queso, arte, murcielagos y baile

_ tomorrow i will be leaving for arenal. 7:45 am, from the ice cream shop.

_the other night, i opened the door to the bathroom area of the house, and in the large (traditional?) sinks sat POUNDS of meat. red, raw, relatively unprocessed meat. good god, i gasped and practically had to physically shake my head to revover from the start. nothing i haven't seen before, but oh my, what an interesting surprise. the pile was probably half a pig.

_wednesday, i had a cooking class at the school - learned to make chalupas.

_that night, i went to Moon Shiva (restaurant) around 8:30 to listen to some live reggae. a couple local-ish guys, playing mostly covers, but i enjoyed it and spent an hour or so writing there. when they were done, there was a blues band playing downstairs, so i ended up finding two shows in one evening. not too shabby for a tiny mountain town on a wednesday night.

_yesterday:

after class, some girl from new mexico and i visited the cheese factory. . sadly, we missed the tour and just sampled some ice cream and watched them cleaning the machines through the observation window. had fig ice cream and it was delicious, if a little oversweetened.

following the cheese adventure, we stopped by a women's art cooperative - while many of the items were your basic costa rica touristy souvenirs, the clothing, paintings and jewelry were rather interesting. the upstair is a gallery (there seems to be an art gallery ever 100m here) and two workshops, so i chatted up a woman who was making a pair of blue cotton pants.

across the street is 'stella's bakery' so we sampled those wares as well, of course. here, croissants are called 'cangrejos' which i love because a) i can pronounce it correctly and b) as i may have mentioned before, cangrejo means crab. and i'm rather fond of those critters.

the girls opted for home when i decided to check out the roadside bat museum. (there was a chocolate shop nearby as wel, so in one day: cheese, chocolate, art, and bats. just about perfect, if you ask me)
i took the simple, do-it-yourself-tour and then spent some time in their viewing room with the fruit bats that live there. stinkin cute- definitely more than a few kinds i'd never seen before. apparently, if i were a bat, i would need to eat (daily) roughly 450 bananas, 200Lt of nectar, or (i think?) 40lbs of bug mass.

after din din with the familia tica, i hopped back over to the school for a salsa lession. not ar hard as i expected, but i stil have a long way to go. we went to moon shiva for their latin dance night and had a good time of it. (not much dancing on my part but tonight may be a different story)
i met one of the musicians from the night before, and a kid from massachusets who is laughably similar to coutntless bellinghammers. . in a good way.


this little town is rather adorable, and the forests, the wind, the atmosphere is attractive; i can understand why tehre are so many foreigners setting up camp int he area. on the one hand, i am tempted to find a way to come back and live here for a while, but on the other, i am ready to get back to a more 'typical' tico area of the courntry. this town is a gem, no doubt, but i suspect it would be possible to live here successfully without speaking spanish. .

stayed up too late and am now ravenously hungry. . will report more on the sights sounds and smells of arenal and heredia, next week. wish me luck on my dancing mission tonight . .

happy (almost) solstice