My day was not nearly as interesting as Saturday, but I will comment that it is semana santa this week. Think of the entire week as preparing for Easter. I spent the afternoon exercising at the empty campus of the University of Northern Colorado, and had homemade tortillas and soup for dinner. An OTS Tropical Diseases student returned from his vacation and will travel to Palo Verde this week. Best of luck to him!

Saturday was a classic day of going into the city. Andriana, Kali, Jamila, Erin, Bridgett and I visited the Jade Museum in San Jose, CR. It is a museum of pre-Colombian history, between 500 and 20000 years roughly. The name is in fact important; most of artifacts on display were made of jade, which is actually a common name for two minerals of different structures. The societies of Central America traded foods, knowledge, and raw jade for their artisans to craft.

The process of creating jade jewelry involves sanding the raw stone by a river with tools similar to a bow-fire starter, if anyone knows what that is. The stone must have water constantly dripped on it to aid in the friction process. Using a stylus with a jade tip, the artisan is able to carve patterns into the stone for animal designs or religious symbols.

Simple necklaces of small jade pieces or a single large stone represent status as a chieftain or shaman. A complete set of jade jewelry would be gauge earrings, a nose ring approximately one inch in diameter, and a necklace. Jade stone was also used as healing rocks and tools to channel spirits of the gods during shaman rituals.

Additional crafts were ceramic pots and cups, stone chairs/corn grinders, and stone jewelry. Objects usually were made to resemble animals of the forest as each animal had a different quality. Mammals, reptiles, and arthropods all were crafted into symbols for the tribe. Fertility is associated with many animals, such as bats and crocodiles. Many birds were spirit animals for traveling to the next world, and shamans were believed to be able to transform into them.

Ocarinas that originate from this part of the world were crafted to imitate a particular bird call, and music in general accompanied hunting rituals, religious rituals, marriages and war. The natives crafted flutes and drums as well and drums were often used at night to intimidate enemies during battle.

Fertility and sexuality are well explored by pre-Colombian artisans. A particular gesture showed up in different places: it was of a woman holding her upper abdomen or her breasts up slightly. This is believed to be a gesture of dominance for several cultures in the region. One artifact was a flute shaped to resemble male genitalia, it was very accurate. Small gold and stone ornaments of couples hugging or in more intimate positions have been found, and could have been given as wedding presents for a successful marriage.

Finally, many sculptures of warriors were discovered. A prestigious warrior would be carrying many slain foes’ heads in his piece. Tattoo rollers could press ink or dyes to identify a tribe, or be heated to tattoo/scar a permanent tattoo.

I am not aware of a modern version of a chieftain with a jade symbol of power. Do we revere the president’s tailor? The crafts were numerous and diverse, but I think I prefer Southwest American art, bias maybe? What are the jade symbols of power in this era? Crosses are made of plastic, and doctors do not use healing rocks because they belief these are “dark age” ideas. But archaeological evidence revealed that diseases that the natives here faced were similar to Zika, Malaria and other diseases we face today. I kept asking my classmates where our valued artisans of today are, do you know?

Final: Dinner was great. I had a vegetarian whole grain rice dish and miso soup. My drink was a local craft bear called the “Alley Cat” it was like an IPA, very smooth.

We had our first beach vacation. Imagine, the whitest beach you have ever seen, with calm, warm water, and the most intense sun ever. For a human with skin like mine, I did not get a Coco Chanel grade tan, more like I turned into a cherry tomato that almost burst.

The beach in Manuel Antonio National Park was covered in hermit crabs! It was very cute. The park was filled with iguanas, sloths, raccoons, and monkeys. It was the most humid place ever! And it was exhausting, but contained the beauty that I search for, something out of the way from the rush of the casual tourist and the party goer.

We stayed at a hostel with an incredible view of the sunset. The beds were fine, similar to what we have already experienced. The hostel was next to a very tourist-oriented restaurant and bar, and the whole space was within a casual walk of some more cozy shops and markets. The hostel was calm at most hours of the day. I appreciated the ability to curl up in a hammock in the afternoon.

I ordered rum straight with lime slices and the bartender said “drink it fast, it burns!” and I said, “No, I like the taste and the burn and the smell”. She said I reminded her of her grandfather, who drank just like I did that night. I belong to the drinkers of the 1930s.

