic (#SoRustic) and it was made of loosely fitting stones held together by mud mortar.)

The next place we saw was the botanical garden, which had been replanted. Sonya told us that Machu Picchu is in a particularly interesting environment known as an "Alpine Rainforest", meaning it had both altitude and humidity. This leads to a lot of endemic organisms, meaning organisms that are native to the area and have not spread outside it. These include Chinnemoya, Granadija, lots of types of orchids, some hummingbirds, eyeglasses bears, among others. The garden grew cocoa and a flower known as Angel's Trumpet too. Angel's Trumpet is a hallucinogenic that was used for religious ceremonies. It is also toxic if prepared wrong.

We then went to the Three Windows Temple, a giant wall with three Windows carved into it. At the summer solstice, the sun shines directly through the middle window and casts a Chackana-shaped shadow on the ground. Sonya told us more significance of the Chackana. The four parts represent the four quarters of the empire, with the circle in the middle representing Cusco, which is literally translated to the "belly button" of the empire. Starting in the top left and going counterclockwise, the three levels represent:

- Condor (Peace), Puma (Strength), and Snake (Love)

- The three Incan laws: don't lie, don't steal, and don't be lazy

- Knowledge, Love, and Work

- the three worlds (g-d s, living, and dead)

When we turned from the Three Windows temple to our left, we saw the Principal Temple. This temple is the center of Machu Picchu, and it is (like all the other temples) in Imperial construction. It is dedicated to the most powerful Incan g-d, Wira Kocha, which literally translates to "imaginary G-d." His story is really interesting. The Incans used to celebrate the sun as the most powerful g-d, but once during a summer solstice something blocked the sun. Some people believe it was an eclipse, others think it was just cloudy, but regardless it convinced the Inca that there must be something more powerful then the sun. They named this g-d Wira Kocha because it was invisible.

We next went to a lookout of the Urubamaba river, which runs through Urubamaa and Ollantaytambo, and the plant a that provides water to the entire valley. The terraces there probably used to be decorated in flowers.

The next stopping point was possibly the coolest, it is known as the "hitching post of the sun." It is the highest spot on the site and on it there is a very interesting rock. The Rock is carved to have four angles, representing the four corners of the empire. It also functions as a sundial and a compass, and it was probably used as an observatory to make records on astrology and agriculture. The most interesting think about the rock however is that it is a unique mix of materials that gives it magnetic and electric properties. People aren't allowed to touch it any more because the oils in our skins harms it, but they say that when you touch it you could feel the energy. Alejandro, who first visited the site in 2013 when you could still touch it, said it felt like fire ants crawling all over your hand. We also had the best view yet of the site from there.

In an alcove when we walked down, there was a giant rock labeled the "Sacred Rock." Sonya told us that it was a representation of a mountain behind it, which we couldn't see the top of from the clouds. The mountain is the highest visible point from Machu Picchu, and it represents duality (which I talked about on Tuesday with the male and female energies). We also saw Mount Waynapicchu, another very tall mountian. Mt Waynapicchu has the guard's house for Machu Picchu, and it has the counterpart to the Templo del Sol, the Templo de la Luna (Moon Temple). We didn't climb it, both because it's a very demanding and somewhat dangerous hike and because they only allow 400 people per day to climb it (in two shirts) and you have to buy tickets waaaaay ahead of time.

We walked through the industrial zone, which now looked like a lot of stone rooms, and to the Espejos de Agua ("Mirrors of Water"). These were two small stone basins of water used to reflect the image of the sun and moon so that one didn't have to look directly into the sun and burn their retinas. They still supposedly work on sunny days, but they used to have metal bottoms to be more effective. The sun and the moon represent more duality. The space was also probably used as another observatory to track everything happening at the site.

