The Pulp

In my humble and only moderately informed opinion, Costa Rica can very easily be split into two cultures. The first in the Central Valley, San Jose, the capital city with more than a million people and the four or five cities that surround it, forming a metropolitan area with 2.5 million people. This Costa Rica enjoys a very pleasant climate all year long, although getting rained on is never pleasant, it sure seems to drizzle more than storm. This Costa Rica has universities, malls, office buildings full of international companies, concerts and museums, quick access to government services, giant supermarkets, and well, everything else that goes along with living in a city that is the hub of everything in the country. Costa Rica doesn't really have a second city, it doesn't have a financial city and a government city, an entertainment city or an industrial city. That's all in the Central Valley. There are four or five outlying cities outside the Central Valley, but none of them really compare to San José and its surrounding cities. There are five or six volunteers doing a third year extension after finishing their service that live in this Costa Rica. The other 120 or so of us live in the other Costa Rica. Rural or semi-rural Costa Rica. 

(just two doors down-pretty convenient for an after dinner ice cream treat)

Even though I live but 15 minutes from Puerto Limón, which is one of the outlying cities mentioned above, my town of Liverpool doesn't have more than 1500 habitants. In this Costa Rica, where almost all volunteers live, there is one institution that is ubiquitous as rice and beans. The pulpería. Sure, most communities, even very small ones, have an elementary school, and other institutions like the EBAIS (extension clinic of the national health service), a community building (usually one big open room for dances, parties, and roller skating), a bar, and maybe a hair salon tend to exist in most communities. But, any community that wants to call itself a community really just has one requisite, the pulpería. I generally translate pulpería as corner store or general store or convenience store, and that's essentially what it is. For Americans, my dad's description is fairly apt: a gas station without the gas. Pulperías obviously vary in their line of products, but the main staples of a Costa Rican diet can be found their: rice, beans, sugar, coffee, juice packets, flour, and an assortment of snacks and candy. Soap and laundry detergent are also almost always in stock. Some will sell beer and the most popular types of liquor. Some sell a selection of vegetables. Some vary into the office supplies sector, some sell basic clothing, some assorted housewares, some sell meat and cheese. Some, but inconveniently not all, will recharge cell phone accounts or sell the scratch off cards used to recharge phone minutes (many/most phones here are pay as you go). Many, but not all, dabble in bread and pastries-this depends mostly on whether or not there's a bakery nearby. They also vary in setup, with many having the attendant and all the goods behind a counter, so you point/ask for everything you need. This is how they are in my town-in fact, they are caged in as well. Some have a few shelves that us customers can walk amongst. Back in the old days, so I'm told, many were just a side window in a house, and you couldn't even see any of the products-apparently some of these still exist in small towns-but I can't say I've seen any. 

(the pulpería down the street from my old house in Puerto Viejo)

For those of you who are Spanish speakers and not familiar with Central/South America, you may be wondering, do these stores sell octopus? That's because, based on the suffix (-ería) combined with the root word "pulp" (octopus), pulpería should be directly translated as octopus store. There are three theories as to how pulperías got their name, according to Wikipedia. My host brother had told me two of them. One proposal is that somewhere in the Americas the ancient octopus dealers started selling other things, and the name transferred from the octopus dealer to general stores. A second theory is that the vendors were always reaching and grabbing a bunch of products at the same time, and thus appeared as an octopus, and the name stuck. The third theory, that my host brother didn't suggest, is that long ago in Mexico, the vendors of pulque (a popular alcoholic drink) became the vendors of other products and thus pulquería (the pulque store) became the name used for the general store, and when this name spread to other parts of Latin America, it shifted to pulpería. It doesn't seem we'll know the reason, as the name has been used for centuries in parts of Latin America. But, rest assured, if I'm not at my house or at school, I'm most likely buying some cookies, a lollipop, or recharging my cell phone at the pulp. 


Addendum: For those who don't know Spanish, it is quite a delightful feature of the language that by adding the suffix "-ería" to any noun (X), you make a word that means X shop. 