Kali called me an “old soul”. Has anybody else ever heard that one before?

 Centipedes are of the class chilopodia. The are arthropods and common throughout the world. All Centipedes have front legs that have evolved to inject venom into their prey, which ranges from small insects and spiders to small mammals such as bats and rodents. Our professor is a sensible person on most dangerous creatures, yet he does not mess around with these things. He kills them on the spot.

I found this in my toilet one day, and somehow Christian had the idea to fish it out and play with it. This thing came back to life in the evening and died over the next night. We have an interesting theme of arthopods coming back to life here.

Our fireside chat with Don Carlos revealed many issues with oak-forest conservation. Firstly, it is not valued for what it is, rather for what it provides. Illegal hunting and cattle pasture make it a tough place to keep together. The research station of Don Carlos has been struggling to maintain itself for some time. There are simply less researchers and hikers at his site. In fact, he prefers not to have many Costa Ricans at his site because of an environmentally unfriendly attitude present in the Costa Rican culture.

My question that came up at a later discussion what whether we needed trails into the forest at all. Do conservationalists need to be allowed to see the forest they are spending money to protect? I argued that people should not feel they are entitled to accessing any ecosystem. They should feel obligated to protect any endangered forest, even though they may never see it for themselves.

Take the National Forests of the U.S. I own them. I pay for them, yet I may never see the national forests in North Carolina in my lifetime but I expect tax payer money is invest in maintenance and balancing “no man’s lands” with regions that permit cattle grazing or logging. If the American people were truly given free access to public lands, the lands, in my opinion, would all be harvested by the Ammon Bundys for cattle, mining, and logging.

I would much prefer that a self-sustaining land be left to itself without human interaction, to have watersheds as it needs or annual forest fires as it needs.

Don Carlos is at a perfect elevation(2600meters) to raise a farm of Rainbow Trout. The water is cool enough to encourage good growth and the weather is consistent. Don Carlos used to sell trout to sport fishing industries throughout Costa Rica but now limits his selling straight to the market. On our last day we were given a special treat: we prepared trout from harvest up to the point where it would get cooked.

We netted several trout and I learned how to kill it. Even after the act, the trout was still slippery and would wriggle out of my hands! A pregnant cat lived on the farm and enjoyed licking the blood off of my fingers. The next task was to gut and clean the fish. We learned how to cut it up and remove the guts and blood veins. The leftovers were again given to el gato, who could use the extra protein for her litter. Don Carlos was insistent that the heart was edible and proved it by dropping one into his mouth. Mind you, these things are still undergoing the final automatic smooth muscle contractions.

I have eaten a still beating heart…it tasted like unsalted sushi…makes sense I suppose….

Another thing Don Carlos found difficult for Americans was to eat fish heads. So we proved to him we could still do it. The eyes are in fact quite nutritious, but the head is quite bony and difficult to gnaw on. So that is how I got to go through a traditional fish meal.

I finished reading “And the Mountains echoed”, a book that I first read in December at my University Library. Someone here enjoyed it enough to add to the miscellaneous section of a bookshelf otherwise reserved for Taxonomy and research history.

Firstly, it was a novel about broken people. Everyone in the story was stolen from, lied to, or limited in some way that severely damaged their remaining relationships or perceptions of their lives.

There was a major theme of parent/child relationships, some of which would be reconciled decades later at the very end or never at all, like a last laugh or festering wound. Many events occurred relating to ideas such as unconditional love or shame of ugliness or beauty. Is a child meant to be raised in the image of a parent or independent? Is the purpose of a child to repay their parent when he or she has aged and requires assisted living, or can they be left to their own life? There is no answer a parent can give to what is best for your child, you can only encourage healthy eating, a responsibility against ignorance, and to assess yourself honestly.

Some of these relationships ended as well as they could. Most of them in fact, went as best as they could. I could say an important theme to conclude the story was “It is never too late to find yourself”.

It was an intense book that has been on my mind all this time, and the fact that an english version was here at a small research station 40 kilometers from the nearest town is something I would not attribute to coincidence. I was meant to finish this book!