Home.

...So with my binoculars slung around my neck in the late afternoon, legs splattered in clay, elbows green from moss, dirt under my fingernails and rain in my hair, I returned to the station. Three plus weeks of homestay have come to a close, and although I'm going to miss the kids, the cooking, and the farm, it feels so good to be back laughing in the upper classroom with 22 people I love.

           ...The fog around the moon is currently fantastic.

Gratuitous picture of a nesting male Quetzal much like the 

one on the postcards I've sent (that I really bought for myself.) 

We have a final tomorrow for Johel's Tropical Diversity class! That after finishing a 47-question (I see you, Pomona people) take home exam for Alan's class on Sunday. As far as whatever else happened in the week between now and last post, there isn't a terrible whole lot. I have increased my quetzal sightings to seven: five males, two females. After classes last Friday, a number of us went out for dinner and proceeded to visit the four-day festival that concluded yesterday in Monteverde. A rodeo, horse shows, concerts, giant illuminated bottles of Flor de Cana drawing drunken tourists like moths to a flame, the smell of frying yucca and cornflour dough, salsa on an open dance floor and low-budget carnival amusement rides. I finished up my study last Thursday with a trip to the Monteverde Cloud Forest Preserve, where with a new friend and Centro Cientifico Tropical trail guide and I found a lone bare-shanked screech owl in an overgrown trail past the place where CIEE started the hike to Eladio's ages ago.

Here's what may be a steely-vented hummingbird. Saw it on my way to town with a friend right before we got rosemary grilled chicken avocado mango sandwiches with yucca chips. Nom. 

         AGES ago. Where has the time gone? How on earth is it May? I'm going to stop saying that now. We have two weeks left. TWO. Two to make the time with these wonderful people really count.

        And because this is a study abroad blog, and all of the other study abroad blogs brag about food way more often than I do, I think I'll follow suit. My homestay family actually went to the beach for the last three days I was in their house, leaving me in control of the kitchen, which was awesome. So here you go. Cooking pictures.

On Monday evening, I cooked my dad's homemade carbonara recipe for the family. Everyone seemed to love it. Lots of "muy rico" compliments and requests for the recipe. 

....the recipe was kind of hard to come up with when I didn't know the words for the cooking equipment and half the ingredients. Miming for the win. I managed eventually. 

I lied. Not all cooking pictures. This is one of the show bantams of my host dad's sister: they're the ones I talked about in a previous post when I spoke of the magical Costa Rican kid kingdom/pastureland. 

Pretty gorgeous. They had a d'uccle bantam like Twitch (one of my chickens at school), too!

And some budgies in an outside cage. They call them "pericos de amor", which is interesting. 

Terribly rushed picture of the outdoor cage. Many people in the Monteverde area have these flight cages outside for parrots. Often, they're mealy parrots: which is a local, native species.

Saturday night found me cooking homemade pesto with a strange local variety of spinach and red peppers. 

As well as traditional wedding soup with homemade meatballs. 

Things that I have adapted from my father: a love for all things soup. I ate this out of a mug for at least three meals after that dinner. Mmmm soup. 

Some salad to go with an outdoor twilight porch Italian dinner. Pretty perfect. 

The next morning, I went to the coop to get some fresh eggs from the dominique hens. 

These sweet little bananas are amazing. I'm really, really going to miss how cheap and delicious mangoes are , too. So delicious straight from the fridge. Mmmm cold mango. 

Pause. Mom, you love these. I know you. Heh. 

And finally: locally baked wheat bread from the Jimenez bakery's stand in the farmer's market Saturday morning with oil palm "butter" and guava jelly, a fried egg with gallo pinto, and plantains toasted in the toaster oven. Round it off with coffee and you're tico. 

      So there you go. Again, apologies for the pauses in posts, but such is life when you want to spend all your time in the tropics. Saying hello to the fig tree and crashing along a trail I'd never been down (somehow) near the station this afternoon in the rain was a luxury I want to take full advantage of while I'm still here. Ending up clambering through creeks and watching gangly white-throated robin fledgelings learning to fly in the understory. Perfect. 

...studying. Yes. 

Cheers.