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.
