A slightly embarrassing photo

Here is a photo of us talking to Tamara via skype. You, too, could have this amazing opportunity to see us make funny faces and wear scarves on our heads. It was good to talk to Tamara. Hi Tamara!

It's raining today, which is common in the rainy season, but now it's the dry season so it hasn't really rained for weeks. It reminds me that I like the dry season.

Annie went on a ridiculously long hike yesterday. And now I will write about it. We met up at this end of town and then walked through Santa Elena, Cañitas, and then past a bar that is quite literally the only building on the road in the midst of farm fields. The views across back to Monteverde were awesome and at every stop the folks I was with (and Toast too) pulled out the binocs to see what we could see. The middle of the hike was a hill that may or may not be called Pinnochio Hill in spanish because it sticks up steeply into the sky. We watched cows being herded from a distance that made them look like micecows. Toast thought she could herd them using only occasional barks and a stare, but they didn't listen very well to her. We could hear the caballeros even though they were far away, and that in and of itself was pretty fun. Toast clearly wanted to go and help with the whole situation, even though she's still rather afraid of cows and horses. On the way back we went past a hill where the kids had bags filled with something squishy (I assume grass of the long variety) and they were using them to slide down a hill. They were clearly having an awesome time and some of the high schoolers I was with reminisced a bit about how they had done that a bunch when they were younger. It was fun to go for a hike with students I don't teach because then even though I answered some geology questions for them about geology I don't really understand well enough, I got to be friendly and funny and all of my normal things too. I'm going to figure out if there's a way to get my 5/6 class out to the cliff with the nifty columnar joints, but from our viewpoint, I think it might be a scrabbling adventure. Anyway, I didn't get too sunburnt and I had a good time and Toast was tired for at least 4 hours afterwards. We were out for about 7 hours so I was hopeful for a tired dog today too, but oh well.

The guy skyping next to us is talking about how his hotel was burgled and they managed to get into the safe. He lost $10,000 and is talking very calmly about it. I can't even imagine. The only time I held that kind of money was when my father wrote me a check to help with the down payment on a house, and I kind of freaked then. That is such a huge amount of money to me to posess all at one time. But I guess we all have different lifestyles.