"Professional" "Development"

During the previous school year at the high school and the night school, most of the English teachers were gone either one or two days per week. This was for professional development training they were "required" to attend. I use quotations because although I was told it was required, the more I looked into it, the more I discovered that wasn't exactly the case. The professional development classes were to improve the teacher's English. This is part of the same push by the government to make the country bilingual that brought about the TEFL program within Peace Corps. A group, called Costa Rica Multilingue was formed within the executive branch, it has five goals, which I'll do my best to summarize quickly here: prepare teachers with communicative teaching skills in English, improve the quality/amount of bilingual workers, offer resources and technology to institutions to improve English education, raise and manage funds to offer English learning programs, monitor the labor market for bilingual workers. The official, more prettily worded goals can be found here. These are great goals, they make perfect sense, and I think the effort by the presidential office to improve English education is great. Yet, good intentions only take one so far.


As part of the first goal, Costa Rica Multilingue worked with the ministry of education to provide the aforementioned training. The teachers were usually professors from the closest university, and the teachers were put into groups based on how they had scored on the TOEIC (a proficiency test). This test had been given to all teachers in 2008 or 2009 for the government and Costa Rica Multilingue to get a handle on where the country stood. The results were sobering, with something like 1/3 of teachers not even reaching intermediate level of proficiency. So, in 2010 and 2011, the teacher training occurred. For me the biggest problem was that the training occurred during regular school days. Based on what I gleaned from conversations with various teachers, about 40% of teachers went to training one day a week, and another 50% went to training two days a week. The other ten percent had a high enough level to not warrant training, or no group could be organized for them. There were no substitutes or rescheduled classes for the teachers that were at training. So, if all the teachers were attending training, we're talking about 28% of English classes over those two school years being missed. Granted, the idea is that the teachers will become better teachers, thus using the classes they do have more productively. I might be willing to accept this proposal if it were five or ten percent of classes, but 28% is a pretty sizable chunk of the time that the students should be receiving instruction. A pretty sizable chunk of the education that the parents, as taxpayers, are paying for. The night school teachers, if they had attended the training during the day, did not have to show up for night school-as the training counted as their work day. I never observed the training, so can't comment on it's worthiness in that respect, but many a teacher said they enjoyed it because, after working in the morning, they usually watched movies in the afternoon. I'll bet $5 they used Spanish subtitles. 


While I wholly agree with the concept of the training (it has essentially the same purpose as the TEFL program), I couldn't disagree much more with the way it was carried out. With teachers already receiving ~55 vacation days a year (in addition to all official holidays) I think it would have been a considerably better idea to schedule the professional development during summer break, and have it required to continue work the next year. This could have been an intensive two week course or something like that, and then teachers could have continued throughout the year with half days or maybe one day a week for the teachers most in need. This would have considerably cut down the classes missed and disrupted less the continuity of the learning process for the students. Of course, I'm sure the super strong teacher's union wouldn't have gone for it, and I think that's such a huge problem. The proficiency tests showed that a large number of teachers were simply not apt to teach English, but instead of getting fired, or forced into extra training (outside of work hours), these teachers were taken out of the classroom two days a week. Let's imagine for a second the education these teachers' students are receiving: already subpar, and now, 40% of the time, you don't have any class at all. This sure doesn't seem to me to be the plan that is going to help those students learn or practice much English. More frustrating, if after a year of taking the classes and not improving his score to a satisfactory level, a teacher doesn't get fired or reprimanded, they just have to attend training the following year. Depending on one's training teacher, this might actually be a reward. 

(perhaps their teacher is in training...)

