San José 2.0

For the past week, we were back in San José at our homestays for the last time, having classes at OTS and field tripping around! It was great to be reunited with my host mama for the week. It wasn't until I started listing all of the places I'd been since I had last bid my mama tica goodbye that I realized the multitude of miles that we've covered!

My room in the host house! 

Field trip wise, we first visited AyA, the water treatment plant for San José that makes all the agua here safe for drinking! It was cool to hear about how the treatment process works, and how the vast majority of it works without any pumps. Basically, the water rages into the mostly outdoor facility through two sources that have consolidated the water from many a location. During rainy season (aka now) where a day without a heavy rain is an anomaly, these stream-like water entrances are like the splash-zones at a water park. After the larger leaves and sand get filtered out, some Aluminum Sulfate is added to precipitate some impurities. The cleaner water at the top of these tubs gets tunneled into tubes that go onto the next treatment round, while the dirtier, sediment-laden water sticks around the bottom. After some more finely-tuned filtration and disinfection with a dash of Chlorine thrown in for good luck, the water makes its merry out of the facility and back to my water bottle so I safely stay hydrated! But in all realness, having safe drinking water is a major deal for public health. The 2.6 billion people world wide that lack it are super susceptible to deadly diseases. 

We also went to INCIENSA...basically the Costa Rican equivalent to the CDC! They have plenty of specialized units to deal with different diseases with in the country. It was cool to hear how INCIENSA does qualitiy assurance on the hosptial labs throughout the country. For different diseases, the national branch sends the local labs unknown samples that the labs have to identify. If they don't do it correctly, the lab members generally have to come to San José for further training. Además, all of the positive samples for those pesky infectious diseases are sent here for confirmation. 

                                      

And on Friday, we went to INBioparque! INBio is a non-profit that does work in bioprospecting. Well, what might that be, you (or me a few days ago) might question? Basically, bioprospecting is looking at different plants for different, new potential uses, some of them medical. It's like going on a scavenger hunt with few clues about the next best thing that could be useful to mankind. But, this organization has a park that like a zoo-meets-botanical-garden-meets-the great-outdoors. Many different Costa Rican ecosystems are representing over there, with the appropriate plants and animals chilling there, mostly freely roaming around! The exceptions to the roaming-wildly are the boa constrictors, tarantulas and frogs...things you might not want to eat the 7-year-olds frolicking around the place. Although, I was a bit frightened that I could have a Harry Potter moment and the glass between me and the serpent would suddenly disappear (jokes, jokes).   

These iguanas were just hanging around all over the park!

Munchers gonna munch.

One of the areas was the Finca (farm)! 

Basking in the sun at the butterfly garden.

Dragon fly!

Now we are in La Selva, another OTS field station. This one is closer to San José and attracts more researchers and tourists as well! The heat and humidity are a constant reminder that is more jungley than Las Cruces. We're here for about two weeks, and will do some field and community work about Dengue and also visit the Bribri, another indigenous group!

Inspecting Insects, Perusing Plants and Finishing Fall Break

Hello from fall break! Here's a brief run down of the past two weeks...

From Nicaragua, we went to the Texas A&M Soltis Center, a beautiful field station where we bunkered down to take our midterm exams. It's more of a rainforest than where we've spent more of our time, which brings along a more diverse array of insect living...

First, and probably most notably, we have the bullet ant! From our arrival in Costa Rica, we were warned about this oh-so-real urban (jungle?) legend of an ant. Its bite scores a perfect 10 on the pain scale. While it isn't poisonous, it's been known to make people's vision go red from pain. With this kind of warning, I've naturally wanted to see one to know what it's all about. How large and in charge could it actually be?

Sometimes when I've seen a slightly larger ant, I've wondered, is this a bullet ant? No. No it is not. As I learned at the Soltis Center, after seeing my first bullet ant on a friend's cabin,  bullet ants are very spottable. You can pick one out a mile away--err, maybe 20 feet away...but still. Think about your normal ant. It would be a minute speck of nothingness from 20 feet away. Even for you 20/20 eyed guys out there. The bullet ant would be just as visible, and comparable in size to that giant E on the eye chart. 

A bit difficult to photograph due to its restless movement, the bullet ant cordially visited us in the classroom and hallway! 

There were a bunch of other neat insect that had tactful camouflage adaptations...

In addition to having an array of insects, the center had a bountiful population of plants, which was perfect in studying for our Ethnobiology exam! For the test we had to be able to identify the plant families of some plants we had studied...so around the station we walked practicing our naming skills. It became so second nature to name the nature that I'm still subconsciously doing it on fall break. 

A personal favorite: Melastomataceae! 

After taking our Ethnobio and Tropical Medicine midterms and turning in our research proposals for our final projects, it was time for fall break! From Soltis, to San José we went, and then 13 of us came to Manuel Antonio where we've rented a Jungle Villa for the past week. It's a beautiful house with a pool, that (as the name suggests) is in a jungle-y environment...which means we sometimes get visits from our long-lost relatives...

Monkeys come and hop on the table and chairs sometimes.

While in the jungle, we're not too far from the beach and a beautiful national park, which we've been exploring!

