Semana Santa, Aventura Style.

Beth left us! And so did Daniel. Both of them went back to the U.S, leaving Katie and I feeling a bit at a loss. We had a nice going away dinner for Beth at an Italian restaurant down the street from school, where Katie pretended it was her birthday so she could get a free piece of Tiramisu. Then Beth, Katie, Daniel, Adam and I went to the bar on the College Street that Katie and I had begun our journey in, and sent her off with a bang (AKA a very large “hulk” green beer). The next day Katie took Dee to the airport and said goodbye to him as well. But we couldn’t feel sad for very long, because only a couple of days later it was Semana Santa, and time for our adventure with Tio Pedro!

“Semana Santa” is Costa Rican for the weekend before Easter; Thursday through Saturday, to be exact. Semana Santa is an extremely busy weekend here because everyone has off from work and most everyone tries, if they can, to go away somewhere for the weekend. Katie and I decided we would celebrate Semana Santa by going to Monteverde with Tio Pedro! Monteverde is a little west of San Jose and high up in a group of visually breathtaking mountains. Monteverde is known for its adventure travel activities, most notably the wide array of canopy tours it has to offer. The original canopy tour (ziplining from platform to platform through the jungle) was invented in Monteverde, but since that time about six more have sprung up in the Monteverde, and hundreds more all over Costa Rica. A bunch of different people told me that the Selvatura Canopy Tour in Monteverde is hands-down the best one, so I booked it for the three of us. I was also told by Tio Pedro that he would be happy to pay for our lodging, so I booked us a sweet, eco-friendly, slightly fancy lodge as well.

So here’s the thing about Semana Santa. From Thursday through Saturday, it’s illegal throughout the country to buy and sell alcohol. This is the only time that buying alcohol isn’t possible in Costa Rica. I know this because I learned it the hard way: One Saturday, Katie and I were planning a lazy outdoor lounging session for the following day, when it suddenly struck me that perhaps it may not be possible to buy beer in Costa Rica on Sundays, as its even illegal to buy beer in New York on Sundays, and this is a country with a high percentage of Catholics. So I decided to ask my host dad Giovanni about it. However, I made a grave error. When I said in spanish, “Are we allowed to buy beer on Sundays here?” instead of using the proper word for Sundays (domingos), I accidentally said the word for breakfasts (desayunos). So Giovanni thought I was asking him if Katie and I were allowed to buy and drink cerveza for breakfast. This, of course, was quite embarrassing. I quickly cleared up the error, and then later told Maybell about it. She thought this was quite entertaining. Anyways, Giovanni eventually informed me that of course you can buy beer on Sundays here. “Cuando quieras! Pura vida!” he said to me. But not during Semana Santa. On that Thursday, the counters and fridges with alcohol are covered in sheets, and there is no getting around the law. The ironic thing is that because of this law, people stock up so heavily on the Wednesday before that they go overboard with their weekend stash, knowing they can’t buy any, and everyone ends up drinking much more during Semana Santa than they regularly do. Of course, on the Wednesday before leaving for Monteverde, Katie and I forgot to purchase alcohol for our trip, and this slightly distressed us. Tio Pedro, who does not drink alcohol, informed us that perhaps it was a bad sign that we had taken to drinking a cocktail or a beer almost every night. This we had not previously considered.

We enjoyed the three-hour road trip together, listening to Katie’s jams. We really went for the 90’s tunes that day in the car, singing along to all of the songs that brought us back to our middle school days. At one point, after listening to what may have been our fourth Nsync song and then discussing how endlessly wonderful Justin Timberlake is, Katie pondered: “It must have been pretty immasculating to be the other members of Nsync.” I agreed. Tio Pedro laughed at us. The last hour of the trip was truly amazing, as our trusty jeep climbed higher and higher and we looked out over the mountains, at the slowly setting sun. Tio Pedro pulled over a number of times so we could get out and take some scenic pictures. It’s started to really annoy me that none of the pictures that I take here will ever, ever do the real life images justice. They’re simply impossible to capture.

When we arrived at our hotel, we made a pleasantly surprising discovery! Sitting down to dinner together, we were informed that wine is permitted to be consumed during Semana Santa, but no liquor or beer. I tried to ask our waiter what the logic was behind this, but he had no idea. I assume there’s something religious going on there. Either way, Katie and I delightedly sipped white wine with our meal. We went to bed pretty soon after dinner that night because we had to wake up super early to do our canopy tour the next morning. Tio Pedro seemed quite happy to have his own Nsync-free room for the night. Katie and I fell asleep listening to jams and chatting up.

So the next morning we awoke bright and early and got a shuttle to the Canopy Tour headquarters place where they fitted us with awesome neon helmets and harnesses. Then we walked for a while through the woods to the first platform, where a couple of guys demonstrated how to properly sit in our harness and hold onto the cable, etc… A group of older Dutch people on some sort of nature tour were in our group, and they simply would not stop talking throughout the safety demonstration, until I actually felt the need to shush them. I don’t like shushing old people, but sometimes it just has to be done. When we’d learned all there was to learn, we climbed up the staircase that led to the first platform, and then we were off! There were EIGHTEEN different platforms, with eighteen different zip lines through the cloudy forest, each different and exciting in its own way. Some were higher up than others, some were faster, some went on for long, long distances. The final zip line was incredible. Katie and I had to be strapped together, and it went on for about a mile long, whipping REALLY fast over the top of the rainforest. It was beautiful.

