Extreme (non) Couponing

Before I left Texas, I watched an 'Extreme Couponing' marathon on TV (don't judge me!).   One of the self-proclaimed couponers liked to carefully arrange the goods from her 'haul,' once she got home and then take photographs of the items for a scrap book.  Totally weird; however, on one particular episode, this chick built a tower of food the size of a small car on her kitchen table, and only paid about $8 for everything.

Well, Monday, I hit up the grocery store, and had what I might call the 'opposite' experience-  I spent $30 on practically nothing (probably about $18 of food in Texas).  Astonished at the price I paid, I too arranged my haul once i got home and took a photo, and now I am scrap booking it online, for your viewing pleasure.  Ladies and gents- my haul:

Meanwhile, my 'not-really-worthy-of-calling-it-a-haul' haul tower was only 

about the size of a small cat. I am not necessarily complaining about the prices, I just find the drastic price difference interesting.*

P.S. Nana, don't worry, I have plenty of money.  $30 of fruit, cereal, peanuts, cheese and a box(?) of milk doesn't scare me. I am doing A-ok.   :)

*Disclaimer: food in Tamarindo is particularly pricey because of all the tourists. I don't think these prices are indicative of the rest of Costa Rica.

Dinners by the beach

In Tamarindo, most restaurants are located right on the beach.  You enter the restaurants from the street, and walk towards the beach for seating.  Where their seating ends, the beach begins.

Most evenings, there are different types of entertainment wandering along the beach, in front of the seating at the restaurants. The entertainers work for tips, and tourists are happy to keep them employed.  The tourists eats this stuff up (pun intended)!  I don't necessarily consider myself a tourist, since I am here for 2 months, but I totally eat this stuff up too.  I would be a big fat liar if I said otherwise.  Here are some of the 'acts' that I have crossed paths with in the last couple of weeks:

Fire show (old school boom box playing his show's soundtrack- very Matrix-esque).

A different fire show (this one also had live music that went along with the show - a lady drummer/singer).

Makeshift band: melodica, mini guitar, cheese grater, and a bass (a wooden box + a 2x4 + a telephone cord).

Darin Talbot with me and my friends.  He only entertains at one joint in town.  He performs 'interactive entertainment' 3 nights a week (Vegas-lounge-ish show, but with a beach flare).  His show: PuraVidaVille. (see below for Pura Vida reference). 

Mariachi

Service at restaurants is usually pretty slow...but for good reason.  1. Who visits Tamarindo to hurry though a meal?  2. Everything is made fresh.  If you order a salad, they are cutting up the head of lettuce just before it reaches your table.  No pre-made anything.  Plus, the Costa Rican lifestyle (Pura Vida: Pura life or full life) keeps things moving at an enjoyably relaxed pace.

My fave meal thus far is a typical Costa Rica lunch, although they serve it all the time.  I also eat it all the time! It's called 'casado' (which interestingly, also means 'married' in Spanish). Anywho, it's fish (or chicken or beef), served with rice, beans, a salad, veggies and plantains (the plantains are my most favorite part of the meal. I  always save them for the end.

Yummers!  Casado.  My fave!

Green Mountain Energy

Houston has an electric company called 'Green Mountain Energy'-  this weekend, I went to their motherland (per se): Monteverde (green mountain), Costa Rica.  Lots of great energies there.....or something like that.

I travelled with Stephanie and Amy (2 besties from New Mexico who are in my class, and staying about the same amount of time as me in Tamarindo) AND Katrin (a new student from Germany who lives in the same Costa Rican host-home with Steph and Amy).

We left right after school on Friday, and headed for the hills - literally.   Another crappy roadway, but this weekend, we had lovely scenery along the way, especially as we got into the mountains.  The ride was about 4 hours, and it got cooler and windier as we got higher and higher.

Estaban, our friendly Turismo driver.

Lucky us!  Gravel-dirt-rock roads for 2 hours of our trip!

View from one side of the car.

Very lovely view from the other side of the car.

Once we got in, we checking into our B&B.  1 room + 4 girls = no problem! Camino Verde was a funky little B&B run by 2 young brothers.

Camilo Verde B&B

Our little house/hotel room

Hotel room - I slept on a top bunk (interestingly, at 29, a first for me). 

We dropped our bags and hit the town.  Monteverde is a small town, so we conquered the entire town and ate dinner in about 2 hours.  After dinner, we rested a bit, then checked out Bar Amigos, the one happening night spot in town   Great live band-  salsa and meringue.

The town of Monteverde. 

Bar Amigos - always with my fave, Coke Light! 

The next day was chock full o' activity.  Seven am breakfast at the B&B, which included pancakes-  a major treat- not too common around these parts.  Then we went zip lining.  We drove even higher up into the mountains and zip lined over and around the mountain for nearly 2 hours.  A-MAZING views!  Some zip lines went through the trees, while others were high in the sky above the trees.  Zip lining Monteverde was one of the coolest things I have done- EVER! 

