Toucanets and the beginning of traditional class.

You know it's going to be a good day when you open your door at 5:32 AM and a blue-crowned motmot is sitting in the grass under the clothesline.

        After the hiking marathon yesterday, what more was there to do than go exploring again?

At about 5:45, Skyler and I left the field station intending to do some creature-scoping and mild cardio: at 8:27 AM we returned, covered in moss and burrs and thorns and iron-red clay and morning rain---having done the loop to the T.V. towers, waded partway down a river, and climbed through patches of what looked like banana or heliconia---having leaned in to the insane, foggy wind blowing over the pacific slope at the hilltop.

Alan (the program director; and the victim of quotes from this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaPepCVepCg ) understood that one could get turned around in the woods, and excused us for being late on the first day of lecture. The below picture does our actual state of forest-streaked glory.

 

So I guess that was pretty sick. But the day certainly didn't end there.

Today we had our first official tropical community and diversity lectures in the classroom, before heading to the all-inclusive resort they're trying to tell us is a Spanish immersion school. It is through this institute that we will both learn how to be functional in and get matched up with our homestay families: classes there go for three hours each afternoon. A lot of class, right? But get this: the campus has an internet cafe, multiple fountained and wrought-iron-furnitured courtyards, a gym, a huge jacuzzi, and large-windowed classrooms looking down on the valley. They taught us a few songs and fed us guava-glazed corn starch cake before showing us where to sign up for free dance and cooking lessons, movie nights, and discounted charter trips, such as canopy level ziplining, canopy walking, rope-swinging, bungee jumping, and horseback riding.


...and then we waited for them to tell us they had to be joking, but got distracted by the hammocks strung up inside the tiled study halls.

So that was my day. And now I'm here drinking Chamomile tea with milk and still in utter disbelief that this place is actually real.

Pictures and then I -must- study. Goodness. We're really in school now. Score.

The hills right outside the station. The weather is okay, I suppose. 

 The place I want to live a year and a half from now. Currently it belongs to our professor Bronko. 

If I keep doing push-ups with the boys here, I think I can take him out when the time comes. 

 Can I just say how much I love having to -walk- everywhere? Seriously. With views like this....

This is the road from the field station down in to town. 

The resort/Spanish school.

Toucan in Spanish is....toucan. 

Hastily snapped courtyard photo!

And of course...sunsets. Walking back with Jess, Genevieve, Sarah, Matt, and Alayna in the sunset. 

Score score score. 

Also: bonus pictures for people who asked me about what my room looks like! Answer: it looks like a hurricane with the intent of keeping damp laundry safe from the eternal mist ripped through it, and happened to drop a few bird feathers and souvenirs on its way out.

More adventures to come. Planning another early start. Cheers!