Extraordinarias Tradiciónes Navideñas

While it's hard to be separated from family during the holidays, this year was a little easier to bear given our expectation to at least see Hannah and Chad soon after, as well as experiencing some very special and "extraordinary" traditions of the Costa Rican Christmas.

This is our PC "cluster": Rachel and Donny live in Santa Maria, only 15 minutes away;  Melissa lives in San Andres, a 45 minute bus, taxi and walk away.  Rachel is the English Teaching PCV who is co-leading the English Camp with Francis. We celebrated Christmas w/ a brunch and hike afterwards.

To kick off the season, the community sponsored it's annual Festival of Lights, which is a very slow moving parade of school bands and various other "floats".  The schools impressed us though with their very well performed renditions of traditional Christmas music!

The "gigantes" showed up too, in all of their unusual forms and characters!

Vilma's niece and nephew, Matias and Susan,  spent 5 days w/ Vilma (and us) before Christmas.

Our "Noche Buena"(Christmas Eve) started with a picnic of a fresh (sacrificed that morning) roasted chicken and salad, outside of Alejandra's house (Vilma's friend).  

After the picnic, we watched part of the process(key word "part") of cleaning and butchering a freshly slaughtered pig, for which the meat is used to prepare tamales for Christmas.  Talk about living the experience of knowing where you food comes from!  The kids didn't shy away from watching the process either.

We then made tamales, the traditional Christmas morning breakfast.  Directions:  place a ball of cooked masa (corn meal) on 2 pieces of banana leaves.  Place on top of that: una cuchara (spoonful) of colored rice, strips of chili dulce (red or green bell pepper), carrot and green beans; a spoonful of refried beans, a few peas, mushrooms and if you're not vegetarian, add pork).  Wrap the tamales in the 2 banana leaves so there's no leakage of ingredients, and tie 2 tamales together and you have a piña!

A piña of tamales.

The next step is to cook the 'piñas' for about 30 minutes, which we did, over an open fire, in the light of the moon.

This was only the beginning of the Christmas celebrations, because after we returned to Vilma's home with the goods,  her family arrived from San Jose and had a BBQ and fireworks. They stayed up until 12:00 and opened presents.  (Francis and I said Buenas Noches muy temprano).

What a memorable "Noche Buena" this was!

Going backwards in time, the week before Christmas, we helped Alejandra pick coffee and 'cubaces', a special type of bean that looks like a lima bean, but tastes like a kidney bean.

Above, we take the beans off the vine, then shuck the beans.  Below, I'm picking "granos de cafe".

Indiana is Alejandra's little girl.  She obviously made a friend this day!

On the work end of things; Francis and I gave a presentation along with another PCV, to the program development team of the Ministry of Education, about our "Friendship Circles" program in December.  It was very well received, and we're hoping it will eventually have an impact on the educational system from the top down. We are always told to Dream Big!

We are presently involved in "summer" break programs, including an English Camp for 6th graders, which Francis and Rachel are in charge of.  The Camp takes place M-F, 8-12 for 4 weeks. 

The 2 teams had to race to put the correct label of the body part on their team member.

 The mosaic project I am trying to get off the ground is moving forward slowly but surely.  Maybe we'll actually get started before school starts up again in February.  Getting used to how slow things happen continues to be a big challenge for me!   I'll keep you posted on our progress!

  

Donny and I, also led one in a series of 3 Sex Ed Workshops the day after returning from vacation with Hannah and Chad. 

 As I said, we hit the ground running.

Now you are up to date with what we are up to since early December.  

I am reminded how "campo" it is here when I see a cow running down the street!

#bloggingabroad

Adventuras con Hannah y Chad

                                "Qúe maravilloso" was our vacation with Hannah and Chad!

"Como siempre", like always, we returned from vacation and hit the ground running!  Hannah and Chad left a week ago, and while it seems like a long time ago, we cherished our time together and saw many new parts of Costa Rica.  I'll start with the vacation and work backwards into December!

Here are highlights of our trip:

Chad kayaked and we rafted the lower part of the Rio Pacaure, which, when it's running at its highest, is world class.  Lucky for us, it wasn't running at its highest, but we did get to experience many sets of Class 4 rapids and saw many beautiful waterfalls.  We didn't lose anyone from our raft, which was our goal, and we had a nice blend of cruising and paddling!  I don't have pictures from the raft trip because I didn't take my camera, so I'll post those later after Hannah sends me pics from the GoPro.

Chad was in 7th Heaven with a kayak paddle in hand and seat in the kayak!  Bring it on!

Pretty gardens and ruins we saw in Cartago.

We spent one night in the beautiful home of friends of Hannah and Chad's, (Jane and Ryan) in Dominical.  The views were spectacular and the company even better!

Sites from our hikes in the Osa Peninsula.

Fica tree (and Hannah)

This is some of the wildlife we spotted.

Unidentified species of grasshopper?

The male and female homosapien species.

The banana tree spider (and Chad).

Didn't get pictures of the monkeys, anteater, scarlet macaws or toucans, but those were among the cool birds and animals we found along the trails of Corcovado National Park and other trails.

Spent the night in this tent cabin: mattress on floor, flowers on pillows :)

Views from our tent cabin.

We hiked in and out of the jungle and along the beach for 10 miles in Corcovado. There wasn't much dawdling, because we had to catch a boat at 1230.

Whale skeleton

It's hard to hike in sand; but we did our best to keep up with our guide.

A neotropic cormorant.

After arriving to Drake Bay, our last destination on the Osa Peninsula, we enjoyed a slower pace of hiking, canoeing, kayaking and swimming along the shore and in the Rio Claro.

We jumped into the river from a few prime spots a few times too!

There was always an adventure awaiting us!

And finally, the shoes tell the story of the end; worn out!