Curiously, the two teachers that had undoubtedly the worst English at the high school last year weren't attending classes. I inquired into this and found out that if there weren't enough people in your area at your level, or the people couldn't agree on a schedule, the class wouldn't happen. So, as there weren't enough teachers that had the horrendously low level of English that these teachers did, there wasn't a group. So, the two teachers that needed the most assistance with their English received none. So, instead, a number of teachers that actually didn't need much help with their English, but rather with lesson planning, classroom management, developing learning objectives, and well, just general professionalism, instead spent one day a week arriving even later than normal, leaving even earlier than normal, taking a long lunch, and spending the afternoon watching a movie. In case you're wondering, no, no one from Costa Rica Multilingue ever came to observe the teachers, and whether they were implementing their "improved" English in the classroom. Needless to say, despite all this training, over the course of a year, I discerned no difference in the English abilities of my teachers. Well, not completely, there were two teachers that showed improvement, but that's because I told them to come to me with problems, then we'd go over them and practice them--something they said didn't occur in the training-as they had to stick to the program wide plan. 


Good intentions indeed, but, in my opinion, carried out quite poorly. The reluctance to work extra comes from a sense of entitlement I've noted among teachers here, which I think comes from the fact that, even despite its development, in Costa Rica, especially rural Costa Rica, being educated is still quite rare. Labor is super, super protected here, so that probably also contributes to the unwillingness to think about requiring training outside of work hours. Additionally, the nationally run ministry of education creates a lot of distance between students and parents and the ministry's management in the capital; thus weakening one of the great sources of accountability on public education. I write about it, because probably half of the teachers I worked with used Spanish instead of English because they didn't know the English words and phrases, or didn't feel confident using them. A more accountable training might have addressed this, and differently scheduled might not have robbed 28% of the classroom time from students nationwide. The Peace Corps application describes the job as challenging more than a fews times, and this is just one of the many challenges I have encountered during my time here. 

My (not so) new host family

I promised to share a little bit about why I'm not living in Puerto Viejo de Sarapiqui anymore, and so I'll do my best to do so briefly here. I'll most likely elaborate more on why certain aspects of my work here didn't work out the way I had hoped they would, but I'll stick to the principal reasons here. The TEFL project was started within Peace Corps Costa Rica because the Arias administration of 2006-2010 made a super ambitious goal of making the country bilingual by 2017. What exactly they mean by bilingual (language is a little more nuanced than you speak it or you don't) I don't know, but whatever they meant, they asked the Peace Corps to start a TEFL project. Peace Corps responded and our program was born. I'm in the first group and we are assigned to work with public schools, both directly teaching classes and helping teachers become better English teachers. 


There is a whole slew of activities that could help teachers become better English teachers. Reviewing lesson plans, worksheets, homework assignments, and tests for errors or odd usage; practicing English with the teacher before or after school or during free periods; observing the teacher and providing feedback; co-planning and then co-teaching; teaching certain lessons and having the teacher observe me and then meeting to compare styles; organizing meetings with teachers to talk about best practices; and meeting with the principals to give feedback to them about the teachers' performances. If you think about it, every one of these activities requires some commitment of extra time by the local teachers. This became a huge challenge at both the schools in Puerto Viejo. 

At the regular high school, the time wasn't as big a problem as a major lack of interest by the teachers in working with me. I got the impression from most that they thought they were good enough English teachers as it was, and a few others were too ashamed of their English skills to work with me. The principal there was in her first year at a huge high school, and every time I met with her I got the impression that she had more important things to do than take advantage of my presence. The night school had a much different atmosphere, a welcoming principal and teachers interested in working with me. Yet, as they took the bus home-they weren't going to stay late (it was 22:00 anyways) and all of them had young children that they took care of during the day-then their spouse came home-and they went to work-thus, they could seldom come more than 15 or 20 minutes early. So, to put it quite succinctly: I found very little willingness or time to work with the teachers. I shared this challenge with my bosses, and they met with some of the people from the school. They decided that it would be best for me to move to a new site for the coming school year. It was decided that I'd move to Liverpool, as Kevin B., my boss was planning to send some of the new cohort of volunteers to the area, and he thought it'd be helpful to have an experienced volunteer in the region to help them transition into their service. So, I had the fortunate experience of being able to go with Kevin to Liverpool and look around for host families. 

