Manuel Antonio, Booze Cruise--you've all been so patient!

I have so much to say.

Opera: We went to Teatro Nacional to see Mil y Una Noches (1001 Arabian Nights) with Sheherazad; it was ok--definitely a cultural experience--but there was a lot of belly dancing, which made me happy :)

Castro's--on Wednesday night we took a bus to San Jose to Castro's, this really classy bar (wit ultra cheap beer!) where we showed off our dancing skillz. Only 3 or 4 guys showed up, all of them blackout drunk, so I found a Tico to dance with--Angelo. He was super good! He kept asking ,"Do you have a boyfriend?" and I kept saying, " Yes," to which he would respond, "Why?" And I'd say in French, "Becuase he's far less annoying than you." Ahh, the magic of multilingualism :P Still, he was a great dancer.

We also had cooking class, where we made this pasty delicious thing with platanos and peppers, cilantro, onions, celery, and other things. We made jewelry, too, and it was hilarious watching all these LAX players stringingh pink beads onto elastic thread for their mums and girlfriends. Yes, dear reader, in fact I DID get pictures of that :)

We've discovered a restaurant here, Chico's, that makes kickass Hawaiian pizza--and the man who runs it grew up in NYC, so he speaks flawless English. Whenever we go there he talks the entire time, going on and on about "the best flag in the world--the stars and stripes!" and how much he misses the States. He's more of an obnoxious American than some of us!

On Thursday when I came home to study for my exam on Friday, my host mum had a friend over. This friend has been there before--and she pointedly ignores me. I'm not sure why I can never understand anything she says...but on Thursday, I determined that it's because she has no teeth. She and my host mum and her three daughters were all pregaming with 40s of Imperial--they all go out together, which is so cute! As a side note, all of my host sisters look like variations of Princess Jasmine. I feel like a pale frump toad in their presence :P

The last time I wrote it had rained really hard; apparently, people actually die when it rains here :l One man was walking across the road and he fell in a manhole (the rain had carried away the cover) and drowned almost instantly with all the crap that was flowing into the sewer below him. Urgh. I will never cross the street in the rain again.

On Friday morning we had our exam at 8 a.m. (shoot me in the face). It was pretty self explanatory. Then we piled on the bus and headed to Manuel Antonio :) We watched a ridiculously bootleg copy of Wolverine; all the really good special effects bits were distilled into grey screens. I'm SO GLAD I didn't pay for it!

We ate lunch beside a river full of crocodiles. I ate one of them. My friends got videos of them eating a turkey--their reflexes are soooo fast, especially for them weighing, like, a million pounds. Scary-awesome. We got to the beach, turned the bus around in an impossibly narrow road, checked into the hotel, and ran to the beach--I almost lost my glasses twice, which would have been ultra bad--I brought nothing else to keep me from being blind down here! We ate dinner at a restaurant called El Avion--it's built around the wreckage of a C-123 Fairchild that went down in Manuel Antonio. Now it's a bar :P We decided to splurge a little; I had peppered ginger mahi mahi and tiramisu. Yessssss.

Later we went skinny dipping. In the ocean. Also in the pool. Too much fun :)

The next morning we went to Parque Nacional Manuel Antonio--we saw monkeys, sloths (in Spanish, osos parasosos--lazy bears :P), snakes, and giant iguanas! I tore myself up on some rocks that we were climbing on, but we had a great time playing in the rip current :) I saw a 3-foot iguana disappear into the pipes below a row of portapotties--you couldn't pay me to choose one of those and lower my naked butt onto a hole that may or may not have a giant iguana face in it!

Saturday afternoon at 1 we went on the booze cruise :) It was an all-you-can-eat, all-you-can-drink, dolphin-and-whale watching sunset cruise. Fun times :) We saw dolphins, though I got no good pictures of them. We got to go snorkeling, and I saw a huge blue puffer fish! Though I couldn't fit the mask on over my goggles, so I may have just imagined the puffer fish :P They fed us really tasty mahi mahi with carrots, potatoes, rice, and chayote, but mostly what mattered to us were the rum punches (lovingly dubbed Happy Juice by the boat crew :P).

That night was ultra fun--we hurried to get ready to go to a bar where ladies drank free from 9 to 11...then looked at the clock and saw that it was only 6:46. Instead we went to the beach, played at the pool (where someone stole my shorts, 2 pairs of my shoes, and my watch), some people went to a bonfire at the beach, and I passed out before midnight watching Fear (starring way-young Reese Witherspoon and Mark Wahlberg).

Sunday, we packed up and headed out--everyone was asleep on the bus in a matter of minutes. Now I'm back home and everything reeks of sand and saltwater--but I've got a nice tan, and an excuse to buy new shoes :)