Its horn sounded like a theme song from Twilight Zone.- We spent about 30 hours on it, total. It had just enough seats for everyone, so all of our luggage had to go on the roof. One of the first things we learned upon getting there was that you couldn't flush toilet paper, you had to throw it in the trashcan. We were also very much the minority, it's not one of those Spanish countries where they are really just as many white people as Latino. Nope, almost everyone spoke only Spanish. I have to say, after coming home I was pretty fluent in Spanish after the whole experience there and my four years of high school Spanish.One of the four guys ended up being a kid that was in my EFY group first year with Herb! Which was random. The roads there were a little creepy. We took a two hour bus ride to our orientation camp on the coast. There was a tree blocking the road on the way there which had also cut off the power to the orientation camp, which was already just cabins. I believe we had a candlelit spaghetti dinner that night and went to bed early after a long day of traveling, trying to do everything by flashlight. (They had to ease us in to the Costa Rican cuisine...) 
After church, we had planned on driving back to San Jose to go to a stake fireside there, but it was raining to hard for us to leave on time so we ended up staying at the camp for another couple of hours. At that point, we hadn't really been exposed to the country at all other than our tour guides, we had only been to the camp where it was only our group. So, that night when we went to a shopping mall for dinner, it was quite interesting. Obviously, none of the fast food restaurant workers spoke English. Luckily, I was one of about 5 of the kids that new Spanish pretty well and could basically get the point across. But it is a lot different actually doing it than learning about it in school. It was also our first time using the Costa Rican money, colones. 517 colones was equal to about a dollar. After dinner, we drove to the hostel. Most people know what those are, for those of you that don't, it's a hotel for youth groups. The rooms have about 10 bunk beds in them, usually everyone shares one or two bathrooms. The middle of them is open to the outside, and they usually aren't very nice. But it was better than a lot of the houses we saw when we were there, and we loved it by the time we left. 
The next day, Monday, we started our service projects. We drove over to the elementary school which was in one of the poorest parts of the country, surrounded by barbed wire fencing. We were told about our four projects...build a wall, plant a garden, pave the playground so the kids didn't get all muddy, and dig a ditch so the playgrounds didn't flood. 
We didn't start that day because of rain...and instead went to the Costa Rican Walmart and explored all of the stuff they had there. That night we got into groups of four and went with 7 or so different families in the San Jose stake to their houses for Family Home Evening. 
The family whose house I went to was a bishop's family, who had three boys. After that we successfully taught the bus driver Mauricio how to play Egyptian. 
All in Spanish. On Tuesday we started our projects. I was in the group digging for and breaking apart cement blocks to lay on the playground before we paved it. We worked for about 4 hours shoveling and spreading and hammering...my biggest job was using the jack hammer to break up the big cement blocks. 
Which was fun, haha. Oh I forgot to mention that it was like spring break there the week we worked at the school, so none of the kids were there but they all came to see what we were doing. One of them came with his dad and wanted to take me and my friend and one of our chaperones back to see their house. So we went with them, accidentally forgetting to tell anyone else where we were going. We figured we wouldn't be gone for long and that it wouldn't be very far away, but it was. About 20 minutes later, we saw my dad and Mike running down the street...they weren't too happy.The next day we started working on the garden and building the wall. I don't remember what the wall was for, I was never part of the group who worked on that. But for the garden we had to clear the land for it and then we paved the little pathways and went to pick out all of the rocks and plants for it. That same group that was working on the garden also helped with the ditch...we got a little sidetracked and made some mud snowmen to leave for the kids. And got extremely muddy in the process.
After working all day, we went souvenir shopping. I don't really remember what I got, a soccer jersey, t-shirt, bag...my dad is the one that got a ton of stuff. A couple of the guys in the group decided it would be a good idea to get hunting knives. One of them told us later that while he was buying the knife he was looking around at some of the other stuff at the shop and kept asking the guy what things were for. Of course almost everything he asked about had something to do with grinding or growing marijuana.
It was interesting getting ready in the mornings. My room had 11 girls in it, with two showers and two bathrooms. A couple of times people forgot that you couldn't flush toilet paper. We found out that there really is a reason for that. We had rotations all set up for showers....the person at the end of the mornings rotation got ice cold water in their shower. Luckily no one really bothered getting ready other than having a shower. Unless we were going sightseeing or out to eat. On Thursday we kept working on the garden until about noon when we left to go to the temple. It was pretty cool that we got to go there, I must say. 
And on Friday we finished all of our projects, which I will put up pictures of later. We also spent a good part of that last day at the school picking up garbage bag fulls and garbage bag fulls of trash. So we were done with the school. 