I have been having a great time since mid February, when I moved into the Avendaño Hernández household. Liverpool essentially consists of two main roads and the highway, one long paved road perpendicular to the highway going south and a long, dirt road parallel to the highway to the north. There a number of roads jutting off these main streets, that are more like cul-de-sacs, as they don't go anywhere. I live on the main paved street, about 500 meters south of the highway, right next to a small convenience store, and across the street from another brand new convenience store. Well, directly across the street from me is an undeveloped lot, filled with banana trees, coconut trees, and eye level weeds. 

For the first two months I lived here, it was just me and my two host parents, Guido and Margot. They are from Heredia, a city in the Central Valley near San José. Guido runs a semi-truck repair parts store about a kilometer away on the highway. He has worked in this for a number of years, and was working in between the Central Valley and Limón for a number of years, and over three years ago decided to move the business permanently to Limón. So, they've lived here since. Margot has an aunt and a few cousins in Liverpool as well, but their three oldest children, and almost all the rest of their relatives live in the Central Valley. Their youngest son, César, was living in Heredia when I moved in, and I moved into his old room, so it was very convenient. But, then, he was fired from his job at a smoothie shop, and at the same time one of his friends also lost his job-so they couldn't pay rent anymore, and he and his friends all moved back with their parents. César is in a tough period, because he graduated high school in December, when he was 17 (the high school here only goes to 11th grade) and so he's 17, but can't work, because almost all jobs in Costa Rica require one to be 18 (he only got the job at the smoothie shop due to family connections). So, he's moved back, and has been a great addition to the family. He got his computer set up in the family room, and sleeps on a mattress between the recliner and the kitchen table. He doesn't seem to mind at all. He spends most of his time on his computer, either surfing Facebook or playing Pro Evolution Soccer or Grand Theft Auto. He's big into soccer, so we talk about that a lot, and he's always showing me this or that Internet meme. Margot is super nice, will joke a bit, and is pretty relaxed, having already gotten her three older kids out of the house and César is pretty much there, she's definitely seen her busiest days go by, and she's happy about it. Guido is lots of fun, mostly due to his strong opinions, and his willingness to let them loose after one or two after dinner drinks. It's been a great move, and I'm pretty sure you can figure out who is who in the pictures. 

Itzelth, Margot's niece's daughter, lives next door, and loves to drop by and play in my mosquito net

Tumbling

I have started a tumblr account in order to experiment with the program as well as a way to share photos from my time here. Obviously, all my photos are in my Picasa album, which can be accessed via the link on the right. Yet, I know some people don't want to or would be overwhelmed at looking through a bunch of photos all at once. So, I'll try to share a photo or so every day via tumblr. I'll do it in chronological order, so it'll be a bit like a visual journey through my Peace Corps experience.

You can find it here: http://kferr027.tumblr.com/. It's called Ken's Tumblr 2, because I had some complications setting up the first blog. You can follow it by clicking on the link above and checking that website periodically. Although I think you have to have a tumblr account to make comments and stuff like that. You can avoid having to check it if you use an RSS feeder (like Google Reader), if you do, try adding http://kferr027.tumblr.com/rss to the feeds you follow. I'll still post here fairly often, with longer posts that will still include related pictures. Also, I'm not super connected to what's cool in America these days, so if tumblr is totally yesterday, feel free to let me know ;)

Sharing is Caring

I spent a lot of time on buses the last week and a half, making a trip to visit my old training community and then making a trip up to the other corner of Costa Rica, to Dos Rios de Upala, helping out another volunteer with a project in his site. All this time on the bus reminded me of a most annoying aspect of bus rides in developing countries. For comparison, I'll never forget when Danthemanstan and I were riding a train in South Korea, enjoying an animated conversation and we were told by the train attendant to please talk in lower voices so as to allow other passengers to sleep. Well, that's most certainly not the case in Costa Rica. Instead, many a Costa Rican likes to share his music with the rest of the bus. I am unwilling to accept the excuse that someone with enough money to buy or rent a phone that plays music and has speakers can't afford head phones. So, I attribute it simply to poor manners. I said developing countries earlier, because this was a dominant trend in China as well, and I feel like I've encountered it in some other countries. My buddy Dave and I always used to joke in China that the people blasting music were just sharing music, looking out for the greater good. 


