August 1

Today we walked through the cloud forest and saw the most amazing array of butterflies. Blue morphos are common, but I never get tired of seeing them because they are so beautiful. We also saw a lot of hummingbirds, and one species in particular had an electric blue head. There are so many brightly colored animals. Bright reds, neon green, orange.....

The diversity of wildlife here is amazing, and I love how the people here live right in the middle of it.

We also visited an insect museum today and saw litereally thousands of specimans of butterflies, beetles, and strange insects that looked like crosses between spiders and scorpions.

Our host mom, Yorleny, is wonderful. She loves to sew, and she makes the most beautiful embroidery. Deborah had a button fall off, and she seemed almost excited to sew it back on. She has also been very accomodating about food. I told her I like vegetables and every single night we have had all types of fruits and vegetables, several that I´ve never tried before. We´ve had mostly vegetarian dinners, which is awesome. It makes us feel less bad about eating ice cream all the time )we walk past the ice cream store every day on our way home=

I am loving the nature here. We´ve gone on a hike every single day. This is also another way we excuse our ice cream habit.

As for the Spanish school, it has been wonderful for me. All week we have been practicing irregular past tense verbs, and I finally feel comfortable switching tenses. It´s wonderful to come home after school and talk with our famila tica )costa ricans call themselves ticos=
I feel like I´ve learned more in the last 3 days than I did the entire course I took in Spain. I am very impressed with how much Deboarh understands. She´s still working on feeling comfortable talking, but she pretty much understand everything people say.


Another thing that I like about Costa Rica is that every couple of hours, they take a break to drink coffee. Costa Ricans LOVE coffee.

Tomorrow we are going to visit the nature reserve. My new mission in life is to see a quetzl.

The internet cafe doesn´t have a USB connection, so no photos today. !Qué Lástima!


Disclaimer the keyboards here are hard to use, so I apologize for the puncuation errors, especially the parentheses, which I still can´t figure out how to use. Oh well. Write us back!