The last stop on our tour was the Condor Temple. The condor is a huge bird that lives in this area It has the largest wingspan of any flying bird and that large wingspan allows it to fly the highest of any bird in the region, into the altosphere. Because it flys so high, the Incans saw the condor as a connection to the g-d s. The condor temple is, if you use some imagination, in the position of a condor about to take off. The body is made of some really pretty rock. In the temple (which is under the body) there are the normal enclaves for religious objects and decoration, but Sonya told us that they were also used for mummies. The Incans wrapped mummies in the fetal position, reasoning that we entered this world like that so we would have to enter the next the same way. They were placed in the condor temple with hopes that the condor would help them get to the next life, and people made sacrifices to the condor (which is a carnivorous animal) to feed it and give it strength to transport their messages to the world of the g-d s.

Our tour ended, and we said goodbye to Sonya and went out of the site for a snack break and to stamp our passports. Then we went back in (a ticket allows re-entry three times per day) and climbed up to what Shannon called the photo-op. We took pictures and snapchats all together and then the group split and Taylor and Hunter went to sit by the entrance while Keaton, Naomi, Shannon, Alejandro, and I wend up to a higher viewpoint. It was really really beautiful from there, and it was fun to be in the smaller version of our already small group. We took some more pictures and exited the park at almost 4 o'clock.

Everyone was hungry, so we went to get on line for the bus to have a late lunch/early dinner in Machu Picchu Pueblo. The line was soooooo long! We waited for an hour and a half, and got down to the village around 5:30, leaving half and hour before we had to be at the train station. Alejandro came with me to pick up my keyboard (thank goodness, I wasn't looking forward to typing all this on the iPad touchscreen) and it was miraculously there. The lady tried to get me to pay an extra s/10 (which is like $3) for it because I'm gringa, but Alejandro get defensive and wouldn't let me so she called and it was all fine. Then we stopped to pick up some pastries before heading to the train, where I sat across from a Swedish woman with perfect English who was traveling across Latin America. When we got to the station, we made a short stop to change into warmer clothes at the hotel then went right to dinner, starving. Keaton accidenally ate some of my dinner, but it was okay because it was hysterical and I didn't end up finishing it. After a lovely conversation with Alejandro, which Shannon hopped onto as well, I fell asleep. I was so tired from the day I forgot to post this update, sorry for the lateness!

I'm going totally offline from Monday until November 28, so next week's post will be late as well! Much love!!

�Hola!

Week 11 of my trip was new! I explored Cusco (it's history and markets) lived in the Amazon for five days, then flew to Lima! Sorry for the late posting, there isn't wifi in the Amazon. I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving!

We woke up in Ollantaytambo on Saturday morning and Raul asked us if we wanted to go to a special ceremony that Alex (the country manager) had invited us to. It was a baptism of a child in which Alex would become the g-d father, and the interest was that the baptism was a mix of Catholic and Incan traditions. The group voted against going however, so we packed up and headed to Cusco! We drove past Pachar for the last time, along roads cut into the mountains until the mountains turned into hilly farmland and then Cusco. We checked into our hostel and went to a vegan for a pretty alright lunch.

After lunch, we had some free time in Cusco and I went to the Museo Inca, or the Incan Museum. I looked through rooms of pre-Incan pottery and stone knives, reading about the earliest cultures in Peru (the Cara in Lima dated back to 6000 BCE, and the Wan and Chankas from Cusco are from almost as long ago). A bunch of Pikillaqtu figures carved in turquoise caught my eye especially. I then went to see Incan pottery, from miniature ceramics made to be offered to the g-d s to giant urns for storage. I read about Machu Picchu, Incan art, textiles, and weapons, and cranial trepanation. I saw old mummies arranged in a fetal position, and read about how perfect they were and how careful the Incans were to not alter their features during mummification. I read more about the history of colonization, from Spanish invasion in the 16th century to the colonization and adoption of Spanish culture into wealthy Incan homes to the anti-colonization effort in the 18th century.

After the museum, we went back to the hotel to rest before dinner. We went to a burger restaurant for dinner and brought Naomi back a burger and ice cream because she wasn't feeling so well.

