Indiana Box and the Jungle of Doom

I thought I'd tell you all about my wild weekend adventures in Costa Rica. I did feel a little like Indiana Jones at times because my weekend involved both ancient artifacts and tropical jungles. On Friday, I went to downtown San Jose with a couple of my classmates. First we went to the National Museum which is housed in this amazing Spanish fort:


They had a great collection of ancient artifacts, including gold and jade pieces, pottery and metates.


Metates are used for grinding corn, but these intricate metates were buried with the dead so that they would have food in the afterlife. They are made of volcanic rock.



Some of the English translations in the Museum were pretty interesting, but this was my favorite.


This is the view of downtown San Jose from the balcony of the fort. You can tell that is is almost lunch time because it is so cloudy, but generally it doesn't start raining until around two or three in the afternoon.


This is a beautiful statue in the plaza in the middle of the fort.


After visiting the museum, we ate lunch and then starting walking around downtown. In the parks and pedestrian streets of San Jose, they have a bunch of cows that have been decorated by various local artists. This is a Frog-Cow:


This is the Cow Diva. Isn't she fancy?


There were also some beautiful artistic cows:




And some goofy cows:


I loved the Taxi Cow, complete with license plate:


Next, Cow Kabob and Butcher Shop Cow. These two are a little morbid, but so funny:



And that was basically the end of Friday. After spending the whole day in the city, my classmate, Bette, and I decided to get out of town on Saturday. Our tour left at six in the morning for breakfast in a coffee plantation. This is a picture of how they lay the coffee out to dry:


This is a picture of a coffee plant. Can you see the little coffee beans? They are green, like almost everything else in Costa Rica.


And in between the rows of coffee plants, they plant banana trees to take up the extra moisture from the ground.


After Bette, the coffee aficionado, loaded up on coffee to bring home, we went to the crater of Poas Volcano. Here is a picture of the crater:


Don't worry! Although the volcano is active, it's main form of activity is emitting a fumarole, not lava. And here is a closer picture of the fumarole:


After visiting the volcano, we went to La Paz waterfalls. They have very pretty recycling containers there. After all if they can recycle here in the rainforest, can't we be better too?


This is a picture of the very awesome bathroom sink! You turn the little rock with a frog on it, and the water comes down the little waterfall. I thought it was so cute, but I can only imagine what the bathroom attendant was thinking as she showed every single person who used the bathroom how to turn on the water.


At La Paz, we went to the aviary where we saw some beautiful little birds:




And some beautiful big birds. I was three feet away from this toucan, and although there is wire behind him preventing him from flying away, there was nothing between me and the bird. His huge beak made me a little nervous, but isn't he beautiful?


After the aviary, we visited the butterfly garden where there were hundreds of butterflies fluttering by the lovely flowers:




There was also this friendly little monkey who wanted to say hello:


After the butterfly garden (can you tell this was a really long day?), we went to the hummingbird garden. Unlike the other gardens, this garden was not surrounding by any kind of net or wire to keep the hummingbirds in. There were just tons of feeders that attracted them. So all the hummingbirds flitting around were native to the area, but only one of them would hold still long enough for me to get a decent picture:


And during lunch, I had a little visitor. Mmm. . . tasty!


Here is a cute little (not poisonous) tree frog we saw:


As you can tell from the pictures, we really were in the jungle. Here is one of the three incredible waterfalls:


And here is a cute little guy (I can't remember what the name of the animal is, but our guide said he is in the raccoon family) who decided to say hello:


And last, but not least, we ended the day by taking a boat ride down the Sarapiqui River. We saw a lot of iguanas and howler monkeys, but none of the pictures turned out very well.


I guess I'll have to try next weekend for some good monkey pictures. I hope you enjoy these pictures, and I'll keep them coming!