That night we went sightseeing in San Jose. The first place we went was the national theater. Well, kind of. We got kicked out after about five minutes of the tour for using flash photography. Then we went to one of the big Catholic cathedrals where a wedding was going on, which was weird in the first place. Then some of the stranger people in my group started taking pictures, so we got kicked out of there, too. My question is, why would you want pictures of a stranger's wedding anyway? Plus, if I was getting married and a bunch of kids from a different country wandered in taking pictures like tourists...at my wedding... I would be pretty ticked off. That night we had our big soccer tournament. Like I said, it was huge there. We got some local kids to come play with us and they were not only crazily good at it they were so into every little detail about the game. It was pretty crazy to watch. The next day, Saturday, we did some more sightseeing. The first place we went was the volcano. Which was a little different that the volcanoes we went to in Hawaii. It was basically an ashy wasteland with a lake of acid green water and fog.
We saw some more churches, Mauricio pointed out lots of stuff to us as we were driving. We saw monkeys that day, too!! Just off by the side of the road. That night we were having a "surprise dinner." Up in the mountains. So we all actually got ready for the first time since being there. We all loaded up on the minibus and drove for a while and eventually some of us realized that we were driving at about an 80 degree angle up a mountain. Not kidding. So we were all looking out the window down at the city, a little creeped out because, well, obviously. And then the bus stopped going. We had only been going about 10 mph anyway since it was such a steep hill and such a heavy bus, but it stopped going. For a second I thought the bus was going to roll backwards, but it had just broken down, so we all got out and walked the rest of the way up the mountain to the restaurant! So we got there, and it was actually a really nice place, which I don't think there were many of in that country. It was outside looking over the city and they had a private room all set up for us with little cups with punch sitting in front of our places. So we all sat down and started drinking our punch waiting for the bus driver to make it up with the bus. So we are all sitting there drinking out punch until someone found out that the drink was alcoholic. Ahahaha...that was priceless. 
So we had a really good dinner. Well, really good compared to the black beans and wild rice we had been having almost all week. And fried papayas. After dinner, we found out what the "surprise" of the dinner was. Since we had been learning salsa and meringue, they had some Latino dancers come perform for us. My dad got pulled out of the crowd to dance with them, also pretty funny. 
Sunday, the next day, we went to church again, at a different building. Since it was in the city and not the country it was a little bit nicer/ bigger than the first one and they actually had separate classes. 
After church we all got packed up for our six hour bus ride up into the mountains to the town we would be staying in for the next week. For the first hour or so, everyone was able to sleep, and did. After that, the road was so bumpy it was impossible to even stay in the seat sometimes. 
Again, we were driving up the edges of these mountains where you could look off one edge and see that our tires were inches away from a dropoff with no guardrail. We had a good bus driver. We got some really good landscape pictures on that drive though and saw some more wildlife. 
We finally got to the town after it had gotten dark. Earlier in the week at the school, the leaders had paired us into groups of two or three who would each be staying with a separate host family in the town, Canitas de Monteverde. So when we got there, we were all paired with our partners. 
So we met our family. There were two girls, Ruth and Nazareth who were 12 and 14 I think. And one boy, Christian, who was 17. 
The dad drove us around on his little motocycle. He worked at a dairy farm that was owned by a couple other people in the house. They had chickens and cows and cats and a dog. The mom made and sold jewelry. A lot of the people in the town were related, cousins, aunts and uncles, grandparents. There were only about 10 houses and they were all within a ten minute walk of the town center where the community place was. So that is where our group would meet up. The mom would always show me how she did things...she had me handwash some of my clothes (they didn't have a washer and dryer) and cook some of the food. That is one reason I was kind of worried about rooming with someone I didn't know...my only experiences with that have been in Costa Rica and my second year of EFY and neither turned out too well. Luckily, I already know my roommate at BYU is awesome, so I'm not worried about it anymore. The next day was Monday. Ziplining day. The roosters next door woke us up at about 5:30. We were suprised to wake up and find that everyone in the house was already gone to school and work by the time we came out of our room at about 5:45. School started at about 6 for the kids. So we had the breakfast she had made, she was an AMAZING cook. Luckily. Other than I discovered that I'm not much a fan of papaya. After breakfast we walked down to the community center to meet our group to go ziplining. It was pretty interesting to hear about everyone's different experiences overnight. Everyone's dog had followed them down from their houses, too, there were about 15 of them waiting with us for the bus. Including puppies!! One of the dogs had had them the day before we got there and they were adorable. Any free time we had we were playing frisbee or playing with the puppies. I swear, when I'm older I'm going to have a hundred dogs. They are my favorite animal by a landslide. 
After that exciting experience, we went to the nearest semi-big town. Which was still really small. But compared to the town we were staying in with our host families, it was big. We got back to Canitas de Monteverde and had our first chance to walk around the town and see where everyone had been staying. All the little kids were home from school and came to play with us. One of the families that another group was staying with had an entire farm with pigs, horses, goats, etc that they showed some of us. A couple of the little school kids showed us their climbing tree which we spent a lot of that afternoon climbing. That night we went to a bar and did karaoke.
