Take a right at the yellow rock into the coffee fields...

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Sorry I haven't updated in WAY too long, but life just gets crazy sometimes and BAM suddenly I'm two weekends behind.

So, two weekends ago was a long weekend. Our Spanish finals were on Friday morning and then we were free, totally free, until Tuesday at 8. We had a ridiculous girls day on Friday and hung out with some Ticos and my Venezuelan and Guatemalan friends. Saturday morning, Kate and I went to HiperMas (loosely translated as SuperMore, which is a Wal-Mart equivalent. Other than some necessities, I bought a National Geographic in Spanish that I have slowly, but successfully, been reading.

How random is this? John McCain's daughter's favorite band is a Costa Rican group called LePop, and one of the band members is my friend Kali's Tico Brother! They were having a release party/concert on Saturday night, so all of us got dolled up and went out. It was at a more upscale bar called Bar Code and even though the music wasn't really our style, it was still a fun and different side of San Jose.

On Sunday, we met up at the school and hopped on a bus to Cartago, a fairly large city/basically just a suburb of San Jose. We wandered around there, ate lunch at a bakery, and found a cow festival. Bizarre, but fun. From there we hopped on a bus to Orosi, a smaller city in a valley about an hour away from Cartago. Thanks to Maree's Lonely Planet and Britney's compass, we found a sweet little hostel with strange directions to all sorts of interesting local places. We hiked for about an hour to a "swimming hole" which turned out to be a raging river of death, but we climbed on rocks and took pretty pictures. On our way back into town we ran into the only 3 other Caucasians we saw during our stay, one American and a Norwegian couple. Possibly my favorite part of the day though, was when 5 little white girls sat down for dinner and DEMOLISHED 4 liters of coke, cheese bread, and 2 large pizzas. Much girly bonding happened that night.

Monday morning, we woke up, checked out of our hostel, and followed directions to the waterfall. Fun snippets from the directions include the title, "the road hidden behind the gas station" and "Neno's house is to the right, the waterfall is to the left." We eventually got to this awesome, if someone dangerous waterfall, but we all bouldered up and back just fine, with the help of a cord running down the right side of the fall. Only one of us slipped, and her backpack bore the brunt of her fall. It was basically the most fun I've had in Costa Rica so far.

We headed back to San Jose, stopping again in Cartago to visit the famous cathedral there, which apparently the Virgin Mary visits every year at the beginning of August and heals people. I guess churches are a pretty big deal in Catholic countries.

Enjoy the pics, next post will be about my most recent weekend!

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Photos

At Bar Code.
We clean up nice!

Lunch was DELICIOUS.
Bakeries are the way to go.