This weekend I went to Grenada, Nicaragua with three other fellow interns. Zanda is the one from Bahamas, Pinto is the one from near Barcelona Spain, and Jessica is from the U.S. Jessica used to do the same job as me, but now she has another job here. They all have experience going to Nicaragua and they all speak Spanish much better than me, especially Pinto. It's about a 4 or 5 hour bus ride if you go direct, but we spent a lot longer because we took a number of buses.

We took one bus up to the Costa Rican border post. We got our passports stamped and we walked about 1km across the border to the Nicaraguan border post. There were a lot of people with wads of cash hanging around trying to get us to exchange our money. Also there were people offering taxis and other services. We managed to find our way to a bus with only one guy asking for a tip for 'helping' us across the border. Nicaragua is much poorer than Costa Rica and going from Costa Rica to Nicaragua was vaguely similar to the experience of going from Canada to Costa Rica. There were less cars and more animals on the road. Some of the houses were mere shacks.

The bus continued down the Pan-American highway past Lake Nicaragua. The lake is about half the size of Lake Ontario, but has two volcanoes in the middle and is the only place in the world with freshwater sharks. We also passed a lot of banana plantations, which I hadn't seen in Costa Rica yet. The bus wasn't going to Grenada, but Pinto managed to make friends with a guy who was, so we hopped off the bus near Grenada and caught an old school bus which dropped us off in Grenada.

None of us had a map, so we didn't know where we were, but Pinto kept asking people and, despite a number of conflicting directions, we managed to find our hostel. It was full so we got an address of another hostel and had a nice tour of the city by the time we finally got our room. It was the cleanest hostel I ever stayed in, with a large bathroom and it only cost $5 per person. We toured a little of the city and had really good pizza at the Pizzeria across the street.

Grenada is on Lake Nicaragua so we walked down to the lake in the morning. We also went to the Grenada market which was full of action and made the markets in Busan, Korea seem clean. Grenada is a very beautiful city with many well-maintained and painted colonial-era buildings. There were quite a few tourists from around the world and many of the stores and restaurants catered to the tourists. We sat in the Central Park waiting for our return bus and a bunch of university students came up to us to practise their English.

The return trip was much faster because we bought a direct trip back to Costa Rica, and the bus driver dropped us off right here in Bagaces.

This week the owner of the company had two agricultural university students at his farm for just the week. He has cement handprints by his pool of every intern who has ever worked here, so he invited the two agricultural students, me, Zanda and Pinto to make our handprints. It was interesting seeing all of the different names. There were a lot of Canadians because the Canadian government used to run an internship program through here.

Work still keeps my attention for most of the week and I am still enjoying it. My family got another dog, this one a tiny puppy. Also, every morning there is random cow or two in the yard because the yard is one of the last places in the area where the grass is still green. With the howler monkeys, the mooing cows, the crowing roosters and the barking dogs, I definitely don't need an alarm clock anymore.

Last weekend I decided to see some of the Costa Rican nature so I went to Santa Rosa National Park which is near the border to Nicaragua. Santa Rosa is on the Pacific Coast and preserves some of the last of the dry tropical forest in the Americas. This time of the year the park is at the driest.

The bus dropped me and a very friendly American at the entrance to the park. The main park headquarters and camping grounds is about 7km away, so me and the American had a lot of time to walk and talk. Apparently he came to Costa Rica about 6 weeks ago to help find a good house for his dad to buy and he's been living it up since. Apparently, the best place to party is the town of Jaco. The whole town parties all night long and nobody gets up before noon and the women and drugs are plentiful. He had been trying to save some money so he had been living in the park for the past week and he was more than happy to tell me how great it was and how it's so isolated that he was living like a wild bush man. All in all, it was a very entertaining walk with this 43 year old guy from Virginia.

After reaching park headquarters the American introduced me to his friend, the park ranger, who spoke English quite well. He seemed very proud of his park and mentioned that the President of Costa Rica would visit the park on Monday to commemorate an anniversary of a battle. Also, on Sunday, all the park wardens from across the country would be arriving to get together before meeting the President. At the main camp I saw a couple of different kinds of iguanas and other reptiles hanging around

I then continued my walk on an extremely rugged road 13 km down to the Naranjo Beach. It was mostly downhill and I had my first monkey sighting in Costa Rica. There was a small group of white faced capuchin monkeys who were hanging out in a tree near the trail. I also saw quite a few different kinds of birds, including a couple of parrots. It was getting close to sunset when I reached the beach campground. The beach and Witch's Rock is a world famous surfing mecca and had consistant large curls when I was there. There were only about two or three surfing groups camping there because it is so isolated. The only way to get there is by hiring a boat, or an extremely rugged 4x4. The beach was very beautiful and the water was surprisingly cold. I watched the sunset on the Pacific and camped out. In the night, there were a bunch of raccoons hanging around and they kept peeking into my tent to look at my food.