Sunday was our day in Cusco! We started off the morning with a walking tour of Cusco. Our first spot was a giant mural depicting the history of the area from pre-Incan times through 1992, when the mural was finished. On the far right, there were images associated with pre-Incan origin myths, moving to the rise of the Incan empire with the 9th Inca, a giant sun, and Dios Punchow (a gold statue dedicated to the sunrise g-d which is missing now), then it shows Spanish invasion with conquistadors and missionaries, which gave way to colonialism, and later anti-colonialism with indigenous uprising, and ended with the declaration of Peru's independence from Spain and the people together looking forward to a future of indigenous rights and prosperity for Peru.

The second stop on our walking tour was the Kurikancha, which was the original home of the Inca (the Incan emperor) and was later turned into a Franciscan basilica and monestary. It was originally a great example of Incan architecture, and housed the Incan as well as the Dios Punchow, the statue of the g-d of sunrise which went missing after Spanish invasion. Historically, there's a very good chance it was melted into gold bars and shipped to Spain, and an even better chance that the ship carrying the golden bars ended up shipwrecked at the bottom of the ocean. About 60-70% of the Spanish loot ended up that way. In addition to all the loot the Spanish took, they pushed down Incans by building churches to honor different saints on top of their spiritual sites. This was partly because Incan architecture was so well done and hard to take apart, but also to assert themselves as more important and powerful then the Incan culture and religion. The Franciscan basilica that is now on the site of the Kurikancha actually contains some interesting mixtures of Christianity and Incan culture, the most notable example being a statue of a crucified Jesus who looks Incan, is wearing indigenous clothes, and is chewing cocoa in his cheek.

Our third stop was the Plaza de Armas, the main square in Cusco. We had stopped there briefly the day before, during our free time, so we had already seen the giant Grecian fountain with a statue of the 9th Inca crowning it, pointing towards ruins in the hills. Because it was Sunday, there was a huge parade happening to fly the flags of Peru, Cusco, and a lot of institutions and schools as well. It was loud and bustling with the weekly show of pride. Raul told us that this square's parades were not always so joyful, in fact the original name of the plaza translates to "the plaza where they go to cry." This is because as the Incan empire expanded and took over it's neighbors, the 9th Inca ordered all the sacred objects and treasures of the conquered culture to be brought to Cusco and paraded around the square, where the people of the conquered culture watched and weeped before being enslaved. When the Spanish came, they did the same to the Incans, and built a giant church, Corpus Christi, in the square. This church is really interesting because it has a stone altar and a painting in which a mestizo Jesus is drinking corn beer instead of wine and having a feast of indigenous foods. Every Sunday, this church hosts a 5am mass in Quechua for local indigenous people who do not speak Spanish, the only one in the area. And on the day of the winter solstice each year, the indigenous people come to the church and parade the treasures around the square.

Our fourth stop was the Plaza San Francisco, where the school of Bellas Artes is and the first two universities in Cusco still stand, one for each gender, built in 1825.

Our last stop of the morning was at the traditional market, where one can buy everything from herbal remedies to all kinds of food to offering packets to colorful souvenirs. Raul told us that people come especially every year for a special kind of mushrooms that only grow for a few weeks in the rainy season and are considered a delicacy. He also said that one can go to a vendor and choose a frog to buy from a barrel, which the vendor would then skin alive so the buyer could take it to a juicer, who put it into a blender to make frog soup, a cure-what-ails-you remedy. We had almost an hour to wander around the traditional market before lunch.

If you ever find yourself in Cusco, I really recommend the Vegan Temple. It's a good-smelling vegan restaurant owned by some of Alejandro's friends, and I think it was the best meal I've eaten this whole trip. I had a quinoa burger with tofu, tomato, pesto, and bbq sauce, with fries. It was really delicious.

After lunch, we went to the souvenir market, where one can barter for backpacks, earrings, necklaces, hats, leg warmers, basically anything made of al paca wool and/or leather, et cetera. I won't tell you what I bought as gifts, but I will say that the most expensive thing I bought and also what I'm most excited about was a giant, white, al paca wool poncho with a black pattern of camelids that I'm already looking forward to wearing to study in the cold of Boston winter next semester. When we finished buying souvenirs, we had free time until dinner. We went to a restaurant that can be best described as "super-gringo" and then walked back to the hostel to go to sleep.