Getting ready to zip line (from the left: Katrin, me, Amy, Steph).

Each zip-line platform listed some stats about our current location.

 That's me, flying through the air. 

In the forest with our gear and giant Mickey-Mouse-hand-sized gloves. 

Zip lining also ended with a Tarzan Swing-  sort of like a small bungee jump!  We watched a couple other people do it first, and the guys working the lines would make sure the other visitors were all ready to go, double checked their comfort level and then counted off for them to jump.  We sort of made friends with the guys working the zip lines that day, so I guess they thought it would be funny if they pushed all 4 of us off the  edge.  Very funny!  NOT!  When each of us had our respective turns, they would have us get close to the edge, tell us to bend our knees, and as we bent, they just pushed. No, 'Are you ready?' No, 'One, two, three...' It was probably a little more fun that way anyway - in retrospect, not necessarily at the time.

The view from the top of the Tarzan Swing (that's me at the bottom). 

After that, we took a 2 hour hike around the mountain and across 8 different swinging bridges that went over, under, around, and through the rain forest.  Also SUPER way cool.

Swinging bridge through the trees. 

View from a swinging bridge above the trees. 

View from the longest swinging bridge in the park. 

After a packed morning, we went back to the B&B, and hit up a local soda for a late lunch.  Costa Rican soda = a divey restaurant with cheap local eats.  After that, we did a guided night hike through the forest. 

All ready for the night hike- handy head lamp included.  

 P.S. fear not!  Clearly by the looks of me in this photo, I am just as cool as I was before I left Texas. 

Night hike=  really, really, really dark, even with flashlights (and/or head lamps, in my case), and kind of spooky, but it in a really neato way.  Sadly, not many pictures were taken on the hike.  Too dark.  However, here is a list of what we saw:

3 adult sloths and 1 (very cute) baby sloth- they usually hang high in the trees and only come down once a week to do their 'businees,' but we lucked out and caught a mama and baby only a few feet off the ground (and a few feet from where we were standing).  Not so luckily, we did see mama sloth do her business- must have been that time of the week. 
1 coati - sort of like a long-tailed raccoons
1 agouti- Costa Rica's second largest rodent
1 large tarantula 
1,000,000 ants - very hard at work transporting leaves, 4 times the size of their bodies, back to their ant hill.  Meanwhile, they make ant hills the size of human coffins, far bigger than those I have seen I TX. 
1 green toucan
1 brown jay
2 different grasshoppers
4 white faced monkeys
1 (boring old, regular) possum 
1000+ fireflies

The night hike was really cold and rainy (long-pants-long-sleeved-zip-up-hoodie-and-a-rain-coat cold), and that was the start of a very windy, chilly, and wet night in our area of Coasta Rica.  During the night, I woke up several times to what sounded like cat 5 hurricane winds and flickering power.  Along our ride home, we saw tons of down trees, down power lines, and fruit all over the place (high wind cleans the trees out lickity split).  Monteverde and the surrounding area gets frequent high winds, but last night was even a bit uncommon for them.  

Alas, back in Tamarindo.  I maybe even missed our little beach town a bit, and after some chilly weather, I was glad to get back to some sun!  

And the Doctor said. . . (no, this post has nothing to do with monkeys)

Yuppers.  I already took a trip to the doctor-  1.5 weeks into my trip.  We can thank surfing for my visit.  Although, it's probably not what you think.

For starters, surfing is going fairly well.  Day 3 saw major improvements.  I correctly popped up on more waves than waves in which I wiped out, I did a switch (a 180 body flip whilst up on the board), and I learned how to turn the board whilst standing up to ensure a longer ride.  I have a great instructor, but I think the pop-up practice on the extra bed in my room helped.   :)

Mattress surfing = good pop-up practice.

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10200342660465596

Hopefully this link will get you to my day 2 highlight reel.  I feel a lot more comfortable now, after day 3, than I looked and felt on day 2!

However, my ear got clogged with salt water yesterday, which made Spanish class a bit tricky today . I only understand half the stuff the teachers say anyway, so minus hearing in one ear, I did a lot of nodding, smiling, and responding with only 'si.'

After class, I headed to the doctor. It's located just above the Super Compro, one of the (not so super) supermarkets in town.   I walked in, with my ailment well prepared in Spanish (agua en la oido), but thankfully the doctor spoke English, which made for a much quicker visit.

I went back to his office after only 5 minutes of waiting, and he irrigated my ear the old school way, with a syringe of water and some mostly-cleanish looking tools.  I am not even prepared to talk about the amount of stuff that came out of my ears (this issue was not solely caused by salt water, I can tell you that), but I now have what feels like super human hearing.  Sixty bucks and one prescription of ear drops later, I was on my way.  Best $60 bucks I have spent so far in C.R. 

