Mariposa bonita

I've spent the evening working on my final video project for this class. It's not due for another week, but I'm spending several days up in the mountains after the program ends on Sunday and I do not want to be doing homework while I'm there.

So I'm too tired to say anything interesting. Fortunately this blue morpho butterfly requires no commentary.

Astronomy Tuesday

I wouldn't have thought it was possible to have too much detail in one of these images, but this look at spiral galaxy M74 from the Webb Telescope may change my mind.

Wow. Just wow.

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI; Processing Copyright: Robert Eder

Felicia

Sadly, I do not have a picture of Felicia—she was hiding behind some plants in her cage, and all I could see was a vague spotty shadow. But even without a picture her story is worth telling.

Felicia is an ocelot, and was brought to the Toucan Rescue Ranch when the drug dealer who was keeping her as a pet was arrested, and the police found her sitting on the couch in his apartment. Because she was still very young, it was hoped she could be rehabilitated and returned to the wild.

The first problem they noticed was that she wasn't going to the bathroom. She had been trained to use a litter box, and refused to go without one. So they put a litter box in her cage and she used it happily.

The most important skill for living in the wild is obviously being able to feed yourself, and so next they put a chicken in her cage to see if she would hunt it. The first day she was scared of the chicken and hid, but by the third day she had made friends with it. 

So Felicia will also be spending the rest of her life at the ranch, using a litter box and refusing to kill her dinner.

Snack time

This sloth is named Latte, and she investigated this potential snack very very slooooowly, before deciding that it met with her approval.

Let sleeping sloths lie

Who knew sloths were so adorable? I certainly didn't, and I have actually seen sloths in the wild, in Panama. Those were basically big brown motionless furballs way up in the trees, and not at all cute, as opposed to this little guy, Milo, and his friends at the Toucan Rescue Ranch outside San José.

Yesterday was our only unscheduled day, and several of us went to the ranch for a tour. We got to see toucans, monkeys, and other wildlife in addition to the sloths. Some of them had been pets; some were injured by cars or power lines. Because the goal is to return as many of the animals to the wild as possible, human contact needs to be limited, and you can only see the animals who for one reason or another can't be rehabilitated. (One poor spider monkey for example was kept as a pet by an owner who cut off her prehensile tail to keep her from grabbing things with it.) 

It takes two years to teach a sloth to live in the wild, and those, like Milo, who fail to graduate will continue to live at the ranch with yummy snacks and blankets to keep them warm for naps.

Sunday bird blogging

A white-winged dove in the trees by ILISA.

This is one of the common birds in San José, and unlike the noisy green parrots that are also everywhere, they're not what you'd expect in the tropics.

But that is another thing I like about the tico culture. In a country with hundreds of species of birds, including spectacular specimens like quetzals and scarlet macaws and violet sabrewings, the national bird of Costa Rica is: the clay-colored thrush, which is basically a brown robin.

San José

Three random pictures of San José: the one on the right is the view from ILISA in the San Pedro district, and the other two are of downtown streets.

It's not a particularly lovely city. It's old and a little gritty and more than a little shabby. You can see why there aren't a lot of tourists here—this isn't the Costa Rica people imagine visiting. But I like the liveliness and the energy and the cityness of it. I'm enjoying taking buses or Ubers, buying groceries, and navigating restaurants and food stands in my mediocre Spanish.

I'm going to spend a few nights up in the mountains when this program is over and see more of the Costa Rica on all the travel brochures, but I'm glad I got to spend this time in San José first.

Saturday reflections

Trees and the welcome and all too rare blue sky, in the windows of the ILISA language school that is our home base in San José.

I opted out of today's excursion to the beach. It would have required getting on a bus at 5am for a two hour ride, followed by another hour on a boat, and then after spending a few hours trying not to expose my Irish skin to too much sun, doing the whole thing in reverse and maybe getting back to San José by 7pm.

Our days are so full here, with lectures and presentations on the education system, visits to museums and markets, and Spanish classes every afternoon, that I'm thrilled to have an unscheduled day. There's a cemetery across the highway that I've been wanting to take a look at, and I may meet up with a friend to visit one of the markets.

And of course I do have plenty of homework. There is always homework.

Urban poetry

As an East Coaster, power lines above ground immediately make me think of snow, and power outages. It doesn't snow in Costa Rica, but I'm sure they get hurricanes, and I wouldn't want to be around any of these power lines after a big storm of any kind.

But I love the patterns they make.

Tacos

The food has been very good here—I bought mangos and a pineapple at the farmers market on Sunday and they were heavenly—but these tacos from a uninspiring food court on Avenida Central are on an entirely different level of deliciousness. Eleven on a scale of ten.

I could eat them every day, and I may.

Póas volcano

First, a word about the Costa Rican weather. It is variable in a way that London would envy; it rains every day, but fortunately not all day every day. Instead it drizzles for half an hour, then the sun comes out for an hour, then it pours, then it's cloudy for a few hours, then the sun comes out again. It is however extremely humid all the time—I don't think my hair has been completely dry since I left New York, and I had to do laundry yesterday after only five days because two showers a day really depleted my supply of clean underwear.

This means we were really lucky to actually see the crater during our excursion to Póas on Saturday. The professor directing our program had been there several times before but it had always been hidden by the mists. And as you can see in the pictures, although it was sunny when we arrived the fog was rolling in by the time we left.

Póas is an active volcano, so visits are limited to twenty minutes and there are concrete shelters on the viewing platforms in case of an unexpected eruption. You also have to wear hard hats; each tour group got hats in a different color, so the trail from the visitors center to the volcano was a sea of reds and yellows and whites bobbing along through the trees. The last major eruption was in 2017, which closed the park for eighteen months, and some of the trails are still closed. In the picture on the right, you can see the effect of the acid rain from the gases that are still being emitted.

Pura Vida

Pura Vida is the all-purpose expression here. It can be used to say thank you or nice to meet you or great, or any time you want to express that you're good, life is good, the world is good.

I was tired when I took this picture of the view from the La Paz Waterfalls Nature Park on Saturday after a long day of excursions. And the altitude had given me a headache, but this panorama did more to make me feel better than the Advil I took. What a beautiful country.

¡Pura vida!