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Today’s the first day without a lot of sun. Yesterday morning we where studding in the garden of the house in the sun disturbed by fighting humming birds but no sign of ‘bad weather’. In the afternoon we went for a walk through the neighborhood when the wind started to freshen up. We stopped by the mall and as we came out the clouds where heading towards San Jose. In the evening we watched the final of the UNCAF Cup, UNCAF is the central american football association, where Costa Rica played against Panama, and the weather turned worse. The game was like the weather, not how I had expected it. On Friday the Ticos played against El Salvador and after 15 minutes Costa Rica was leading by 2 goals. But yesterday they played really bad. It took them forever to control the ball and in the end they always waited until five Panamanians where around to make it impossible to score. So by the end of the first half Panama was leading 1 to 0. The second half was not very entertaining but a few minute before the game ended the Ticos managed to score. Since they don’t have overtime, they had to shoot penalty. The Costa Rican Goalie kept two out of three tries, it reminded me kind of the World Cup last summer…
So Costa Rica is UNCAF Champion now and everyone is happy except the weather.
After the rain yesterday evening it never cleared up. We have some sun but there are still gray clouds hanging over the city and it’s not very hot anymore. I hope it will be hot again tomorrow when I’m going to tell about our trip we did last saturday.

This week flew by like nothing. After getting used to Costa Rica the second week went much faster then the first one. Our class is shrinking week by week. The woman from the UK had here last day already last friday and our youngster from the US has only class from monday to thursday. So on friday we where normally only four. One girl left today early because she went to the Arenal region for the weekend. So the second part of today’s morning we where only three people in our class. During this two hours we only talked and I felt quite comfortable. Today was also the last day of Andrea and Russ, the nice US couple we used to go to lunch with. Russ was in my class as well so that means on monday our class will be down to four.
Tomorrow my dad and I will take another tour again. We will visit the the volcano Irazu and the old capital of Costa Rica Cartago. At Cartago it has a basilica where the believers walk on there knees from the door to the statue of the virgin maria, at least that´s what my teacher Halina told me.
On sunday we will relax a little bit and I´ll catch up on all the new words I learned so I will be able to use them in the future.

After more then one and a half week in Costa Rica my dad and I have got used to the life here. We don’t have problems with sleeping anymore, we enjoy the food and especially we enjoy the weather. Yesterday was the second hottest day since ten years and I guess today is about the same. Since Tuesday I can also feel how it is getting warmer in the classroom. In the houses it’s not very hot even tough the are very open and they don’t have air condition. I really like not having air condition so I don’t get sick. In the afternoon normally clouds are coming in, sometimes really big ones but it never rained yet. At night it gets colder so it’s no problem to sleep. The only thing that keeps me from sleeping are the cars passing by our house. We live on more or less a back road. At home on such a road it would only be allowed to go 30 km/h but here I guess the go like 70 km/h. At least it sounds like it. The windows at the houses are only there so it doesn’t rain into the house, what I don’t mind since it’s never really cold, but when the cars go by I sometimes think they go through my room. Probably after a while I get used to that too. The nice part about it is that in the morning it sounds as the birds are singing in my room as well. It is incredible how many birds sing in the morning and how different they sing. I expected that it would sound like this in the jungle but not in the suburbs of San José.
Yesterday after school we went to fulfill our weekly homework. First we went to the bookstore for my dads homework. He bought ‘The Little Prince’ as a special spanish school book version. After that we went to the ‘mercado central’ again for my homework and there we bought two belts. Even though we eat healthy and I might loose some weight over the weeks my pants don’t fall of without a belt yet.
Now we head of to the supermarket to buy some chocolate because today it’s our tico dads birthday and we want to bring him a little gift.
Even though I lacked a subject for today’s blog it ended up not too short.

Today I wished I would have been in the 7 o’clock S12 to Zurich instead of in our 7.30 bus to school.
In the morning normally every five minutes a bus passes by our buss stop but today we had to wait over 10 minutes at the bus stop.
Usually when it takes longer for a bus to arrive, more people gather at the bus stop. Finally or bus arrived and was already quite full. Today’s bus was so full he had to pass two stops without picking up people who where waiting.
I don’t mind standing in the bus but today I nearly couldn’t hold on to the rail. I really recommend holding on to the rail because when it hasn’t much traffic the busses like to go fast. On our way to school the street has two traffic circles. Normally in the morning the police manages the traffic in the traffic circles so the buses have clear lanes in there and then they accelerate. At least the close the doors before they enter the circles so none falls out.
All in all the buses are very easy to get places. They are really cheep as well. One route costs always the same price despite of how many stops you have to travel. So if you have to take a bus on a main road, for only few stops, it really pays off to wait for a cheaper route then for he one that goes far. Our bus costs 145 colones so that’s about 0.35 Francs for a distance from Winterthur Main station to the Train station Grueze.
Now we will take a bus to the center, hopefully a cheep one, because I have to go to the mercado central and my dad has to go to a bookstore for our weekly homework.

After our city tour on saturday we had to get up early on sunday morning for our gigantic excursion through the north east of Costa Rica. At six the guide picked us up in front of a hotel near the school. After 45 minutes of picking people up allover the city we headed out to a coffee farm. There we had some tico breakfast called Gallo Pinto. Gallo Pinto is rice with beans. Our guide explained us how they process the coffee. After the coffee farm we headed to the volcano Poas. It’s very important to be at the volcanoes early in the morning because the clouds coming in quickly and if you are late you are not able to see the crater anymore. We had a great view of the crater with the turquoise lake inside it. At the border of the crater there where yellow smoke ant it smelled a little like rotten eggs. After the Poas we drove to the La Paz waterfall gardens. It’s a place at the la paz river with four big waterfalls. The smallest is 25 Meters. At this place they have also a Butterfly house which is amazing. The Butterflies are very used to the crowed and they land on your head or on our clothes. At the same place they also have humming birds. These humming birds are free but the park feeds them so it has a lot of them. It’s very hard to take a picture of a humming bird since they are very quick. After the humming birds we eat lunch before we headed for the 40 minutes walk through the jungle along the river to see two of the four waterfalls. The forest is really green and you can hear birds. It is really beautiful. The last place we went to see was the Sarapiqui River. There we took a little boat ride to see some animals. We where very lucky because we got to see a caiman, two iguanas, a tortoise, apes, bats and a lot of birds. The trip back to the city brought us through the Braulio Carrillo National Park. 90% of this park is untouched Jungle and it was very impressive to see all these green mountains and the clouds hanging in the valleys. At the end we even got the see the something that exists in Costa Rica only once. We drove through a tunnel
The whole trip was very impressive and made me curious to see more jungle and more animals.

La Paz River