Monday morning we woke up bright and early to go to the airport and fly to the Amazon Rainforest! When we go there, our flight was, of course, delayed. We futzed around the airport for a few hours before finally boarding the plane and taking the quick flight. We stepped off the flight into the almost oppressive heat and humidity, glad to be back at sea level. We met Robin, the local guide for the Amazon (who grew up in the rainforest and lived literally in the jungle until he was 28), and strapped our bags onto the top of the car. After a stop at a restaurant called Burgos's (shoutout to Groupito Burgos!), we drove for almost an hour to get to the Madre de Dios river, a tributary to the Amazon river. We unstrapped our bags from the car and loaded them onto a large motorized version of a canoe floating in the brown water. We glided peacefully along the river, which reflected the blue of the sky, the green of the impressive foliage, and the reds, browns, and yellows of the earth. As we moved, the sun set and the sun played hide-and-seek with us, skirting in and out from behind trees and making gorgeous light. It was dark when we got to the Sachavacayoc Center, the only permanent structure for a long ways which is usually used as a research facility for university students. We settled into our screened-in rooms and had dinner together in the kitchen area. I fell asleep watching the brilliant stars out the window by my bed.

By Tuesday morning the sky had turned overcast, and we had breakfast together in the kitchen area. Then we all put on rain boots, which was a struggle because the sizes weren't organized and a lot of us didn't know our European shoe size. The rain boots ended up being ineffective for the morning's activity, which was a hike through the rainforest in the rain. As we walked quietly and single file, so as not to scare away animals. The only animal we saw during the walk, besides insects, was a large turtle. We also saw an armadillo hole and some wild pig tracks. The first part of the walk was through dense forest, and Robin pointed out very tall, old trees and the different root systems. The coolest ones were buttress roots (which belong to the tall old trees and look like walls) and stilt roots (which allow the tree to "walk" to water by growing more roots on the side where there is more water and letting the roots on the other side die). The dense forest was punctuated by bridges which we walked over one at a time so they wouldn't strain under more weight. The very last part of the hike was on a long bridge over a swampy area with stilt-rooted trees, which were brown on the bottom and white at the very tops. The bridge led us to a dock, where there were two half-submerged boats in a gorgeous lake. Robin and Alejandro bailed the water out of one of them, and we all got in. There were only two ores, so the rest of us relaxed as Robin and Alejandro paddled us around the rainy, serine lake. Then we got back out and hiked back to camp.

After lunch, we had most of the afternoon free. At 6:30, we got back on the boat in the big river that we had gone on the day before to go searching for white caiman. White caiman are a nocturnal relative of crocodiles. We glided through the dark night and Robin shone a super-bright light towards the shore, magically narrowing in on where one of the small caiman was chilling, and signaling to Santiago (the boat driver) where to stop. The caiman generally slipped into the water when we got close. A couple of times, Robin got out of the boat onto the muddy shore to try to trap one for a closer look, but they always slipped away. As we were gliding back to camp, the stars came out from behind the clouds. When we got back, we had dinner and told a story together before going to bed.

We woke up to a hot, humid day on Wednesday. The morning was free, so I slept in until breakfast, then went back to sleep after breakfast! After lunch, however, I had to pack because we spent Wednesday night at "the platform." But I'm getting ahead of myself, before we could sleep at the platform, we had to get there. The hike was two and a half hours through the rainforest, except on Wednesday it wasn't raining, it was hot and humid. It was the kind of wet heat you can't walk in, you have to walk through. The forest was lush and green, and it was much easier to look around without all that rain. Every so often, Robin stopped the group to point something out. We saw a large land turtle, which Robin said was probably 40 years old and would have been delicious to eat, and we all passed it around. We saw (and heard!) wild chickens. There was a giant snail in the middle of the path. Robin pointed out wild pig tracks. The whole way, there was a red bug buzzing around and following us, and Alejandro said it would hurt a lot if it stung. However, the by-far scariest thing we saw was a snake. In Peruvian Spanish it is called a Jergona, in English it's either a Bothrops Asper or a Fer-De-Lance, either way it is the 2nd most venomous snake in the Amazon. It sits there and waits for something to step on or near it, then it strikes and "it kills you FAST" (actual Shannon quote).

