Rice and Beans!

Hello little blog! How nice to see you. I am here in Costa Rica, and have been for I think almost three weeks! I have another 4 weeks to go. So far I have been in San Jose, La Selva Biological Station (a rainforest), a little town called San Ramon, an Absolute Wildlife Reserve in Cabo Blanco called San Miguel (a dry forest, though there was more rain there than I have ever seen in my life!), the neighboring small hippy town of Malpais, and now the UGA Costa Rica campus in San Luis (a cloud forest). So, there has been much traveling, and much to see! We are having lectures, doing research projects, going on hikes, having free time, eating Costa Rican food, getting up early to birdwatch, those sorts of things. I have kept a very extensive journal and so am not really gonna go into much detail here... but it has been a lot of fun so far! My suitcase is covered in mold and my backpack smells like mold, and it makes my shirt smell whenever I wear it... I have tons of blisters on my feet, but the millions of bug bites on my legs are at last healing! All sorts of things like that. I have made a lot of new friends, and love spending time with them and doing Costa Rican-y things. In Cabo Blanco and La Selva we had no real computer access, so we were forced to spend all of our time together and finding things to do.. here there are computers, and other people here, we arent quite so isolated with just ourselves so we dont spend as much time playing cards or ultimate frisbee or skipping rocks in the ocean or anything like that. but we still go on night hikes together and eat meals together and work on our projects, so it is still a really cool experience. it is nice to have a group of people to do it with you, because otherwise being in a foreign country would be much less fun in my opinion.
well, i am not really homesick so to speak, but i do miss having a big bed to myself and a clean shower and no one to tell me when i have to wake up, and the kind of food i like it eat and all that. and unstructured time---there is sometimes a bit to much structure here for my liking. after my next program (from june 12 to the 29) i will go home for a few days and then head out to see daniel in arizona and spend about a month out there. i am very excited for that... i really like arizona and can not wait to see my kittenmush!!! i have actually thought about last summer a lot since ive been here, and how different it was and how weird it is that it was already a year ago!! its crazy.. it would be fun to go to the canyon again, it would be strange though that not everyone from last summer would be there.
ah well, i need to go journal and work on my project and do productive things. i will try to update this again soon, with more specifics about what is goin on here in the tropics.
adieu!!!