Having never had the audacity to play music out loud in an enclosed public space with no escape (a bus), I can't begin to understand the thought process. From what I've seen, any cell phone that has radio or music playing capabilities comes with headphones. To a certain extent I'll accept the "I forgot my headphones" claim, but there's really no way that this many people are forgetting their headphones this often. I generally think the thinking behind playing music out loud on a bus is in fact non-existent. The people doing this aren't people that were ever taught to think about others and how they might feel. Why so negative about these music sharers, you might ask. Mostly because music sharers aren't generally offering up choice music. Instead, it's usually reggaeton or some other highly mechanized dance music that I'm not very attracted to. Even when it's good music, if my bus plan was to sleep or read, it's still quite annoying. 


While I know that most readers back home aren't riding buses on a very frequent basis, some might use the metro fairly often, and that's a fairly good comparison, although, you're usually not on the metro for three or four hours. So, instead, perhaps try sitting on the couch for a couple of hours, and invite the nearest neighbor kid to come play her favorite type of music out loud next to you for the entire time. Welcome to bus rides in Costa Rica. Well, that's too far, welcome to one out of every three or four bus rides in Costa Rica. The other ones usually just involve a baby's elbow in your side or two old guys next to you talking incessantly about the price of truck tires. 

Getting more than just my feet wet

The week before last I had a wonderful opportunity to visit for the first time a special and unique part of Costa Rica: an indigenous reserve. There were few indigenous people in Costa Rica when Colombus and later Spaniards arrived at the beginning of the 16th century, and there continue to be few today. I don't know much about their history, so won't postulate any reasons for their current small population. They live in protected areas primarily on each side of the Talamanca Mountain range, which splits southern Costa Rica in half. The group I visited was Cabecar, one of the larger groups in Costa Rica. My general impression and understanding of the indigenous groups is that they mostly existed isolated or pushed away from most of the development of Costa Rica over the past two centuries, but have become a bit more integrated into the society recently, some moving off of the reservations for work as well as there being presence of schools and state run clinics and hospitals either on the indigenous territory or very close to it. Yet, they maintain some of their old traditions, and some reserves live almost identical to their ancestors as the indigenous reserves have been some of the last places in Costa Rica to receive running water and electricity (more than 99% of Costa Rica has electricity-according to the state utility company commercials). The reserve I visited was called Cerere, and is located in the county of Valle de La Estrella in Limón province.

(the rest of the group crossing the river)

Matt D., a volunteer who actually just left the country, had arranged a celebration of International Book Day as one of his last activities. The indigenous reserve is actually a good hour or more into the hinterland than his site, but he had gotten to know the principal and some of the teachers, so planned the activity. Seven of us volunteered to help Matt carry out the activity, and I'm quite sure that we all got as much out of it as we put in. We all got on the bus at varying points, and eventually were dropped off in the middle of some banana fields (which is essentially the middle of nowhere). Matt thought that a walk through the banana fields would be better than spending money on the mini-bus taxis that run to the indigenous territory. He was right, it was a hot, but refreshing walk. After crossing two streams and one river (by foot-see picture) we arrived at the school, which is at the edge of the reserve closest to the big roads, and the families live farther and farther up the road, into the forest and mountains. We were shown our accommodations-the floor of the principal's office, where we placed foam sleeping pads provided from the clinic. Once lathered up with mosquito repellant, it wasn't a bad place to sleep. We ate breakfast and lunch in the school cafeteria with the kids and teachers, and had romantic candlelight dinners at a family's house that lived next to the school-candlelight as they don't have electricity. The food was excellent, the fried fish we had one night was some of the best fish I've had since being here.

