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Good Evening Everyone!
As the day winds down, I wanted to squeeze in one more blog today to update everyone about our recent excursion to Santa Teresa. Santa Teresa is a small town and beach in the Puntarenas province of Costa Rica on the western coast. We took a bus Friday afternoon with 8 girls, 2 guys, and no directors from Beyond. That bus took us to a ferry that traveled across an inlet to another bus that took us to our hostel. Total about 6-7 hours of travel. We checked into the hostel and met some of the people that were already staying there. The hostel is setup as coed dormitories with bunk beds and a bathroom that housed between 4 & 6 people. Being hungry college students after we checked in, we searched for somewhere to grab a bite to eat. There are no fast food places to just run up to like on campus. We had a walk to a supermarket to buy some groceries to cook the following day, and then back tracked to a Costa Rican pizzeria that remained to be the only place open at......9:30pm. Everyone is still always astonished at the shift in time of daily activities.
On Saturday, we woke up about 830 to cook breakfast. We had eggs, coffee, and toast that we prepared ourselves. After breakfast, we got ready for the day and went to the pool at the hostel which was very nice. A dragon/lizard/iguana came up and wanted to "play" with us like the endless of crabs were doing. When some of group got back from a morning workout, Mike Wade and I rented a surfboard for $10 and everyone headed to the beach. It was low tide and we were more or less body boarding with this surfboard in some of the white wash. However, we enjoyed the beach and the waves. Very scenic. For lunch, we went to a local soda that was recommended to us by some ticos. The food was exceptional. We went back to the hostel and hung out some more until we wanted to try the beach again. We went back for high tide, which we thought would be more eventful. After several times being picked up by the 15-20' waves that were breaking very close to the shore....and being told by several Europeans that this was really "pros only" types of waves....we conceded defeat and took ourselves back to the hostel to cook dinner.
We had bought items for a pasta dinner the night before, so Savannah, Mike and I prepared our own dinner as everyone was more or less on their own. However, everyone from the hostel was sharing the kitchen. There were people from England, Canada, Germany, France, Brazil, and other places which I thought to be exceptionally cool. Most everyone spoke English, but there were many times that Spanish was the most consistenly spoken language that everyone knew amongst us. It was a pretty cool feeling. Later after dinner, we went to a local bar to dance. This bar was filled with locals and we got many glaring stares as we entered. But slowly we integrated ourselves into the environment. It helped immensely that a few of us had taken dance lessons at the University and could dance to the salsa, merengue, and cumbia. Before you know it, we were all mixed up dancing with the locals. That was a lot of fun. We eventually turned in and headed to bed.
In the morning, we repeated the same process for breakfast and hung out at the pool some more. Then at 2pm, we caught a bus for the ride back which we were sure I got a good seat for. The direct buses here often times do not allow for much leg room for us tall guys. The ferry ride seemed longer than before but not too bad. But once we got off the ferry, we stood in the quarter-sized rain storm for 30 minutes before boarding the bus again. Thankfully, I think everyone managed to keep all of their belongings dry. In all, it was a great trip and I really enjoyed it with my fellow Beyond teammates.
-MM, Pura Vida
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