Children's Museum Invaded by Big Kids! Read all about it on page 2B

      Today's Spanish class consisted of a field trip to the Popular Culture Museum in Santa Lucia de Barva. I think it's pretty coincidental, too, that I met this friend from a town I wanted to visit because of the volcano, visited and went part-way up the volcano to see the view of the city at night, and now am in this guy's town again.

       Odd.

      So, I was pretty hungry on my way to the museum; I soon realized it was because on Monday I'd eaten some bread for breakfast, and maybe a sandwich for lunch, Tuesday some more bread for breakfast and some chicharonnes for dinner (fried pork rinds, mmmmmm healthy), then Wednesday an orange and a liter of sweet tea. Wow, I do well with self-upkeep thing, yeah? Anyway, we arrived and an old Costa Rican woman taught us how to make bread. She made the dough, then we formed it into adorable little shapes and watched it rise in the oven, then left it to cook while we toured the rest of the museum. 

       The rest of the museum consisted of a covered shelter exhibit area with cross-sectioned examples of how Costa Rican houses have been built over the years. My favorite was the adobe houses made of nothing but mud, but that had little pockets carved out inside to store money, treasures, etc., and no one except the person who put it there knew the little treasure coves existed. 

       Then a fully-furnished colonial-style house, which was fairly (no, make that VERY) creepy when the lights got turned out and only candles were lit. After that tour, we ate our bread (which might have had a hint of garlic in the dough, but I dipped it in my hot chocolate anyway. Remember, I was famished), then headed back to ULatina.

        Later that night, a whole bunch-o-gringoes trooped to Stash's house, where we carved ayote! (The closest gourd/ calabash we could find to a punkin). Nells Bells and I shared one that we carved in the shape of a city skyline. Yami, Stash's host mom, voted ours the best :) 

         Halloween morning, four of us super-adventure types headed into San José downtown to take a whirl through the Museo de los Niños (Children's Museum). I had planned on going here that day I did all those other museums, but it looked like it would be much more fun with friends. I was excited because all the exhibit descriptions were in Spanish, but they were geared towards children, so I assumed they should be relatively easy to understand. The museum is housed in a yellow castle-shaped building, and has a really cool mosaic sidewalk alphabet running up the hill to the entrance. The first exhibit was about planets, then colonial and indigenous Costa Rica, the human body, a magnet exhibit, and some really funny emus. A lot of the exhibits had some super-cool tie-on aprons with period-relevant characters painted on them, like an indigenous chief and his shaman mistress, a Caribbean cook, and even a treasure chest full of pirate hats to play with! You can see the photos here. There was supposedly a room where you could put on a pretend-to-be-pregnant-belly, which I wanted to do (Nells Bells told me once, "Mica, your desire to be a mom really freaks me out.") but--ALAS--it was closed. Possibly for the better, I might have really enjoyed not getting to see my toes...

         In the human body exhibit, we also took tons of hysterical pictures, but this time all we were entertained with was a mirror--oh the joys of being easy-to-entertain :) Then there was a mummy room, where the mummy that stood up in its sarcophagus had broken at the waist and so came tumbling out onto Stash when she opened the sarcophagus door--all the more ironic because it was Halloween, and our group of big children almost peed our pants in the children's museum. How fitting. 

I simply can't believe I've already been here for a month...

• Week 5 began with a Monday free of classes, September 15th,  ¡El Día de la Independencia! That's Independence Day, for all you readers :) I slept late since there were no classes and I wanted to rest until my body was ready to wake up--I had had a HUGE weekend. I headed downtown at 10:00 am (10 minute bus ride, shorter than normal because the streets were blocked off a few hundred meters in front of the pedestrian-only section of downtown to make way for the Independence Day festivities). I found a spot in the crowd with my camera and watched 2 hours of parades; the local kids, called Josefinas/Josefinos because they're from San José, marched in their snazzy little school uniforms, played instruments in their school bands, waved Costa Rican flags and danced to their school band's tunes. It was really refreshing to see everyone so excited for their country's independence, even though Costa Rica's liberation from Spain was really easily won--without a huge and bloody  battle, even! Regardless of whether there was a battle or not, independence from the colonizing European entity is still a BIG reason to celebrate. 
  
