Free Day

Sleeping in until nine in the morning was fantastic. After a quick breakfast, Andrew, Cliff, Gavin, and I took a bus downtown to meet some of the EWH girls in the plaza for a Bible study. However, we barely opened our Bibles and instead primarily shared about the blessings and challenges of being part of this program. Just as we were finishing at noon, the rain which had been coming our way from the mountains arrived. Unfortunately, I had left my rain jacket at the homestay, so I had to share an umbrella as we searched for a restaurant in the pouring rain (which has continued with varying intensity for about eleven hours now). At lunch, we mainly discussed how disappointed we’ll be when we return to the States and then have to pay more money for food that is less fresh, less healthy, and less delicious than the food in Costa Rica!

After lunch, we splintered up to explore the city in groups (our last chance to do so since we’re going to the beach next weekend and leaving the country the weekend after that!).Thinking that the Gold Museum was closed, my group went to a bookstore. While in the bookstore, however, we actually found a book with the Gold Museum’s hours, and the museum was open. When we reached the museum in the pouring rain, though, we found that construction work kept most of the exhibits closed to the public for the next two months.  Despite the limited access, we entered and saw some gold figurines and artifacts, as well as many works of a contemporary Costa Rican artist.

From the Gold Museum we went to the Metropolitan Cathedral, which had some elegant architecture. Outside of the cathedral was a music festival (a stage covered with a tent as well as tented areas for people to stand out of the rain), and we arrived to one of the tents just in time for the last song. At the National Theater about one block away, we realized that the Costa Rican symphony orchestra is playing tomorrow at 10:30am (admission $5 and up). I may go if I’m awake in time, while the rest of the group is getting up at 6:15 tomorrow morning for a trip to a volcano which I saw last spring when I was in Costa Rica. Finally, we went to a nearby supermarket, where I bought a cheap block of ‘fresh cheese’. Unfortunately, since the cheese had not aged for very long, the flavor was very weak and the texture was quite similar to tofu.

When we arrived back to the homestay, no one was home even by the time that we would normally have dinner. But just when we had given up and decided to go out and buy something, Flory (our host mother) arrived and announced she had lost track of time at her nephew’s wedding. We were fine with going out anyway, but she told us that she had already made supper and needed only to heat it up.

Strangely, no one at our house had any blatant side-effects from the chloroquine, such as nightmares or bizarre dreams. However, we noticed ourselves being extraordinarily goofy after dinner while playing the card-game form of monopoly, and we joked that if chloroquine was to blame for the new dynamic, our host family must be used to every EWH group being normal for the first half of the month, and then half-crazed for the two weeks prior to leaving for Nicaragua and Honduras—in fact, our hosts seemed to be completely unsurprised by our behavior.