"The Platform", as it turned out, was just that; a platform in the rainforest with thin mattresses and mosquito nets and a rain cover, with a table set out next to it and a makeshift kitchen area. There were latrines, but the men's latrine had spiders and the women's had bees, and I got stung on the back of my leg by something that I'm pretty sure was not a bee when I peed the first time. We set down our bags, re-applied insect repellant because it was almost dusk, and walked down to the edge of the lake for a boat ride.

The lake was stunning. It was truly gorgeous, lined with trees and foliage and lit up by the sun reflecting off it's ripples. Nothing I can say can quite capture the beauty of that lake. We got in the boat and glided serenely across it, then followed around the edge and watched the parrots and macaws settling in for the night, getting ready to sleep. They too were gorgeous, their stunning feathers bright in the sun. We saw monkeys jumping around in the palm trees by the waters edge, eating the leaves. When we got close enough, we could even see the baby monkeys clutching their mother's backs. As the sky turned to pastel pinks and yellows and Venus appeared, Robin took out fishing rods and started to fish for piranhas. Fishing for piranhas is illegal in general, but Robin is indigenous, and we were with Robin. I tried it, because if I ever go fishing again I want to be able to say "you know, this is cool, but it's nowhere near as cool as that time I went fishing for piranhas in a lake in the Amazon!" I didn't catch anything, which is good because when Keaton caught something (he was sitting next to me) it really freaked me out. Naomi also caught a couple, Hunter caught some, and Robin got a bunch. As we were fishing, the sun got lower and lower and Mars appeared, followed by a bajillion other stars. There were definitely stars I'd never seen before in my life, both because there wasn't light pollution and because they were too close to the horizon to be seen from the Northern Hemisphere. When it was too dark to fish, we tooled around the lake in the dark and found black caiman. Robin took one onto the boat to point out it's double eyelid and scaly skin. As we slipped through the water back to the dock, I thought about how I couldn't remember ever being able to see the reflections of the stars before.

We got back to the platform, ate dinner, and went to bed on the thin mattresses. When we woke up on Thursday morning everyone complained that they had been afraid something would eat them in the night, and apparently I had sleep-yelled "what's that light?" louder than a normal sleep talk and asked something about directions, which freaked people out. We packed up our things and hiked an hour and 45 minutes back to the camp. When we got back, I basically slept all afternoon. Everyone else went fishing again, but it's really not my thing and I was feeling kind of homesick, what with it being Thanksgiving and all.

Just before dinner, we went on a night hike. Most jungle life is nocturnal, so we wanted to see what we could see. At first I was worried that in the dark someone would step on a venomous snake and die. However, after a few steps Robin pointed his flashlight and found a giant tarantula hiding a solid three steps from the path under some brush. The tarantula was huge and cool, and I figured that if he could see the tarantula three steps away and under the brush he probably wasn't going to miss a venomous snake. It was like the weirdest trust walk ever, only our eyes were open and instead of trusting the person in front of us not to let us stumble, we were trusting Robin not to get us killed. It turned out that most of what we saw was insects. Insects are the largest and most diverse biogroup, according to Shannon, and it felt like we were in the "One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish" of insects. Insects with long antennae, insects with short antennae, insects with spikes on their legs, insects with smooth legs, insects that looked like leaves, insects that looked like sticks, etc. We saw a lot of fireflies too, and turned around because there were territorial monkeys throwing fruit and Robin didn't want it to hit us. Both the best and most scary part of the hike was when we turned off the flashlights for two minutes and stood in the dark, looking at the stars through the trees and listening to the sounds of the jungle. Robin told us later that the sounds were essentially all just different types of frogs, some that sounded like water dripping and some that sounded like crickets. When we got back to camp, we had dinner and talked for a bit before bed.

Friday morning we went on a medicinal plant walk! Naomi, Hunter, and Taylor were tired/sick/didn't want to go, so Shannon stayed back with them and Alejandro came with Keaton and I on the walk. It was our last time walking through the jungle with Robin, but it was the first time he really let us into his knowledge about the different plants.