During the first day we had about an hour to do some games, get to know you activities, and active reading activities with the kids. Our group was split up in groups of two or three, and each group worked with two grades. As I'll explain more in another post, Costa Rican elementary school kids go to school for half the day, so this meant that my group worked with first graders in the morning and fourth graders in the afternoon. The second day we had them all day and read a few books ('Where the Wild Things Are', 'The Story of Ferdinand', 'the Grouchy Ladybug', 'Aesop's Fables', and 'From Head to Toe'), did some crafts related to the books, as well as played some games. It was very interesting to see differences between the kids and the kids I've interacted with in Liverpool and Puerto Viejo. By far, for me, the biggest difference was how quiet and shy the kids were. I'm sure there are many a reason for this, but it was quite noticeable how much more timid the kids were around us compared to any other group of kids I've worked with. In one of the fourth grade classes in Liverpool, when given the chance to answer questions, almost all the kids try to answer, many will comment on the answers given by others, and it takes effort to keep them quiet. Whereas, in what we thought were fairly interesting and easy to follow activities, we were often faced with a room full of silent students. I'd pry, they understood what was going on and the question, but were either too shy or scared or uninterested to answer. Yet, the students generally seemed to enjoy the crafts, and the first graders were super creative with the monster masks they made to go along with 'Where the Wild Things Are'.

(overseeing some Simon Says action)

These two days spent in the school were topped off by a campfire held at the elementary school. It was a great success. It didn't appear so at first, as at the announced starting time only one of the teachers and her family had arrived. She had brought the snack supplies, so a few of us went down to make refried bean and tuna salad sandwiches by the light of our flashlights (refried bean sandwiches are surprisingly good). When we came back up, we were delighted to see that a bunch of people had arrived and we had even missed out on Matt's story, which was apparently quite a thriller. A few of the community members told a story, Chris and Tarah led the students in a dramatic retelling of 'Where the Wild Things Are', using the masks they had made in class. We then handed out sticks and marshmallows, and introduced the American cultural tradition of roasting marshmallows to the community. It was a big hit. But, then again, how could roasting marshmallows not be a big hit with elementary school kids.

(a traditional wooden raised house in the reserve)

I had to leave the following morning-and with Chris H.-crossed the river and two streams at 4:30 in the morning to catch the 5:00 bus from the main road (the only bus that leaves the town near the reserve. So, yes, I've added 'fording a river using a flashlight to catch the early bus' to my life's accomplishments. This was unfortunate, as the rest of the group got to go to a traditional festival complete with traditional food at a site fairly deep in the indigenous territory. Yet, giving marshmallow roasting advice to some indigenous kids is a pretty sweet experience in and of itself.

Mt. Chirripó

(summit photo)

Around the end of last year, an email was sent out to the Volunteer listserv asking if anyone was interested in climbing Chirripó, Costa Rica's highest peak at 3,820 m (12,533 feet). I said yes, and come the end of March, it happened. We went in a big group, 17 of us I believe. I was happy to have the mess of reserving a permit to climb the mountain taken care of for me, as the permits are limited and must be reserved months in advance, but I wasn't exactly super excited about traveling or climbing in a group that big. Groups that big are great if there is a tour guide to tell everyone what to do. If there isn't then I tend to think that whole trip is spent in discussion about where to eat, what to do, which bus to take, etc. But, I didn't really know when I would've otherwise planned to climb the mountain. Luckily, Barton, Andrew, and Elliot, three of my good friends from training, were all in the group. I made the trip halfway, and stayed with Brian P., a solid dude that was in my training group and lives in a nice little mountain town south of San José, and on the way to Perez Zeledón, the town near Chirripó. We had a great night watching a Costa Rican movie and chowing down on delicious food with a family he's friends with.

