Bucharest Update

I'll have a few new posts on my trip to the Danube Delta up soon, but in the meantime, I thought I'd give everyone a quick update on what's going on right now. I've been in Bucharest for almost two weeks now. I've been staying with my friend Jenny, who I met in the language class in Brasov last year, and her husband Fabien. Jenny and Fab have been the best of hosts for the past two weeks. They've been so welcoming--they even let me join them for a holiday weekend at the Delta!

Staying with Jenny and Fab has made my transition to Bucharest life very easy this time around. Last week I found an apartment in a cool part of town with roommates who seem really fun. I also started my work in the archives and found a bike to ride around the city. Now that I'm all settled in, I'll be moving to my new place on Wednesday. I'm looking forward to exploring my new neighborhood and riding my bike to the archives. The research has been a bit slow thus far, but I have a bunch of new leads to follow up on this week, so I hope that it will improve very soon.

Those of you who have read this blog in the past will know that I occasionally write about being lonely, or homesick, and even downright miserable once. While I can't say that this trip has been entirely without little pangs of homesickness or lonely moments, I can tell you that it's been a whole lot better than past years. I've been really happy here over the past few weeks, and while I certainly miss my friends and family back home, I'm having a great time. I've been able to get in touch with a lot of my friends from last summer and the year before, and I've already made a few new friends. Staying with Jenny and Fab has helped a lot as well. Dinners with the two of them and going jogging and to yoga with Jenny have made me feel very at home here. And finally, the fact that Mike is also spending the summer abroad helps more than I had expected. It's wonderful to talk to someone who really understands the ups and downs of a long trip like this because he's going through the same thing.

I'm looking forward to moving into my new place, getting to know my roommates, and making more progress with my research. Oh, and if things weren't going well enough already, Mike is coming to visit a week from Wednesday! More posts (with pictures next time) on life in Bucharest and my travels in Romania to come soon!

Costa Rica Part III: Manuel Antonio National Park

After our adventures in Orosi, Mike and I headed back to San Jose to meet up with Rob and his girlfriend, Amy, and Mike's parents, Jerry and Carey. The following day we would all head to Manuel Antonio National Park on the Pacific Coast. Jerry and Carey were unfailingly gracious and generous hosts, and the trip was a great opportunity to get to know them and Rob and Amy better.

After a night in San Jose, we loaded up a rented SUV (mercifully equipped with GPS!) to drive to Manuel Antonio. As you can imagine, traveling with six people and all of our bags was a bit more complicated than the trip to Orosi and Cartago. Here's Rob helping tie some of the suitcases to the top of the car before we all piled in:



At Manuel Antonio, we stayed at a beautiful resort whose catchphrase was "Still more monkeys than people." Our room had an incredible view of the Pacific Ocean just beyond the swimming pool:



Apparently the hotel was owned by a former pilot, which explains the room made out of the inside of an airplane.



On our first day in Manuel Antonio, we went on a guided nature walk through the national park. Our guide, Franklin, was incredibly knowledgeable and passionate about the Costa Rican flora and fauna. He was an expert and finding interesting creatures in the trees and setting up his "spotters' scope"--a sort of short range telescope on a tripod--so that the rest of us could see them. He was so good at finding things, in fact, that we started to joke that the spotters' scope contained slides of various animals, so that he could point it off into the rain forest in any direction and cue up a slide of some bats or a sloth.

Franklin was the perfect guide, and he found all kinds of neat things for us to see, like these Capuchin monkeys:




A cleverly disguised "stick bird":



And several sloths (if you look carefully, you should be able to see it hanging from a tree in the center of the picture):



The following day, our accommodations lived up to their claim that we would see more monkeys than people there. We woke up to find a whole troupe of Capuchin monkeys frolicking on the pool deck below our room. They ran all over the place, climbing on the canopy over the bar and sliding down it, and scurrying up trees and jumping from one to the next. Two of them even hopped up onto the railing of our balcony where we sat watching them. They paused on the rail for a moment, regarded me and Amy, and seemed to decided that four feet was as close as they wanted to get!