After all of the zip lines were done, the final part of the canopy tour was a “Tarzan swing.” To get to the swing, we first walked through the jungle over this really cool old suspension bridge, then around the corner to where there was a tall wooden staircase leading up to another platform, this one very high up. When we got up to the top of the platform there were two men waiting for us to strap a thick rope to our harness, after which we were supposed to jump off, swing through the air while, if the mood struck us, making the “OWEEOWEEEOOOO” sound that Tarzan makes. After you’ve swung back and forth a bunch of times, two men standing on the ground below have the unfortunate task of stopping you by grabbing your legs or using this big rubber contraption that they stand in your way to keep you from swinging anymore.

So Tio Pedro went first, and when I watched him jump, standing behind him atop the platform, I realized for the first time how high up we were. I have no concept of heights and measurements, but suffice it to say that it was high. When it came to be my turn I had grown a bit nervous, and as the men hooked the rope onto my harness, I started questioning them about the correct way I should jump—should I aim to jump out, or just sort of fall off the ledge? They dismissed me completely and basically told me to just jump already. When I got to the edge and they did a countdown of “3-2-1”, I hesitated and asked for thirty seconds to get my nerves up. This is when one of the men, the one standing to my left, tried to PUSH me off of the ledge. Up until that point, I’d been speaking Spanish with all of the people working the canopy tour, but when that guy tried to push me off the fucking ledge I turned to him and said, “EXCUSE ME, ARE YOU KIDDING ME? DID YOU JUST SERIOUSLY TRY TO PUSH ME? GIVE ME A SECOND, PLEASE!” Katie and Tio Pedro thought this was absolutely hilarious. I, however, was not thrilled. Sometimes I just need a few seconds. Anyways, I did eventually get my nerves up to jump, and it was awesome! Quite the rush. I swung so high that I was again above the treetops, and something about it reminded me of being a little kid again, back in that first house we lived in on the lake, swinging on that rope swing my mom made that she’d hung from the tree at the top of the hill next to our house. As a four year old, when I swung on it, I swung all the way above the porch and over the lake, feeling like I was flying. Standing on the ground watching Katie swing was really funny because it was from a new perspective…and because she screamed like a girl.

After we had all done the Tarzan Swing, the three of us happily walked back through the woods to the lodge, anxious to remove our harnesses, and feeling surprisingly exhausted. Though it hadn’t required a ton of actual physical exertion, it definitely still took it out of us somehow. So we decided to go have a nice lunch together and to then relax back at our hotel for a bit. I felt like Katie really got an idea of what Tio Pedro and my dinner dates are like after having lunch with us. Though we laugh a lot, Tio Pedro and I also talk about very serious things a lot of the time. Like family and history and some of those harsh, tragic things people avoid talking about a lot of the time because they’re uncomfortable. Tio Pedro and I talk about these things nonchalantly, because its just better that way. We keep it real. Katie also has a tendency to keep it real, so we had a really nice long lunch talking about anything and everything, then headed back to our hotel, where Katie and I proceeded to nap. I never nap at home, and I think that’s the third time I can pinpoint that I have napped here in Costa Rica! I love it. Relaxation does the body good.

After our nap, Katie and I hit the hot tub and talked about how the weekend had been exactly what we’d needed. Quiet, tranquil, boy-free (except Tio-Pedro), sleep-filled, fun. Up until then, we had really had non-stop action, with the project and class all week long followed by some crazy trip almost every single weekend. We chatted about how nice it had been not to take a 6-hour bus anywhere that weekend, not to be lugging L-Pack on our sweaty backs, not to be organizing activities for a huge crew. For me, it was nice to see a familiar face from home, a family member who’d known me longer than just a couple of months. And we could strike Canopy Tour off our list!

Saying goodbye to Tio Pedro was pretty sad, as I’d started to get used to having him around, living my Tico life with me. As he and Katie and I sat outside the airport together chatting for one last time before he’d have to go inside, we watched a car pull up to the curb in front of us, and out stepped a very young, very pregnant girl, probably in her early twenties. A young guy with glasses was driving, and as the two of them got out of the front seats of the car, I watched an older woman who resembled the pregnant girl rush across the street to greet them. She gave the girl a huge hug, and they stood there embracing for what must have been five minutes straight. I got a sick feeling in my stomach, knowing I was saying goodbye to Tio Pedro in just a couple of minutes, and knowing also that I would never again hug my mother like that, would never be pregnant and in love, excited to tell my mom everything, anxiously awaiting her arrival outside the airport.

So basically, after hugging Tio Pedro goodbye, I was thoroughly depressed. Easter was the following day, my first Easter away from home and without my mom, and all I wanted was some chocolate and “the bed” as Katie and I say. Therefore, we headed home, stopping at the grocery store for snacks, and enjoyed our first night in our house without our host family, who had gone away for the holiday. We lounged around and for the first time ever, watched TV in Costa Rica. It turns out our family has a few good movie channels, and also that many of the stations are in English with Spanish subtitles. We came to discover as well that even though dubbed movies are often way too quickly-spoken for us to understand them, when the movie is something like “Clueless,” a movie you’ve seen at least ten times, you can still enjoy watching it without understanding the Spanish, as you’ve inadvertently memorized each and every line.

Easter came and went as we stayed in our beds for the most part, watching more TV. I realized that the month of April was upon me, and that that was why I was feeling a little funny, a little sad, a little sick to my stomach. April is a bad month, and somehow my body was reacting to April even though I’m in a place where I don’t recognize the season change, and where everything is new and different. I hoped to get out of my rut, and soon. Eventually our family came home from their vacation, and we looked forward to seeing our friends the next day, and getting back to a routine. I missed Tio Pedro already!