San Jose

We made it to costa rica without problem. Our group consists of 15 people and Susie and I are among the youngest if the group. This trip is going to be a little bit of work for us. I didn't know that. We have a field guide to read every night!! Yuck! Was not expecting this. I'm glad I rested and relaxed the last day in Australia!

I'm a little jetlagged from my one day back. But i've pushed through.

We started our day with breakfast at the hotel. Great buffet. The area around the hotel is not the greatest so we have to stay on the grounds while we're here. Our morning session included a panelist of speakers from this country. A former president, a college professor, and the director of GLOBE spoke to us about costa rica and the consevation efforts that they have. The former pres spoke about peace as well. The director told us about her globe project and how it's connecting students from different part of the world through bioconservation. It's very interesting and I'll be looking up globe when I get home.

After our speakers we took a short trip to INBio which is a theme park of costa rica. It's a conservation of all the different parts of the country. They give you pieces of all the different forests: wet forest, dry forest, and valley forest. In the dry forest there were deer!! Deer are endangered here! Crazy, huh? We got to see iguanas and the best part was seeing a two-toed sloth!! An ugly little bugger. Real fuzzy.

INBio is a laboratory as well and they are trying to created naturalist citizens by cataloging all the species in costa rica. They have many preserved specimen. Mostly plants and insects. We saw a huge preserved cockroach!!

After walking through the forests, the director, eric, of INBio gave us an overview of what they hope to do in the country. They want to make citizens as informed as possible about their country so they will care about and protect the environment. It was very interesting.

We went to a typical costa rica restaurant for dinner! It was great. They served our dinner on banana leaves! Very authentic! Leaving for the rainforest now. Hopefully it will be warmer weather!!