View from a lookout point in the park

Yesterday, tired of hanging out at the beach, I decided to do some hanging around waterfalls...!

We went rappelling down waterfalls about an hour from where we've been staying! Going down a 180 foot waterfall involves a cascading series of events, where you first sit back in your harness and let some rope go to descend. You lose your footing a bit, but regain it as the rapidly moving rapids of waterfall water floods onto your head. You continue readjusting footing, squinting and loosening your right hand's grip on the rope to continue lowering yourself down.  Part of the way down, you notice a beautiful rainbow forming in the mist and newly-found sunny streams of light to your right. 180 feet later, you're not quite sure how much time has past or how many gallons of water has flowed onto your head, but you look up in disbelief of both what you just came down, but also of the other beautiful mini (well they might still be large...everything's relative) waterfalls in the area!

Tomorrow we head back to San José, where I will reunite with my host mama for the week! 

Nicaragua

Slightly straying from the title of this blog, it's the time to record Mi Vida en Nicaragua! Or more like Mi Viaje (trip) a Nicaragua. Our group first voyaged via bus from Las Cruces to San José, and the next day, we left at 4 am, embarking on a 8ish hour journey to Granada, Nicaragua. The goal was to get to the border before 8 am, which is when the Tico Buses (think Chinatown or Vamoose bus, but between two countries) makes it there and the border ordeal can get real slow real fast. The journey was a blur of sleep interrupted by things like stepping off the bus to get passports stamped, casually spotting a volcano out of the window and deciding it might be a good time to eat a peanut butter sandwich but not summoning the energy to fully wake up, thus eating a peanut butter sandwich with your eyes closed (still delicious).

Travel Route! (más o menos)

One of our tourist destinations was to the main market in Managua (the country's capital), which was slightly similar, yet definitely, drastically different from my experience at the Mercado Central last month in San José. Grids of stands compose the structure of this indoor market, but it's more of that convoluted grid style of the nonsensical DC streets than the crisp New York City grid. But this ain't no odd Mass. Ave. moment when it does that weird jog in the street where you always get lost near Union Station. Oh, no. This is a poorly ventilated, enclosed market where about a dozen potential health hazards pop out at you per minute. Some stands show off large slabs of meat, but with no cooling mechanism in sight. There are pieces of livers or iguana meat straight up chilling (or...the opposite of chilling. More like straight up incubating E. Coli) on the counters. Sickly looking chickens wander about. Workers walk barefoot or with un-protective open toed shoes.

Probably not more than a few kilometers away, we ate lunch at a high-end mall with shops like Lacoste and lunch venues where you could indulge on baked brie and snack on sushi. I feel like this contrast from mercado to mall signifies the gasp-inducing, gaping gaps of wealth evident in Nicaragua. Basically, half of the country's population lives below the poverty line. The vast majority of the population is poor, the middle class is essentially non-existent and the upper class is sparse but disproportionally powerful (basically, the complaints of #occupy but on steroids).

If you have the luck of being one of the wealthy citizens, you might find yourself  locating the nearest Nicaragua pay phone in order to dialthe above number to purchase your very own island! 

Even while getting our touristy groove on, the economic disparities remained in your face. It's hard for me to describe the jaw-dropping natural beauty, the eye-popping colors of buildings that we saw without first premising it with my personal qualms about how we as tourists interact with the situation of poverty we see. How can we can turn on our blinders, photoshop the poverty we see out of our vision? The children that follow you down the street, asking for money are so real. Do we push it from the front of our eyes to the back of our minds because during our five-day séjour we know we can't turn around the economic development of a country in which we are merely visitors coming in with our cultural biases? These are some of thoughts doing their whole action-potential nerving firing thang through my brain through our stay there. That being said (there we go again, readjusting the focus so that striking, uncomfortable issues become blurry in the background), we saw some awesome things in Nicaragua.

We went on a boat ride on Lake Nicaragua, the largest freshwater lake in Central America. The water glistens, a still mirror with the reflection of trees and clouds. There are small islands abound, created by the string of volcanoes in the region. Remember that one-percent-esque population I mentioned? They have houses on many of these islands, which are some ritzy looking houses featuring pools and grand-looking columnar architecture (is it just me or do columns always give houses this air of importance?). But the sewage from these island-homes, goes right back into the lake, so I wouldn't recommend this for your next open-water swim journey (unless you want to get some pretty neat parasites!).

We also went to the Masaya Volcano, an active, steaming one, emitting oh-so-lovely sulfur fumes into the air (you can't stay up by the rim for too long at a time). The landscape around it, a marriage of lava fields and meadow fields, is beautiful.

Getting steamy! 

A nearby crater where a volcano once lived.

The section of Granada where we stayed was definitely geared to tourists, but the town square by the church was always lively with music or what seemed to be political activism (or a combination of the both!). The bright, vibrant colors of buildings bring me such joy! They've been everywhere that we've been on the trip thus far, but they continue to be a delicious treat of eye candy for my eyes.

We are now at the Soltis Center, a beautiful field station run by Texas A&M, and it is more of a rainforest environment than the cloud forest of Las Cruces. The facilities here are so nice, and I'm very excited and hopeful to see amphibians and lizards, and I've already spotted some large, leaf-looking bugs!