We first stopped by the giant ceiba tree we've walked past on every walk in the rainforest and Robin told us more about it. He pointed out it's giant buttress roots and told us it was about 55 meters tall. Most of the rainforest around here is secondary, but this particular tree dated back to the primary rainforest. Robin told us that this species of tree produces very valuable wood, so it is cut down in some places. However, when it is cut down that messes with the natural equilibrium of the rainforest. The ceiba is home to many different kinds of ants and the monkeys use it as a place to sleep. The monkeys are the natural prey of a giant bird in the region. He also told us that the tree used to be worshiped as an Apu, because it is the highest thing in the area (like the mountains in the Sacred Valley).

The next plant he showed us was a plant with sharp spines, which Robin told us the indigenous people used to use as darts, making the ends poison with frog toxins. Then we saw a tree that was a home to ants, and the ants in turn cleared away all the other plants in about a three foot radius and protected the tree. The ants have a toxin in their bite, so the indigenous people used to tie disloyal wives to it and let them die a slow death as a punishment. Next, we found a leave that we ground up into purple paint, which we painted our hands and Alejandro's face with. We also chewed natural aspirin, saw a leave said to attract people to you, and folded reedy leaves to make a crown and a grasshopper. While we were in the woods, we saw a couple of animals and a lot of birds. The coolest animals were a baby wild pig and a great river otter (which is an endangered species and only lives in this particular part of the Amazon).

After the hike we had lunch, and after lunch we had a bit of free time. Then Alejandro, Naomi, and I went to a farm a little bit up the river (everyone else stayed back). The farm was run by a man named Jos� Javier who was granted the land by the government nine years ago in the interest of protecting it. He lives there with his wife and farms and hosts volunteers to come and visit. He had us smell natural vanilla, cinnamon, lemongrass, and cilantro. We pet his puppy, Chiquito, and looked at week-old chicks and blue ducks. He fed us lime, papaya, spicy beans, cocoa, and some other fruits, and we got back in the boat to go back to the Sachavacayoc Center and I played cards with Alejandro until dinner. After dinner, everyone packed and went to bed.

We woke up early Saturday morning and got back on the boat to go to the airport. We stopped to pick up sandwiches for takeout in Puerto Maldonado, the town that the airport is in. Then we flew to Cusco, had a four-hour layover, and flew to Lima. In Lima, we met up again with Raul and checked into the same hostel that we stayed in the first night in Peru. We were also joined by Kati and two of the girls from the Sacred Valley Project who were flying to Guatemala for a convention but had a problem with their flight and had to stay over in Lima.

Shabbat Shalom!

Week 12 of my trip was rustic. My group explored Lima, then took a road trip down the coast, into the mountains, and through the desert. I come home next Thursday, so the last blog post will probably be up then!

Sunday was our first full day in Lima! We started off the morning with the girls from the Sacred Valley Project (if you read last week, you'll remember that their flight was delayed on the way to Guatemala for a conference). We left the hostel and walked to the bus stop, where we boarded a very crowded bus and winded through the streets of Lima for about 15 minutes. The bus let us off a few blocks from the Plaza de Armas, Lima's main square. We had to stop on the way to let a bike parade through, led by biking Santas with white felt beards, red vests, and jingling bells. When we got to the Plaza de Armas, there were loud music and horses being marched around the square, carrying soldiers in a changing of the guards procession. We all crowded around Raul for some tour info. He first pointed out the presidential mansion and the giant cathedral on the square, and told us that the changing of the guard happened every day at noon, but it was even bigger that day because it was a Sunday so they were showing the flag as well. He went on to tell us that Peru had 24 provinces, but that Lima was the fastest-growing city with people moving there from the mountains and forest both to escape persecution movements and due to urbanization and industrialization efforts. About 11 million of Peru's 32 million residents live in Lima. He told us that Lima was never a Incan city, it was built by the Spanish during the colonial era in the 16-17th centuries (Peru wasn't liberated until 1822 by San Mart�n). The colonial city of Lima was the exit point for Incan gold, it was where Incan religious artifacts were melted into gold bars and coins and stamped "Espa�a" and "Peru" before being sent through Panama and Cuba. What wasn't lost in shipwrecks and pirate attacks was squandered by the Spanish Empire, used to decorate cathedrals or make jewelry or given to famous people instead of invested. The theft of all this gold is why there is not much gold in Peru now, even though there are still active gold mines in Peru. There is however hope of finding Incan spiritual artifacts if archaeologists are ever able to uncover the tomb of the 9th Inca, but up to now nobody has been able to find or excavate it. Once Raul had told us all of this, we had a few free minutes to wander around the plaza and watch the parade, we even saw the president standing on the front steps of the presidential palace.

