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Nicoya, Guanacaste"

We spent a week here learning spanish at the Instituto Guanacaste de Idiomas, an excellent school that I highly recommend not just for the quality of education, but also for their helpfulness in trip planning and making those pesky phone calls in spanish for us!
Website of the institute

We stayed with a local family for the week. Behind our room there was a henyard with a rooster. The rooster was up at 3 am, 4 am, 5 am, 6, 7... and so were we.
The food was excellent and always involved varieties of rice and beans, known as pinto gallo (named for the aforementioned rooster "gallo", a black and white variety "pinto")

The towns in Costa Rica all have a central square with a park and benches, the park in Nicoya is particularly attractive due to the beautiful colonial church. We lucked out and arrived in a week of festivities for the celebration of San Blas, the patron saint of the church (Saint Blasius) who is in charge of neck and throat disorders because he saved someone from choking on a chicken bone. There were concerts every night in the park, here you see a marimba concert.
The statues in the church were specially dressed up for the celebration of San Blas, like this Jesus statue with a luxurious long black women's wig and satin and gold robe. All signs were written in Spanish, English, and German, but the translators seemed to have been rather literally-minded people, which sometimes produced hilarious results (this statue received the English name of "the Lord of the Victory"):

There was also a bullriding tournament going on in town. (Our hosts told us we were lucky to arrive that week, that there's usually nothing to do in the evening there-- not even a movie theater.) Unfortunately we didn't get to see the bull with the nastiest reputation, "Malacrianza" ("Miscreant") who had already killed three riders, because he had a hurt hoof. This national sport is really fun and interesting until you see some 17-year-old get trampled and then it starts to seem unnecessarily brutal. They actually have a red cross station directly adjacent to the arena, with a horizontal slot for passing the bodies of injured parties through. At one point during a night tournament there was a blackout while the bull was loose in the ring. Everyone screamed.




We also took a very long, very dusty bus trip out to the coast and spent a morning at Ostional Beach, which reminded me a lot of the California coast except with grey sand and warm water: To see more drawings and read about our trip, just click the links below.

Natural Parks: Monte Alto and Rincon de la Vieja

Upala in the north

Corcovado in the south

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