Volcán Poás

Hello all!

Here is my apology for my more-than-a-month long hiatus: sorry. Now leave me alone.

I know you all are dying for me to talk about myself, so here is a quick update on me. Not a whole lot has changed, actually. My family is great, my host mom still thinks I don't like her cooking (which is not true), and I still can't understand my host dad; apparently the rest of the family can't understand his mumbling most of the time either, so no big deal. Classes are... well, classes. School is boring in any language. My university hasn't had any marches recently, so classes have been pretty regular.

A few weeks ago, the ISEP program had the second excursion of the semester, this time to Volcán Poás, which was absolutely beautiful! The park consists of an active volcano with two lakes. The picture below is a picture from an observation point at the top of a 30 minute hike. We were lucky to be able to see as much as we could, because most of the time this entire area is covered by clouds and smoke.

This next picture is a picture of one of the lakes. According to the information I included in a project for my Spanish class, this lake is calm and cold. The other is warm and acidic.

This next picture is of my friend Caitlin with these giant leaves which were everywhere at the park. I must say, this was one of my favorite things about the day.

After the volcano, we went to a place called La Paz Waterfall Gardens. We ate at this really nice resort restaurant. It was a buffet and it was glorious. Besides being a beautiful covered area in the middle of all of the plants around the resort, the food was absolutely amazing. I would have taken a couple pictures of it, but I was too busy stuffing my face with two plates full of food and a bowl of pasta. So for the rest of the day I had a stomach ache, but the sites were still too good to be ruined by that.

There was a nice hike that led to three different waterfalls, hence the name. The waterfall in the picture on the left wasn't the biggest, but it is the only one I got a decent picture of. The path to the 120 foot waterfall led right up to the side of it, which allowed you to pretty much look right up underneath it. Then it looped around to give a full view, but still pretty close, so if you went to the observation point, the mist from the waterfall was so thick it felt like rain, so I didn't want to take out my camera.

The resort also had birds (including an incredible number of hummingbirds), butterflies, sloths (my favorite), monkeys, snakes, frogs, and a traditional ox-pulled Costa Rican cart, which all-in-all made for a pretty interesting day. Here are some pictures below.

The rest of the pictures from my trip will be on my facebook within the next couple of days, so if you are still interested, you can go there to look at the rest, and I will leave you with one of my favorite pictures from the day. Check back soon though, because as soon as my sister sends me the pictures from her trip here from her camera (like she was supposed to do earlier today) I will do a post about her week-long visit which ended a few days ago. Also, I will put up a short post about the protests on my campus for those of you who haven't heard about it.

Nos vemos!