After the Plaza de Armas, we went to the catacombs for a tour. First we walked around an 18th century Franciscan monastery, where we saw murals uncovered in a 1974 earthquake, hand-painted Spanish wall tiles from 1620, many restored religious paintings (of saints, the stations of the cross, monks, etc), procession arcs, meeting rooms, and the dining room. In the dining room, there was a giant painting off the last supper, but Jesus was sitting at a round table instead of a long one, there were a lot of people there (not just apostles), and he was eating a Guinea pig. Then we walked down stairs and past a funeral carriage, into the 16th century catacombs built directly under the great cathedral. They were built of grey bricks and a mortar called calicanto, and had been used as public burial ground for Catholics between 1557 and 1823. It is still used for special burials, the most recent being four weeks ago for a Franciscan Preist. We walked past oven graves, which the tour guide told us had been used for 4-6 people and were 3-4 meters deep, some people were put here with caskets and some were just placed body on body. In 1947 the catacombs were excavated, and the archaeologist had left the bones organized, but it was mostly legs and skulls because everything else was decomposed. Then we walked to another pit, this one we were told was 15 meters deep and had been used to control overflow from the other tombs, when the tombs had filled the dead bodies were dumped into this pit and covered by lime and sand to stop the spell of decomposition. The guide told us that there were more layers of the same thing, and the catacombs under the church probably had the bones of about 25,000 people. We walked up out of the catacombs, through the priests preparation room from the 18th century, up a set of red wood steps from the 17th century, and onto a balcony alongside the square courtyard. We saw the church towers, still standing from 1624 despite earthquakes, and the guide pointed out an olive tree from the 1600s. The final stop on our tour was the balcony of the impressive Franciscan church (which has 21 separate altars). The balcony was made to accommodate a 136-person choir, with ornate seats from the 1200s, a giant lectern for Latin music books, and a huge organ.

After the Catacomb tour, we had a late lunch at a seafood restaurant and got on line for the "subway", which was actually the most crowded bus I've ever been on. We stayed on for 20 minutes and eventually got off at Barranco, an artsy neighborhood of Lima. There we said goodbye to the girls from the Sacred Valley Project, who had to catch their flight to Guatemala. We went to a lookout point over the ocean for sunset and then walked to a vegan coffee shop which turned out to be closed. We walked to the main square, where we used Starbucks' bathroom and sat on a park bench listening to a group of people playing music and watched the people milling around. We got ice cream and went back to our hostel before dinner and bed.

Monday was a travel day. We took a bus to the "subway" to a taxi van, which drove us up through the dessert and to a town called Lunahuan�. There, Naomi and I arranged for rooms in a hostel (with help from Alejandro), and Naomi and Taylor found somewhere for us to eat dinner.

Tuesday we also traveled. We left Lunahuan� and drove up into the mountains, along a windy unpaved road. I felt pretty carsick. We stopped twice, once for breakfast of bread and tea, and the second time to pee by the side of the road. We were driving along a gorgeous river, with water so clear we could see everything beneath it, yet still a blue-turquoise-green color that can't be put into words or even photographed. When we stopped to pee, we also went down towards the sparkling water and Naomi, Keaton, Taylor, Shannon, Alejandro, and Raul all jumped in and shrieked at how cold it was! It was fun to watch. Then we got back in the can and winded up the mountain road to Huancaya, where Naomi and I again went to negotiate a hostel room and Keaton went to find somewhere for us to eat lunch. In the afternoon, Naomi and Keaton went for a hike and the rest of us stayed back, and I slept the whole time. After dinner, everyone went to stargaze and I stayed back again because my stomach hurt and I wanted to sleep more. I did see the stars out my window though, and they were spectacular (although not as spectacular as the stars from the lake in the Amazon last week). It turned out that there were fireflies in my room, so I had my own stars anyway.

