An attempt at relaxation...

Saturday we set the alarm for 5 and by 6 we were walking down to Sarchi- we are some of the only tourists in Sarchi so certain people have started to recognize us and know to speak English to us. We have made one friend at the Soda next to the bus stop who told us he hasn´t had the chance to pracitice his english in a long time and Sam makes a point of walking by his shop every time we go into town.

From Sarchi we jumped onto the bus to Naranjo where we got off to wait for another bus to Ciudad Quesada (cheesy city?). We waited and waited and waited then asked some of the other people who were waiting only to be met with a frantic and rapid repsonse of somthing like "I don´t know, we´ve been waiting too you know?" After almost an hour and all the other buses passing at least twice, ours arrived. As we stood in line to get on we overheard someone say "habia un accidente cinco son muertos". There were no more seats left and without the fullunderstanding of what had happened we were a little on edge--talking to some other Americans (for a change) we found out that the bus they had been on in the morning had hit a car that had swerved out in front on it, all of the people in the car had died. We all felt very lucky to be safe and the other American students were really nice to talk to and even offered us their seats after a little while.

Once in La Fortuna we got some coffee from "Down to Earth Coffee" which was really fresh... suposedly harvested only days earlier. At the farm that we´re working on the coffee won´t be ready to harvest until October so although we are getting to know a lot about how to plant and maintain a coffee farm we can´t actually try any of the cosecha (harvest).

There are lots of little cafes and gringo oriented restaurants in La Fortuna and it was nice to grab a salad and sandwich. Still we were happy that our hotel was in El Castillo a little ways away from the main tourist spots. The hotel that we ended up at was a really great deal and we spent the rest of our afternoon relaxing in the pool, drinking lemonadas, and watching and waiting for the volcano to erupt. Funny thing is that all the hotels advertize doing relaxing things while watching lava. If the volcano had erupted while we were in the pool I think I would have tried to swim in the opposite direction as fast as possible. Luckily or not...we weren´t threatened by such excitment and the volcano slumbered away the day. We did get a chance to see the top though which was a stunning sight indeed.

Sunday we made our way back to Sarchi. The bus ride felt twice as long and we were very relievd to finallymake it back to our cabina. While we were gone they had fumagated so instead of live bugs flying around atnight we were met with lots of dead ones (and several zombies)...I guess watching the volcano was relaxing after all....