The next day was Tuesday. They warned us from the very beginning that we would probably be doing harder work than we had ever done in our lives. It hadn't been too hard up until that point for most people...but that whole day was just...exhausting. We got up really early and left to go to the Santa Elena Reservation about half an hour away, still up in the mountains. We got there and some of the state troopers on duty at the reservation told us what we would be doing. There was a big pile of water resistant gravel in the parking lot. We were going to get about 20 pounds of it scooped into a canvas bag that we would carry on our shoulders about a mile down the paths in the park to pave the path. The part we were doing was seriously in the middle of the jungle. The kind of jungle you imagine when someone says jungle with moss and swinging vines and huge trees and logs and streams and tropical birds and waterfalls. For the first hour of the day, we carried the bags of gravel back and forth paving the paths. They had been mud, and since it rained a lot up there, people didn't really like hiking on muddy paths. So that was the point of the project. It was a super long day. I'm pretty sure we all went to bed around 6. Early, compared to when we usually, went to bed, about 1.
The next day we were back in the town for our service project. We painted the fence around the community center and then went to their soccer stadium to paint the inside of it. 
There were three buildings in the town other than the houses. The community center, the soccer stadium, and the elementary school. Noone really drove cars because they could walk anywhere they needed to go. Not even everyone had cars, but I'm pretty sure everyone had a moped/ Vespa/ motorcycle. While we were painting the soccer stadium, a girl in the group fell and had to go the emergency room. I didn't really talk to her about it, or don't remember, but I'm sure that was interesting going to the E.R. in a foreign country.And after that fiasco, my host dad brought his motorcycle down and let us all take rides on it. I love riding on motorcycles! 
Anyway. Then we played a bunch of games that some of the kids there taught us, mostly involving getting really dizzy, falling down, and looking like idiots. The next day we woke up super early and said goodbye to our families to leave for the beach. That drive was about three hours long, and was the most fun one yet. A couple of my original roommates from the hostel and I and Keifer, one of the guys, were all in a mini mini bus because there wasn' enough room for everyone on the second bus. I dont'really know how that happened since we had room there. Maybe its just because it was too cramped. So, the six of us were in the separate bus. It was mostly fun because we made lots of videos, but I couldn't find any of them. On the way there we stopped and got out to see some crocodiles in the river we were passing over. And they were ginormous. People would toss a pebble or something over the edge and five or six crocs would jump out of the water thinking it was food. 
And then we got to the beach and our best hotel yet! Six of us were in one room. It actually had semi warm water, comfortable beds, outlets and airconditioning. And a tv! And refrigerator. Basically it was a typical U.S. hotel which was heaven after staying in some of the places we had been staying. And we had our second American meal of the trip before heading out to the beach. Hamburgers. And at the beach, it was pretty cloudy, but we all tried surfing. I got up once. Maybe, it's a lot harder than it looks. One of the Mauricio's used to be a professional surfer who claimed to have surfed with sharks. 
On the way homefrom the beach, it started pouring down rain. Lightning and thunder bigger than I have probably ever heard it before. And we had to cross a one-car bridge going oback to the hotel. What I mean by that was that the bridge was so old and rickety that only one car could go across it safely. We were a minibus! But we had to cross it and did, even though we could feel the wind shaking it underenath us. There were quite honestly at least 4 people crying at that point. But it was all good, we got home and watched the storm from our hotel while eating ice cream and watching the Disney Channel.
Friday was the last full day we had there. We went back to the beach. The whole day was fairly uneventful other than three of my friends and I went on a banana boat ride. I love boating/ tubing. Turbing is one of my favorite things to do, but if I had the option of banana boating instead of tubing, I would pick it. I'm pretty sure that is the only time I have ever lost my voice. The guy driving our boat didn't care if we were holding on for dear life like the lame guys at United States beaches. He probably went faster the louder we screamed. At about 4 we drove back to our original hostel and were planning on going to a stake dance that night. But we got kicked out again because I guess it was single adult and there were the majority of us who were 16 and 17. Then we had our own party at the hostel. There was a wedding going on their...I don't know why someone would choose to have their wedding at a hostel. But it was a party, I'll tell you. And we had our testimony meeting that night before leaving the next morning. 
It was quite an adventure, as you can probably tell. It was already that long and I could have said so much more...I didn't even talk about any of the people in the group and all the drama that went on with people. I'm pretty sure there was at least one relationship that went on on that trip. Sad, but true. But pretty much everyone was awesome, I even thought about rooming with one or two of them in college because we still talk all the time. Didn't work out, but ya. You guys should all look in to going on one of those trips!! I'm sure you would have as much fun as I did! I really want to go again, actually, maybe to Fiji next time.
This was our theme song for the trip...I swear it came on the radio every five seconds.