After our exciting morning of monkey-watching, we took to the sea so that Rob could go scuba diving. The rest of us were slated to go snorkeling, but unfortunately the water was too rough to see much of anything, except for a large school of colorful fish than swam all around us for a few minutes. For the rest of the day, we just enjoyed relaxing in the sun on the boat. It was a lovely morning, and we made it to shore just as it started to turn a bit stormy in the afternoon. A few of the party got a bit sea-sick, but I'm not naming any names here... A few hours later, everyone felt well enough to enjoy the best key lime pie any of us had ever tasted!

On our last morning in Manuel Antonio, Rob and Amy took off to visit a village outside of San Jose for a day, and the rest of us enjoyed a zip-line canopy tour. The tour was the perfect blend of sight-seeing and adventure, as we cruised through the rain forest canopy on zip-lines and rope swings. Strapped into rock-climbing harnesses, we hiked up a hill to begin our journey. The tour consisted of a series of platforms high in the trees, which were connected by ten zip-lines, one "tarzan swing," two rappels, and one rope-bridge. Riding the zip-lines was exhilarating, and the beautiful rain forest canopy that we flew by made it even more incredible. For the last rappel, our guides thought it would be funny to surprise me with a little free-fall. They told me to put my hands behind my head, and they would control the rappel for me. As Mike and his parents will gladly tell you, I screamed like you wouldn't believe on the way down. The fall caught me a little off guard, and afterwards I was shaking (but smiling) for quite a while. Unfortunately I don't have any pictures from the tour yet, but if I get some later on, I'll be sure to post them.

The following day marked the end of the trip for Mike and me. We headed back to San Jose to fly back to Chicago, while the rest of the group prepared to continue their journey with a trip to the mountains to see a volcano and the famous cloud forest of Monteverde. The trip was an unforgettable experience, both in terms of what we got to see and do, and just as a chance to spend time with Mike's wonderful family. Thank you so much for inviting me to share in this incredible adventure!

Costa Rica Part II: Orosi

From Cartago, we took a bus to the village of Orosi. This next part of the trip was one of the highlights for me (along with monkeys and zip-lining, which will be in the next post, I promise!). It was great to get off the beaten path a bit and see some of rural and small-town Costa Rica. The trip to Orosi was my kind of traveling at its best, no strict itinerary, riding the bus around and talking to locals and other foreigners (Orosi had a surprisingly large American expatriate population for such a small village. We met three while we were there.), and just exploring and seeing what there is to see.

Orosi was a quiet little town (everything closed by about 9pm, including the local "night-life") situated along a river and between several mountains. The rich volcanic soil makes Orosi and the surrounding river valley a great place to grow all kinds of produce, including coffee, limes, and bananas. The colorful market across the street from our hotel, pictured below, sold local fruit of all sorts.




We stayed at the Hotel Reventazon, which is named after the river that runs alongside of Orosi. The proprietor of the hotel was an American expat who is building an earthship on one of the mountains near Orosi. He told us about a natural hot spring next to the river. Orosi is near Costa Rica's tallest volcano, and all of the geothermal energy from the volcano results in several natural hot springs in the area. Two of them have been turned into tourist attractions, but one is still just out in the open and is a popular spot with the Orosi locals. The hotel owner gave us directions to the springs that sounded fairly straightforward, and we set off on our adventure.

Hotel Reventazon

As per his instructions, we took a bus over a bridge and out of town. We got off the bus near the power plant and took the left fork in the road, towards the river. Then things got tricky. Our next instruction was to look for a hole in a barbed wire fence on the left side of the road, go through it and walk through a coffee plantation towards the river. We promptly found a hole in barbed wire fence and veered off on a trail towards the river.

A bridge over the Reventazon River outside of Orosi (note: if you come to this bridge, you are NOT on the right track to finding the hot springs)


We weren't entirely sure that we were on the right track, but with our list of instructions and the river as a reliable landmark, we were confident that we would find the spring. In the meantime, we found a lot of other things:

Rainbow trees

Lime groves

Coffee plants

A long caravan of leaf-cutter ants taking their bounty back to the colony


We must have walked around for at least two full hours, trying one path after another, without finding any hot springs. We quickly learned that holes in barbed wire fences were pretty thick on the ground in Orosi. We tried several of them, all of the paths either dead-ending or stopping at the river with no hot springs to be seen. Time after time, we said to one another "This looks promising. I think this is the path he told us about." After so many wrong turns, we were beginning to think that we'd have to turn back without finding the hot springs.