Doctor Piloto's office: just above the Super Compro, and just below the Rooftop Bar & Club.

Afterwards, I stopped for a Subway sandwich combo deal (it was close to the doc's office), and I even ordered and interacted with the folks in Subway entirely in Spanish!  P.S. 1. ALL Subways smell exactly the same, no matter where they are located and 2. No $5 footlongs here!  In general, the food here is a little pricier than I thought it would be, but Subway takes the cake (or takes the sanwhich, in this case); $9 for a 6inch, drink and chips.  Boo.  But after a visit to the doctor, a nice slice of Americana was worth it.  

Tamarindo Subway.  Exciting, eh?

Prescription and Subway in hand.  Me gusta!

Plus, to top it off, I caught a very lovely pink sky during sunset, as I headed up my apartment stairs after my trusty Subway meal!

Sunset from the staircase

  

The Long Road to Samara

My new friend, Danielle, planned a nice weekend away.  She rented a car for the weekend, and after a 3 hour ordeal trying to pick up the rental car, we were headed to Samara Beach mid-Saturday.  Google maps made the coastal, scenic route look easy and fast, so off we went.   Five words: in Coasta Rica, Google lies!  Our '2 hour' drive was dirt/gravel the entire way, the GPS didn't even recognize some of the roads we were on, and it took us roughly 5 hours to arrive at our destination.  PLUS the coastal, scenic route wasn't that scenic, and it was barely coastal.  But as they say 'always an adventure in Costa Rica.'

The road wasn't too busy (for obvious reasons), when it comes to vehicles, but there were plenty of other things on the road along the way: people on bicycles, roosters, chickens, cowboys hearding cattle, dogs, monkeys, big lizards, and A RIVER.  Yes.  At one point, the road went right into a river.  We got out to investigate and thought 'no way.' So off we went to find another crossing with a bridge.  Ps that does not exist.  We found a more shallow crossing, and took the car for a swim.

Just some cows heading down the road....

Scary narrow bridge

The only, very fleeting, coastal view of our 'coastal, scenic' drive

The part of the river we were NOT going to cross.  Yikes!

The part of the river we thought we could handle.... and we did! 

A semi-scenic view from the road

All was worth it though.  We stopped for yummy grapefruit sodas along the way, ended up at a nice little hotel right on the beach, ate some super spicy fish tacos at a local Mexican joint (holy hot mango salsa), and spent most of Sunday lounging on the hotel hammocks and in the hotel pool.

The hotel had a bunch of little haciendas, so this was our cute little casa for the evening. 

View from the hammock (ps there is a lizard on the tree)

Sunset on Samara Beach

 

More from the beach

View from the hotel restaurant 

Needless to say, we took the inland highway back to Tamarindo.  That ride was only 2 hours.  Plus, we saw 2 18-wheelers and a Burger King on the highway too.  Felt just like home....not really.  Haha.

Tamarindo, Costa Rica - aka Tamagringo, Costa Rica

Here's a quick look at the center of town.  Tamarindo is pretty touristy, LOTS of gringos, most shops take US dollars, and people from counties other than the US that come to Tamarindo to learn Spanish say that their English actually improves during their visit.  

The center of town is small, only a couple city blocks long, but it has most everything you need: restaurants, shops, a couple small grocery stores, a small pharmacy, one bank, AND a Subway!  I need to stop in and see if they do a 5 dollar footlong (because of all the Americans here), or if they have their own catchy song for a 2500 colones footlong.   Not important.  Moving on....

The roads are mostly dirt, but the main road is pavement- cappy pavement, but pavement nonetheless.  The big snazzy resorts and hotels are a several minute drive down the road (or a 20 minute walk).   Conveniently, my school is a 2 minute walk from the center of town, which is great.  From the school to the far end of the town center is only about a 10 minute walk too, so everything is nearby.

Monkey Business

In the mornings, I hear this loud noise off in the distance.  It sort of sounds like a pre-bark grumble from a very large dog; maybe even similar to the start-up roar of a small lion.  I finally asked my teacher what the sound was, hoping he didn't say something like, 'oh, it's the coffee maker from the hotel next door.' It certainly was not.  It's howler monkeys!

I spotted some monkeying around this morning AND this afternoon.  This morning's pictures are fuzzy cell phone pics (only thing I had with me), but this afternoon, they were hanging right by the apartment balcony, so I snapped some better ones with my camera. 

Morning monkeys

Morning monkeys 

They are small monkeys (maybe a little bigger than Ross's monkey on Friends, the TV show).  Their loud howl is not quite indicative of their smallish size, but their voices carry.....big time!

Afternoon monkeys

Afternoon monkeys