Ah, the sweet smells of Costa Rica...

Trash, fire, and my favorite... trash fire. What a beautiful place!

I have been all over the country since I´ve been able to update this. After the Rodeo, I bought a surfboard in Jacó, a two-hour bus ride away, have surfed on it in Playa Caldera, a half-hour bus ride away, and so much more. Jacó is an American tourist mecca, with its Pizza Hut, Mexican Joe´s internet café, Subway, Quiznos, KFC, and signs everywhere advertising in English and giving dollar amounts. The beach there is beautiful, though, and it´s the best place around for buying surfboards. Mine is a 6´6´´ egg-shape board, a sunny yellow with blue around the edges. It´ll be perfect to use while I´m here, and by the time I leave, I´ll be happy to get some money back by selling it.

Playa Caldera, the closest surfing beach, is incredible. Once you get off the bus at a gate to a canning factory, you hike all the way past the factory, over some rocks, and down a long beach to the point, where the waves break perpendicular to the rocky point towards the beach. Most people (or most tourists) aren´t up for the 45-minute walk, so it´s usually a private beach.

Bus rides here vary greatly in their duration. If you´re lucky, you get on a direct bus, and if you´re my friends and me most of the time, you get on a bus that takes you through every back-road neighborhood, most of which have unpaved roads. The experience is made all the better by the fact that the 1950s school buses generally have no shocks left... Not to complain, though, I´ll pay less than a dollar to go on a trip, no matter how uncomfortable the ride!

Attempting to go to a Reggae Festival one Saturday night in Montezuma, south on the Nicoya Peninsula, my friends Colleen, Codi, Kyle and I learned that it was actually taking place the following night. Since we couldn´t go to the fabled reggae festival, we ended up at a hostel in Santa Teresa, near Malpaís, where we had an incredible time. A full moon, a clear night, a low tide, and about 50 really fun people made for a great party on the beach. We all went back just a week later, happy to find the same group of surfers there to greet us. The waves there are pretty big, and I made it out!

This weekend, after getting back from Santa Teresa on Friday, about half the students here went to Jacó for a Daddy Yankee concert. He´s a reggaeton artist, I didn´t know him before, but after this concert I still think he only has about one song!

The superbowl didn´t really interest me- down here we don´t get the commercials, and since I don´t really have a preference for either team, it wasn´t a big deal. I´m taking it easy the next few days... Carnival´s in a week and a half!