La Tortuga Feliz, Part II… baby turtles! Or as we learned to call them… tortugitas! Aside from our beach patrol responsibilities, our other duty was to man the hatchery. That meant working 4-hour shifts to keep it guarded 24 hours a day, 7 days a week as well as building the correct nests for incoming eggs at night. Even though I didn't have a lot of turtles that I saw on patrol, I had a lot to do during my hatchery shifts! A few days into my week of volunteering, we received our hatchery training and practiced building the nests into sand. There are 3 types of turtles that nest on the LTF island: leatherback, green and hawksbill. Leatherback turtle season was from March - June, so we were in the beginning of green turtle nesting ... read more

The next stop on our Costa Rican adventure was the inspiration for our trip in the first place: volunteering at La Tortuga Feliz. A while back, I had talked to my youngest sister, Hannah, about volunteering some place where she could begin to use the Spanish she had learned. I thought it'd be a great way to show her life outside of the United States and hopefully encourage her to pursue further education in Spanish. So we started to plan the trip, researching places to volunteer and checking out the feasibility of what we wanted to do. Soon, I found La Tortuga Feliz, a non-profit organization on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica that works to help protect nesting sea turtles around their local community. It seemed great and fit our needs: they accepted week-long volunteers, ... read more

Before Keith and I left for our trip, my grandmother told me that Ireland was her favorite place she had ever visited. She said being in Ireland, "felt like coming home." I believed her, to an extent, because the Irish are known for their hospitality. But I didn't know exactly how true what she said would be. Aside from the fact that "coming home" was significant since Dublin is the last stop before we head back to Chicago, Dublin as a whole felt so much like home. It wasn't European the way we have experienced Europe so far. The colors were gone, the Italian fountains and French squares were not to be found, the air of majestic grace was certainly not here. It was a working city, with smoke stacks and brick and crosswalk signs (Naples: ... read more

We're glad to be back in Europe, and Italy! But all I can think about is returning to my adopted home, Rome. Perhaps I'm anxious about arriving in the city that I fell in love with two years ago, perhaps I was grumpy because of all my Moroccan things I had to lug around, but I felt so-so about Pisa. All we really did after we landed was go to the tower, snap a few fun photos, and trudge painfully back to the train station thanks to my awkward and heavy bag of Moroccan goods, which of all the things I bought in Morocco did not include a belt, sadly enough. It wasn't a complete waste of time, but I can't say that I would have gone out of my way to see Pisa. I really ... read more

"Le premier soir, je me suis donc endormi sur la sable, a mille milles de toute terre habitée." ~ Le Petit Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Of all the places that I've slept, the Sahara Desert will go down as one of the surreal, most memorable, most brilliant, and loudest places that I've ever slept. It was fantastic: we made our way out from Merzouga on our camels for about an hour until we reached our tents. Once at our tents, we were welcomed by our Berber guides with mint tea, joking around, music, and delicious food. It was very "packaged tour experience," but I put that aside as I enjoyed the night. The night itself was unbelievable. We reached Merzouga at dusk and quickly saddled up. During the camel trek to the "middle" of the desert ... read more