The night before the climb we stayed at Casa Mariposa, a wonderful, well-run hostel owned by a couple from California. The wife is a former Peace Corps Volunteer, so we were all happy to give her some business. The group's plan was to leave at 4:30 am, in order to make the 14 kilometer hike up to the lodge before it got rainy in the afternoon. I see almost no logic in hiking in the dark, and also don't like to get up early, so Andrew, Barton, and I left about five. We still had to do some hiking in the dark, but figured we should at least stay somewhat with the group. Some of the people in the group had chosen to porter some of their food and other items to the lodge, but I carried all my food, clothing, and sleeping bag. The bum thing about climbing mountains is that when you're climbing you are exercising, thus don't need much warm clothing. Yet, and it was certainly the case at Chirripó, mountains get super cold at night, so you need to carry plenty of extra clothing. It was a great hike. I'm a fan of taking frequent but short breaks, and everyone I hiked with complied, so I was quite happy. Chirripó is famous for it's biodiversity, and although I'm not plant or bird expert to be able to appreciate this, what was really fascinating to me where the different types of vegetation we went through. Again, I lock the brains to list them all here, but needless to say parts of the trip were tropical rainforest, parts looked like Greenbelt Park near my parents' house in Iowa, and parts were heavy pine forest like I've seen in northern Minnesota/Canada, and other parts were filled with the desert mountain scenery seen in Westerns. All in the same day. 

(Barton and me at the top)

We arrived at the top after six hours of hiking/breaks, got signed in and got our stuff to our rooms. Elliot and I elected to take one of the coldest showers I've taken in my life, but I did feel refreshed. After that I had a glorious lunch of tortillas, tuna, apples, and trail mix. Everyone else had similar lunches. Elliot, John F., Barton and I decided to take advantage of the mostly clear afternoon and climb Los Crestones, a set of boulders shooting into the sky on an adjacent ridge. At the top John and I climbed until we were all concerned about how we'd get down. I let John go first so he could help me down-good decision on my part given his superior skill and height. He and Elliot raced back down (John had to help start dinner) and Barton and I enjoyed a much more leisurely stroll back down to the lodge. Most everyone in the group cooked spaghetti with sausage, which they had portered up with the gas canisters and stove. I stuck with tortillas and refried beans (when hiking/camping I'm all about simplicity). Early to be we went anticipating a painfully early rise the next day. 

(Elliot, Barton, and Jonathan on the way up)

The idea was to get to the top of the peak, an additional 5 kilometer hike from the lodge by sunrise, so as to see the sun rise over the Caribbean Ocean. The group left at 3:30, Barton, Andrew, and I left at 4:00, continuing our leaving after everyone else trend. The hike was not my idea of fun: dark and cold, wearing a head lamp staring at the group hoping not to take a spill. On the contrary, the hike down, with plenty of light and a cool, crisp air, was absolutely delightful and had amazingly gorgeous scenery. Alas, we all made it to the top, and Jonathan L., the trip organizer, had brought a bottle of Johnnie Walker for all of us to enjoy as we saw the sunrise from Costa Rica's highest point. Sadly, there was cloud cover on both coasts that prevented us seeing both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans at the same time-which can be done on a clear day. But, we could see the clouds that were hanging over both oceans at the same time. There were also views of calm, pristine alpine lakes in some of the valleys between the ridges. Chirripó is located in the Talamanca Mountain Range, which divides the bottom half of Costa Rica into two, east and west. It was crazy to be able to see places that, by transport, take 8 to 10 hours to travel between, but from the top of the mountain seemed just a hop, skip, and jump away. We passed back by the lodge, packed up all our stuff, and headed on down. The walk down took Barton and I exactly as much time as the walk up, probably due to our bodies hurting plenty from the day before. We took leisurely stops as well, as we didn't have any hurry. A number of people from our group, including Andrew and Elliot, were in a hurry to catch a bus to make it back to their sites that night. I had no plans besides ordering a hamburger and a Pilsen in the restaurant next to the hostel, and that's just what I did. It was a great hike, the ridges, alpine lakes, and views near the top are amazing, and is a trip I would highly recommend to any of my coworkers here in Costa Rica as well as anyone visiting the country. 

Please check out the link to the right for My Photos-Picasa Photo Gallery to see many more photos of the trip.