Amber and I have decided that it's basically like Marin and Kauai had a mountainous love child.
Let's begin the tour, because I don't have long. There's so much to do. Fingernail moon tonight and species names to study before we commence movie night. It's really hard to express how much I enjoy the home feel of this place: all of us joking around one big dinner table after a day of hiking and town exploration.
This is Monteverde. For those relatives that don't know the story, the field station was founded by Quakers in the mid-seventies and has been operating as a tropical biology and conservation driven field station ever since. More info on the program here: http://www.ciee.org/study-abroad/costa-rica/monteverde/tropical-ecology-conservation/
The whole building is made of wood. It's absolutely beautiful. The compound contains a few gardens and greenhouses where we hang our laundry: there are some cabins and a lab building in addition to the staff housing. Trails head off in all directions directly in to the cloud forest. Just like my favorite trail in Marin, the main road leads to a radio tower...which I thought I heard creaking, until Joel told me that the noise we were hearing in the forest understory was the tremulous, metallic call of the black faced solitaire. Ohhhh birds.
Alayna hittin' them books and whatnot.
Moncho gave us our orientation lecture. This classroom is amazing: two walls of windows facing the forest. We've arrived in the middle of some unseasonable mistiness, and as with everything...it's absolutely breathtaking.
School? Really? Haaaa.
Amber and I have a room to ourselves here. Pomona rooming abroad! Wooooo!
...we still see 47 everywhere.
...yep.
So there's a bunch of huge maps of Costa Rica everywhere. This is the main one in the classroom. The pieces of red tape on the western half of the map seem to be in some Eiffel tower-esque formation; Monteverde is at the top. Gosh. I love me some mountains.
WOOO Coatis and Motmots and QUETZALS. Only have the one at the top left to see. My life is bird-style search-imaging until I've completed the hunt. Everything in the forest is green and red though...yeee.
Orangey, badly shot photos of the insect room. Just sneaking a peek---they have a sweet collection here.
My forest eyes. Or bird eyes. Or binoculars.
I love these things.
Morning lecture: species reports. We were a bit feisty today, if I do say so myself. Probably why we had so many banana peel/rock-placing/shoulder-tapping battles midday. Silly biologists.
Work and play, work and play.
Marisela being a badass botanist.
Joel leading the pack up the mountain.
Really inadequate picture of the awesome fog and cloud cover.
Epiphytes (ferns, mosses, orchids, etc.) are the absolute bomb.
Walking in the Elven Forest. We never really got an explanation as to why it's called the elven forest...but the trees thin out towards the peak, so maybe because they were small? And very green?
Mysteries.
Sierra and Sarah decided to put their extensive knowledge of natural tropical camouflage to work. Joel had a pretty funny story about legitimate (sorry, gals) camouflage escapades in La Selva...ask me about it!
These field station benchmarks were all along their property. Pretty helpful.
Moncho being serious, as usual. But for reals, our TAs have mad tropical knowledge.
Looking down the Caribbean slope. So much fog! We saw a longhorn beetle and a few swallow-tailed kites, but as always, I was too excited about the animals to take pictures. This will be a recurring theme. Apologies.
Amber is the best.
Branden and Audrey...possibly talking about the movie "The Fog."
Skyler found a dying moth and moved it out of harm's way. Such cool bugs!
Headed back down the mountain and back to the field station. So...this is kind of crazy. We haven't really had legitimate, do-what-you-want free time for ages, and this hike marked the beginning of free time until Monday at 8 AM.
Weekends? We get time off?
Isn't this some kind of fantastic vacation?!
Apparently we're in school. Anyway, we all had to buy laundry detergent (though we don't even have to do our own laundry here...or cook our own meals...I can't even explain how spoiled I feel. Going to stop) and various other things in town, so we set out mid-afternoon to explore.
It's really not a real place.
Look at those clouds.
Seriously.
Love the colors of the houses. Neon apple greens, hot flamingo pinks, banana sun yellows, fiery tangerine oranges...
Heading in to town with Skyler, Roxanne, Jeff, and Amber.
Pastureland and ecotourism.
A sweet gazebo outside of the artisan's market we visited. Scoping out the local pottery scene. Unreal.
...lots of ecotourism.
And the Saturday night crew out in force: taxis and Pilsen/Imperial distributors. Nice.
A bunch of us are staying in to watch a movie in the upstairs classroom and listen to the rain instead of getting straight in to the salsa and bar scene.
Pretty standard house here.
Convenience store. So much more excitement with the colors...
These guys were hailing us for a picture. Hehe. Everyone seems to own a motorcycle here.
And this one's for our Costa Rican mentor and CIEE grad, Drew Quinn. He knows what's up.
So after a leisurely afternoon of birdwatching and exploration, I'm super distracted and hanging out with everyone in the classroom. Man, does movie night sound great.
Three more weeks of this. I'll post more about class and Spanish immersion later: I'm in desperate need of improvement before I head off to the homestay. Befriending the amazing cooking staff in Santa Rosa was the best: they're teaching me phrases like "you all look like shrimp in your bathing suits (after being in the sun all day)," "you're insane for liking spiders," and "you woke me up when you came back from your night hike" in Spanish! I helped them with dishes and said I wanted to cook for them at the field station in gratitude, and they made me my favorite food one night (vegetable soup.)
Have I mentioned this place is amazing?
Rant ends and movie night begins now.
Cheers.
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