On Wednesday morning we got back in the car and drove to the top point of a hike down to a boat tour. I didn't go on the hike because I had been sick the day before, and we were at altitude, and the hike back up the mountain seemed like a bad plan. Instead, I sat on a giant flat rock on the steep mountainside, overlooking the blue-green-turquoise river perforated by yellow-green grass and bushes that contrasted from the grey-white-yellow-red mountainside on the opposite side of the valley from my rock. I journaled as the clouds made the color of the river deeper and the breeze cooler, and only stopped and went back into the van when it started to rain and the rest of the group returned. We went to lunch at a restaurant with an adorable month-old puppy we named snowball for it's white fluffy fur, then drove down the winding mountain road to a town just outside of Lunahuan�, where we had dinner and spent the night.

Thursday morning we went rafting! Our hotel is on the river, so after breakfast the rafting guides met us there with life jackets, paddles, helmets, and inflatable rafts. The rafts were smaller than the other ones we've used,but bigger than the kayaks. I was I a raft with Naomi, Keaton, and Shannon, and our guide's name was Juan Carlos. The river was the same that we'd been driving along, but in Lunahuan� it's not as blue. we slipped over the water and bounced and splashed around the rapids. The water looked like it was having a party, splashing up around the rocks and making white foam. There were cormorants and egrets and herons along the way, flying ahead of us above the freezing water. At one point, our raft almost flipped and Keaton fell out and helped us right it. Naomi, Keaton, Raul, Shannon, and the rafting guides dove in and let the water pull them along at one point, then swam back to the rafts. We had a break to eat chocolate, and then walked around a hotel where people worked for their keep, and it was all vegan and the buildings were made of mud and they were working on a sweat lodge. This was the only river we've rafted without trees lining it's banks, instead this river was lined with rocks and bushes, and beyond by giant tan mountains rising up towards the sky.

After the rafting, we changed and played with a puppy that tried to eat everything that moved, then we went to lunch. We had some free time in Lunahuan� after lunch, and Naomi and I went to find wifi. Then we went back to our hotel and watched a lot of TV before and after dinner, and fell asleep.

Friday was another travel day. We left Lunahuan� and took a taxi to Canete, where we cought a bus to Cruce Pisco. We watched out of the windows as the mountains gave way to mounds of desert sand, and beyond the mounds of sand we could see the ocean. Then we took a taxi along the beach, past a fish meal factory, and to Paracas. There, Naomi and I found a hotel and Taylor and Keaton found lunch at a vegan-friendly burger place. After lunch, I went with Raul to negotiate a boat tour for Saturday morning, then went back to the hotel until dinner.

I don't think I ever wrote this blog post, but here are some photos from the desert:

Hi again friends!

So it's been almost 8 months since I posted here and I thought it was time for a new post, both to get out some lingering thoughts about my Rustic Pathways semester and to introduce you all to the next trip I'm going on in just under a week. Here goes...

My Rustic Pathways trip was definitely a growing experience for me. Certainly, the program was well-structured and well-thought through, and I loved my guides, however, the other students on the trip with me were not my people and not the type of people I would have chosen to share the experience with or travel with for 13 weeks. I am glad I went because the language and cultural aspects of the trip were extremely valuable to me and I do think the service projects that Rustic had us working on were worthwhile. I know the social dynamics on my trip were difficult, but I frankly think the program did a poor job of dealing with the bullying and harassment that took place. Rustic Pathways' mission page states that their core values include teamwork and community, and while they created a wonderful program, it is my opinion that they failed to uphold these two values, at least on my trip.