Playa Flamingo

(written 8/26/13)

Week 3! And I have sadly left monteverde. However, as much as I miss the mountains, the beach is a pretty great alternative. Temperatures here are in the 80s (id guess. Google weather cant seem to figure out where i am) with lots of humidity. The sky is blue most of the day with showers for a few hours in the afternoon.

This seems to be much less of a community than in monteverde where everyone knew each other. On tours in monteverde the guides would always ask who our homestays were, and they usually knew our families. Oh! And another thing about monteverde I keep forgetting to mention. The have stray dogs everywhere but they're all fairly well behaved and healthy looking. I asked my host mother how it was that the dogs were so healthy and she said that the vets in the area occasionally come and spay/neuter all the stray dogs they can find, and hotels and restaurants put out their extra food for the animals. How nice! A community that actually cares for its strays as if they were the responsibility of everyone.

But now to Flamingo Beach. It's pretty touristy but I think well be able to find nontouristy places if we stay away from the resorts. Plus it's the end of tourist season so there's almost nobody here. We traveled on Saturday so that yesterday we'd have all day to explore. Our apartment has a kitchen, so the first thing we did was walk to get groceries. Almost everybody walks to get around here, yet none of the roads have sidewalks. Costa Ricans tell me that the drivers are used to pedestrians on the edge of their lane and are good at avoiding them. This may be true but there's nothing quite like a bus 2 feet away from you going 50ish mph to get your heart racing. So far so good though! Our map isn't very helpful and the apartments seem to be located in the middle of two small towns (or neighborhood centers maybe?), so after shopping we decided to just head in the general direction of water. We ended up on a beach with only a few locals around and after a while walking we ended up at this giant old, wall-less bar/ cigar lounge. It looked like in it's hayday it used to be a club and then an oyster bar, before settling down as a place for expats, Rastas, and the occasional lost tourist. Then we sat on the beach for a while and read before coming home for dinner and some evening pool/ homework time. 

Today we was our first day at this campus of the school. Classes are still going well, though I'm alone again this week so classes will be very intense. After class Lucy and I made a few plans for tours later in the week (more on that later) and then went in search of THE flamingo beach. Well... We didn't find it, but we did stumble onto a different beach without a single person on it. Just as we started to read it started raining, so we decided to head back to the pool by the apartment. No worries though! We're going back tomorrow:-)

Alright. Off to cook dinner!