• September 16th held a field trip to Atenas with my favorite professor. Prof. Q. teaches both Environmental Group classes on Tuesday, (Rural and Urban Dimensions from 9-12 and Ecotourism & Conservation from 1-4), which makes it easier to have a field trip that lasts all day--we don't have to come back to school for another class, and he makes an effort to include aspects and lessons from both classes into the field trip agenda. I'm telling you, he's the greatest, always looking for the student to feel comfortable and learn at the same time (because it's hard to learn when you're not comfortable, as we all probably know!). So, Atenas is the Costa Rican town to which he returned (with his American wife) after doing his graduate work in Oklahoma. The guidebook I found in my house this morning (left by a previous student, thank you!) said that Atenas, a tiny rural community in the western mountains of Costa Rica's Central Valley, was voted by National Geographic to have the "best climate in the world." So that is their selling point, now, a slogan that can be seen on the backs of buses all around "town." 

Our first stop in Atenas was to pick up Prof. Q. on the side of the highway. In my guidebook I read about a really interesting-sounding school where we could learn about iguana-farming, which turned out to be our next stop,  way out into the countryside, ECAG or the Escuela Centro Americana de Ganaderia (Central American School of Livestock Farming, English translation). There we met our guides and began a tour of their dairy farm. 
1)"cow poopy" (Prof. Q.'s exact words) compost pile, where they use worms to expedite the decomposition process, the end product essentially being fertilized soil. They use this product to fertilize the fields where the cows live (to continue growing healthy grass), and in the garden where Agriculture students learn gardening techniques and the veggies are used in the school cafeteria. Completely closed cycle, just how I like it :) 

2) Dairy barn where twice a day they milk their 35 cows, 4 at a time. Through a gate on one side, we could see the cutest Costa Rican barn-hand I've ever seen (OK, so at this point I'd only seen three of them) feeding a baby cow with a bottle. I think that's what made me like him :) 

3) The baby cow nursery/ kindergarten where baby cows get weaned from their mommies onto yummy green grass (rather than grain and corn, like American cows. Cows' stomachs are not made to digest that stuff! See: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver, this great website about cows eating grass, and--if you don't have a problem with seeing innards, this blog.) 

I'll just paste the info for you:  basically, as cows are fed grain, the pH level of their stomachs decreases (becomes more acidic), which can cause "indigestion, rumen stasis, dehydration, acidosis, toxemia, incoordination, collapse, and frequently death" (Merck Veterinary Manual, quoted in Fanatic Cook blog).  If you're not an animal rights lover and don't care about the livelihood of cows, continue reading to see how humans are affected: when the pH of a cow's stomach(s) drops to around 5.5, the bacterial protozoa begin to die, and dangerous E. coli strains begin to form (namely E. coli 0157:H7, found in the human-induced unnaturally acidic stomachs of cattle), which is more likely to cause diarrhea, abdominal cramps, fever, and sometimes fatal kidney failure in humans.  (Nina Planck, NYTimes article, quoted in Fanatic Cook  blog). I'm not advocating vegetarianism or boycotting the consumption of meat, just the boycotting of the consumption of meat that comes from big commercial farms (you know the type, cows standing knee-deep in their own "cow poopy"--how can bacteria NOT proliferate?) or from a source whose practices you don't know. Anywho, continuing with the field trip saga (but I don't apologize for that little rant, it's important information for anyone who eats in today's consumer society!)

4) Next we tried two of the types of cheese that are made with the milk--these cheeses are sold to the farm's visitors, and served in the school's cafeteria. And might I add that they were delicious---and I do love cheese. I don't know if that makes it easier to believe me because I'm a "connoisseur" (haha!) or harder to believe me because I love almost every cheese...

5) After a short walk through a field with a really interesting tree, we came upon a wooden dock that extended out over a sludgy lagoon, about 15' above the surface of the water. We looked around for a few minutes and finally saw scaly, pointed heads gliding through the water--a crocodile pit. The school keeps these crocs for conservation purposes, making sure their species doesn't die out. In captivity, if there is more than 1 male crocodile, the males will fight to the death. So, this pit had 9 females and 1 male who was rumored to be 4.5 meters long (that means roughly 13.5 feet  for us non-metric users. Wow.) To continue closing the cycle, the crocs get fed the unusable portions of any goat, sheep or cow that dies of natural causes. This is not a hamburger farm, just dairy.

