Merry Christmas and a Happy New year to all! We are enjoying our 3 week Christmas break here in Costa Rica. We arrived on Dec. 18 by plane and headed directly to the beach. We took the bus from San Jose to Manuel Antonio where we spent the first 5 days of our trip. We spent our time relaxing on the beach and exploring the national park of Manuel Antonio. The water was beautiful and perfect for swimming. We were sitting there on the beach with the sun shinning bright trying to imagine what winter must be like back home. It is so amazing that weather can be so opposite in different parts of the world.
From Manuel Antonio we came back to San Jose area and came to visit my (cody) host family that I stayed with when I was here in Costa Rica 3 years ago. It is fun to see the family and how the girls have grown. They now have 2 more kids than they did when I was here the first time. We are having a lot of fun playing and spending time with them. We did some shopping or rather window shopping before Christmas. Seeing as where we live in Copan doesn´t even have a grocery store, we are just excited to walk around in a bigger city and are entertained by the local supermarket. For Christmas eve we went next door where all of Yorlene´s family was gathered and ate lots of good food and talked with her family. Christmas morning we woke up early and watched the little girls open presents. It was fun to spend time with this family seeing as it is as close as we can get to having traditional Christmas. We were sad not to be with our families but are happy to be having this experience.
The day after Christmas we set off again to the beach, this time to Montezuma. This entails a bus ride for 2 1/2 hours, a 1 1/2 hour ferry ride and another 2 hour bus ride. But the trip is beautiful and we enjoyed the travel. We stayed in a hotel that was great and our room was really like a little bungalow by itself. The window opened up to an ocean view and we watched the monkeys climb right outside our room on the little patio. In fact every morning around 7 the monkeys played around in the tree above our room and dropped leaves and twigs on the roof. It sounded like hail and was a bit frightening until we figured out what it was. We spent our time there doing many fun things. We went to Cabo Blanco national park and hiked around, we swam in the ocean, we walked along the beaches, we went to the waterfalls there, and went on a snorkeling trip. The snorkeling trip was very fun, we took a boat out to an island called Tortuga island and went snorkeling in the morning. We then had a great lunch that they prepared for us and then went snorkeling again in the afternoon. Overall our trip to Montezuma was very fun. The only difficult part was that we didn´t bring enough cash and there is no ATM in Montezuma. We took the bus to a nearby town and the machine wouldn´t give us money. So we spent a lot of our trip being creative and were sure glad on Tuesday after two trips to the bank in a nearby city and many hours of waiting when we finally got enough cash out to be able to pay for the bus back to San Jose.
We are now back at my host family´s house for the next few days before we head back to Honduras on Jan 5th. We had a quiet new years eve and watched some movies, trying to stay up until midnight. We couldn´t even find a countdown on the TV so around midnight we went outside to see the fireworks that everyone was setting off. Now here we are in 2009!
We will be sure to add pictures when we get back to Honduras.
Happy New Year!
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