Luckily we ran into some people to ask for further directions. Mike got to practice his Spanish asking passers-by where the "aguas callientes" were, while I stood by and paid close attention to the hand gestures and listened for cognates. With a little help, and quite a bit more walking (with a few more wrong turns), we were successful! We finally found a warm pool alongside the river, with two Tico men lounging in it:



Relaxing in the hot water was exactly what we needed after our long walk. And finally finding the spring was even sweeter after all that we went through on our way there!


The next day, we went on a hike up a nearby mountain before heading back to San Jose to meet up with Mike's family for the next leg of the trip. On our way up the mountain, we got to see some more of the local flora, a beautiful, if a bit foggy view of the town, and a few little waterfalls.



Plantains!

If you read this blog and you like SPORTS...

You should check out my brother Alex's highly entertaining World Cup blog. Tune in now while he ranks all of the teams before the tournament gets started in a few weeks.

Oh, and SPORTS.

Costa Rica Part I: Cartago

A few months ago, I never would have guessed that I'd be writing about Costa Rica in this blog. It's a long way from Romania and Indiana, the two places where I spend most of my time lately, so given the temporal and financial constraints, I didn't expect to make it there any time soon. I owe the unexpected pleasure of exploring a bit of Costa Rica to my boyfriend's family. They very generously invited me to join them on this trip to celebrate Mike's brother Rob's graduation from Indiana University.

Because Mike and I had to leave early to head to Portugal and Romania respectively, we went to Costa Rica ahead of everyone else and had two days to explore on our own. After arriving in San Jose (the capital and largest city), we got right on a bus bound for Cartago.

When the Spanish colonized the area that is now Costa Rica, Cartago was the capital of the colonial administration. An earthquake sometime in the 18th century destroyed many of the buildings from colonial times, and when the capital moved to San Jose, Cartago diminished in importance. There are still some nice things to see in Cartago, but the main reason that we went was to catch another bus the following day to a village in the beautiful Reventazon River Valley.

During our eighteen hours or so in Cartago, we visited a Catholic basilica.



Stayed at the urban-rustic paradise "Hotel Dinastia" for all of $16.



And explored the ruins of a cathedral from the colonial period.



The ruins have been made into a beautiful park, which appeared to be a popular spot with both tourists and locals.






While I was in Cartago, I couldn't help being reminded of Romania. From what I saw, Costa Rica and Romania seem to be at similar levels of economic development. I haven't done any research to back that statement up, so take it for what it is: the casual observation of someone who doesn't know a great deal about economics. Beyond that, there were a bunch of little cultural things that reminded me of Romania.

Like many Romanians I've encountered, Costa Ricans (or Ticos, as they call themselves) tended to be friendly and welcoming...and sometimes amused by foreign tourists.


Like these Tico men who saw me taking a picture of the ruins and wanted to ham it up for a photo of their own.

And like in Romania, there were dogs everywhere!





Some things, on the other hand, were very different from Romania. For one thing, Costa Rica is in the tropics:

Summer of Adventures

It seems somehow appropriate that I begin this year's blog while stranded in Chicago after my flight to Romania was canceled yesterday. Because what is travel about if not going with the flow, taking the good with the bad. Apparently the volcano in Iceland, Mount Eyjafjallajokull, is still causing some problems for flights in and out of Europe. I'm not really sure why some flights are canceled, but others are fine, but I'm hoping to make it to Amsterdam tonight. In any case, having just returned from a week in Costa Rica, I've had plenty of the good lately. And if the bad means hanging out in Chicago for a night with my friend Christie and getting to Bucharest a day later than planned, then I'm not complaining.

I have to leave for the airport in just a few minutes, but I just wanted to get this thing started with an itinerary of my plans for the summer.

Here's the plan as it stands now:

May 9-16 Costa Rica
May 17-18 Chicago
May 19-22 Bucharest
May 22-24 Danube Delta, Romania
May 25-July 8 Bucharest (hopefully including weekends away for climbing, hiking, etc.)
July 9-19 Lisbon, Portugal (with tentative trips to Morocco and Spain over the weekends)

I had an incredible time in Costa Rica with my boyfriend, Michael, and his lovely family. I'll post stories and pictures from the trip soon, but for now here's a preview.



Mike and I exploring the beautiful Costa Rican countryside...


...before heading to the Pacific Coast to relax and check out the rain forest.

More pictures and stories to come (including monkeys)!