Happy July everyone!

Wednesday after I used the internet in Santa Elena I went home and my mom(Dona Alicia) had gotten back from San Jose). I ate dinner with her and a guy who is working on the finca, who is apparently the brother of one of the taxi drivers we know. He has 7 brothers and 8 sisters! I asked if it was usual for families here to have lots of children and my mom said that it used to be but now people are having few children so I think it's just a generational thing, to answer someone's question.

Thursday we had Spanish class and I had history in the afternoon at 3:30. In between lunch and class though it started to rain a LOT! We're talking almost monsoon with crazy thunder and lightening. So the power went out and we had to sit in the dining room to have part of our class because it was the only building on campus that had power. Thursday night after dinner I watched the Argentina vs. USA soccer game on TV(Argentina won 4 to 1!!!), I can't wait until the next World Cup. People here don't seem as big on soccer as I would have expected. I guess since it's a more rural lifestyle they don't watch soccer as much?

Friday I had Spanish and no history class int he afternoon so after lunch me, Shailee, Nikki, and Lauren walked back to my house to get ready to go to Santa Elena. We all spent forever deciding what to wear and my mom was joking that we were making ourselves "guapa" to find "novios." We got a ride into Santa Elena in time to meet everyone at 6:30 to go have dinner together. We split and one group went to Morpho's and I went to the Tree House Restaurant with 5 other people. The restaurant has a tree growing in the middle that actually makes up the roof and supports a few of the tables(including ours) so it was really cool! Afterwards we went back to the Bar Amigos. Bar Amigos has live music on Fridays so we had to pay 1000 Colones to get in(sounds expensive right? It was weird changing money the other day and getting 41,000 Colones, I felt so rich). We danced a lot and it was SO fun! Me, Nikki, Shailee, and Lauren ended up getting back to my house about 1:30am and they all spent the night.

Saturday we got up, had amazing hot chocolate and papaya, and went to the Ecolodge to go on a tour. We went to Finca La Bella where they have a project where people can't sell the land and they have to grow coffee and other things. One place has a Trapiche which is a machine that you feed the sugar cane through to make the juice to make sugar. It was really cool! After the tour and lunch, I went home and took a major nap. I watched some of the Argentina vs Czech Republic soccer game until it mysteriously cut off and the news came on? The other night they like cancelled the news for the soccer game so it seemed weird to me...

Today we met at the Ecolodge to go to a hot springs. We rode in a bus to a house right outside of Monteverde where we switched over to horses. We rode the horses for about an hour before we got to the hot springs. It was really pretty there and it was cool that we were the only people there!