6) We visited the baby goats kindergarten area to play with, snuggle with, and pester the little goats, who are there to make it more farmy and to save on lawn-mowing costs. I don't think the goats provided much milk, but they do provide a lovely soundtrack (that incessantly reminded me of home, along with the soothing smell of manure and freshly cut hay--you only wish I was kidding about it being soothing).

7) Lunch at a yummy Atenas buffet across from a park

8) Then a tour of an organic coffee cooperative in the hills of Atenas. We got a tour of the grounds (whoa, no pun intended!), sampled fruit from the fruit trees that shaded the coffee plants, saw the processes through which the cooperative farmers pick, wash/soak/separate, sun-dry, shell, shell again and grind the beans, then we were provided with samples of the coffee and some homemade coffee-complementing goodies from the owner's wife. 

9) Prof. Q. was excited to take us to a spring fed, chlorine-free swimming pool in the area; when we arrived, though, the deep end had only 1.5 feet of water in it! It turns out that the pool gets drained every Monday so bacteria and yuckies won't grow in the water in the absence of chlorine. Since we came on a Tuesday it had not yet finished filling up for it's heavy weekend usage. Prof. Q. has promised that he will take us back there some time later in the semester :)

10)In addition to seeing the rural aspects of living in Atenas, one of the main reasons for going on this field trip was to visit the community center that Prof. Q.'s wife started, called Su Espacio (your space). It serves as a central location that offers dance lessons, martial arts classes, English lessons, etc. to the community's kids (or adults).

• Wednesday night held a funny time at Bar Rio where my friends and I each ordered mixed drinks based on their names along. I opted for the cheapest, a Miguelito (which is funny because I call one of my friends here Miguelito), there was a Cerebral Hemorrhage and all sorts of weird names. Most of them were terrible, but it was still hilarious.
• Thursday 9/18 was my mommy's birthday! I called her to sing Feliz Cumpleaños, talked on skype for an hour, then got a call from Dad. He didn't have a sound chip in the computer he was using, so I pantomimed--I'm sure that made the crazy American in McDonald's look even crazier. 
• Friday morning I woke up early to follow my previously-planned itinerary, which involved meandering downtown to get some much-needed Mica Time. I am good friends with almost everyone in my group, but sometimes you just need some peace and quiet--although it's quite ironic that I go to the capitol city to get my peace and quiet! Most of my journal entry for today is in Spanish, but I'll translate: I walked to the main avenue of the pedestrian-only section of San José, then climbed a hill to reach the Children's Museum. I thought it would be a great way to start because the exhibits would be in Spanish but at a child's level (which is about my level), but I decided such a colorful museum would be more fun with friends. So, I made my way back down the hill past the cute alphabet sidewalk mural and crossed over the Rio Torres that runs alongside the north side of the city. I explored lots of different streets, not looking for anything in particular, and most of the city parks; in Parque Morazón there was a big festival for kids with music and dancing. I received free entry to the National Art Center and another connected gallery, where I saw two exhibits on modern art and graphic design. Then I hit the National Library to wait out the rain, but decided to continue walking after a while because all that was available to the public was the reference section. I walked through the National Park and finally to the National Museum, which is located on the eastern side of town in an old military fortress (from before the military was abolished in the late 1940s). I tried to read all the exhibit descriptions in Spanish--it's amazing how tired that will make you! I walked through the room of Pre-Colombian gold; an exhibit on mosaic tile fabrication and design; a colonial house model with original furniture donated to the museum; Costa Rica's diverse population roots; Costa Rica's history; the impact of coffee and bananas on its people, environment and economy (provided jobs for people, did wonders for the economy, but any monoculture crop will bring soil nutrient leaching and other problems). Then I visited the secret garden, which had some butterflies in it, then some beautiful wooden sculptures shaped like different animals, a tour of what the military fort looked like (I'm glad I wasn't a soldier back then, tiny dormitories, tiny public bathrooms, crowded showers--hard life in general), and then I learned about the legend of the passionflower; did you know its name is derived from the Passion of the Christ, and that every section of the flower--including color--has a different meaning? If you visit the link, be sure to click continue so you can read the legend in its entirety :) It was a really long day, but I definitely enjoyed my Mica Time!
• Saturday I did wings, beer and football with Matito, and Sunday I attempted to use the internet at his house, watched some more football/ golf, and got walked to the bus stop in the rain. [long.week]