First Holiday Away

Avalon and Kike dancing to the band on night off.

On my night off I went to listen to the local band play with Jim, Avalon, Kim, and Matt. Kike got in on Guantanamera. Isaac (blue shirt) was amazing with the vocals, harmonica, and guitar, that is Carlos (Kike's son) on bongos, and I believe Tom is the basist. P.S. This is where I eat everyday.

After almost 6 years of moving around the US, this Thanksgiving was my first holiday away from home. That means no mother's cooking, no holiday movies with the fam and Cici, and a meal different than what I would typically eat. We made dinner here with chicken instead of turkey (which I actually liked better) and I made my mom's famous stuffing and apple pie to make it a little more like home. The Costa Ricans for the most part didn't want to eat with us, we had 4 people cancel out, but there were two students here from Panama that joined. All and all, it was a pretty good holiday, and the food was delicious. I woke up the next day and had pie for breakfast (typical) but this time it was not while heading out the door for some Black Friday shopping...perhaps next year. We had 5 pies for 10 people, so I thought I should help with the leftovers. I even had enough messed up gravy (that I was not incharge of) to make a dumpling and sausage soup. I had like a gallon and a half of the wonderful soup with all the thanksgiving leftovers poured in. I had to give a bunch to the boys at Rancho Privado (or Bro-vado as they call it) just to get rid of some, and they were hungry and excited that I had cooked. I also brought over some of the stuffing I made and some apple pie, which they said was the best they'd ever had . Bee on morning glory

Coati in a tree.

There are entire fields of morning glories (this doesn't do it justice).

Other than that, not much has happened this past week. We had another beach clean up, but this time it was a BIG DEAL. It started when I got back from morning walk and appeared to go all day (though we only stayed until we were starving for breakfast at 11am). There was music, a band, and food for sale. The tamales were AMAZING!!! We couldn't stay all day because we had work to do, but everyone had a lot of fun. Though I was late for beach cleaning due to an extra long morning walk with Sanitago (child of one of the Leatherback Trust workers who was more interested in chasing dogs, playing in the water, and practicing baton twirling) I did manage to get a couple of pictures from the walk back. There were so many cool animals out and flowers blooming, unfortunately without a zoom, they were difficult to capture.