The next morning I woke up to blisters on my feet because of my new shoes. I hung out on the beach for a while and explored the nearby forest and lagoon where I was told there were crocodiles, but I only found crabs and deer. The 13km walk back to the main camp was extremely painful. Not only did I have blisters, but it was mostly uphill, it was in the scorching hot sun, and I ran out of water. I was thankful when I reached the main camp and was able to sit in the shade and drink the water. During the walk there and the walk back, I drank 6 liters of water. I have never sweated so much. After resting for a couple of hours I headed the last 7 km back to the highway, but I luckily I caught a ride about halfway.

The park was very beautiful despite being almost a desert because it is so dry and I plan to go back to check out some of the other trails, and also to see how it changes in the wet season. Hopefully by then I will have broken in these new shoes.

I have been here about a week and a half, and I'm getting used to the heat and having to wake up at 6:30 in the morning. However, my skin is still recovering from the excessive sun here. It still hasn't rained since I got here, and I've been told it probably won't rain until the end of the dry season in late April. However there is plenty of wind, and since it is a dry heat, it is bearable.

Last Saturday I went to a nearby beach called Playa Hermosa with the girl from the Bahamas who works here. This beach is one of the few calm beaches on the Pacific coast. Most of the other beaches have larger waves that are good for surfing. The beach was very scenic, but everything was so dry and brown. We met three girls there from Chicago who are doing a university language exchange program with a university in the capital, San Jose. We hung out on the beach for a while, where I managed to get a bad sunburn despite using lots of sunscreen, and we ate dinner together. In the evening I checked out the local disco in Bagaces.

On Sunday, my Costa Rican family had a barbeque and we played soccer and played with their dog. It's a cross between a Doberman and a Rottweiler, but it is still only 2 months old, so it's relatively harmless. I can communicate a little better with my family now, we even had a very slow and labored conversation about Costa Rica politics.

On Thursday night, the American intern that works here set up a birthday/St. Patrick's party for his girlfriend. I got to meet most of the "gringos" that live in the town. There's the four interns from where I work, three former programming interns that still live here, and a group of about 10 girls and 1 guy who follow monkeys around all day in a nearby nature preserve. They are here for about a year doing this. There were also a couple of native Costa Ricans I met as well.

When I get a chance, I'll try to find an internet cafe to post some more pictures on my photo site but I might not be able to this weekend

I arrived on Monday on a plane from Buffalo through Charlotte. I was met at the airport by one of my fellow employees, Tatiana. We took a bus 3 hours to the town of Bagaces where I work. The bus ride was interesting to say the least, especially when the driver would pass cars on the two lane road with oncoming traffic. Usually other cars would slow down to avoid the bus, but sometimes the bus had to swerve back into the correct lane.

I spent the first two nights in the owner of the company's house. He and his wife have a fancy ranch house with a pool and a great view. Its the middle of the dry season so every day is hot with barely a cloud in the sky. There are a lot of cattle in the pastures and iguanas hang around like squirrels.

I started work right away on Tuesday. There are about 30 workers and there are 4 other interns. They are from the Bahamas, Spain, Russia and the US. I am working on making a program to run a vision test for people. This company makes the vision equipment you use when they check your eyes at the driver's licence issuers. Most employees speak at least a little bit of English and I haven't been bored at work yet.

The family has three sons ages 12,13, and 15, but the father died recently of cancer and the family moved here from the capital. The family is very friendly and speaks very little english. They live right next to the factory where I work but it's about a fifteen minute walk to the town so it's somewhat isolated. I have a large room and my own bathroom, at least temporarily. The mother cooks my meals and the food is excellent. Soccer is extremely popular here and I played with my family as well as watched some on the TV. The weather is so dry that last night a tree caught on fire by the river next to the house and I was woken at 5 in the morning by a fire engine driving up the driveway. Luckily there was no wind and the fire didn't spread. I was also woken up occasionally by an annoying howler monkey but the rest of the time I could sleep.

It is a nice paradise here, so nice in fact that the two previous intern programmers that worked here now live here permanently, having gotten full time jobs in internet related work. I can't upload any pictures to my photo site from work, so I might have to find a good internet cafe to do it later.