Cuatro de Julio en Costa Rica

Author: Freddy
Location: Cuatro de Julio en Costa Rica
I heard it. Loud and clear. Once again. The infamous call of a rooster in the early morning. Fortunately, this morning it was at 6:15 rather than 5 o'clock. Nonetheless, I was unable to sleep any longer at about 6:30, so I made the mistake of wandering downstairs. This mistake caused me to be very hungry later, not because my home-stay family is not feeding me, but because mi mama began preparing my breakfast as soon as I walked down those steps. We left the house at 7:30 to meet the rest of the group at Ana's house. Once the whole group was present, we loaded the bus and headed to La Carpio to jazz up the wall we built by painting some murals. On the bus, Hilary, Deborah, and Richard informed us that we would also be playing with the kids in La Carpio; the plan was to set up some sort of street fair for them. Some of the street fair attractions included jump rope games, coloring, and face-painting. I was at the face painting station for a while and did my best to accommodate the children's desires, most of which were: puma, dragon, or flower. Over where the kids were drawing it was apparent that the kids had never been told that their pictures were muy bonita or muy bien as they continuously showed their finished products to our group for approval.
When I rotated out of the street-fair activities and back to painting, a couple of interesting things happened. First, Angela and I painted bananas so real-looking that I wanted to reach into the wall and grab one. Second, we had an unexpected visitor. When we first opened the lot on which we were building, Gail explained that there was a jail next to it. We all noticed the double barred window to the jail cell, but simply shrugged it off. Today, however, we were all under the window when we heard a sort of farting sound, obviously made by the mouth and the tongue. I was confused at first, but someone pointed out that someone in the jail cell had made this noise. The jail mate continued to poke his head our every few minutes and said things that I will not repeat in this entry. He eventually must have lost interest or have not liked our taste in music and stopped yelling things. After our day of work at La Carpio, we went back to our homestays for a siesta before the fiesta.
At about 5 o'clock p.m. we all arrived at Ana's ranch with our homestay brothers and sisters to play games. Soccer, Frisbee, and relay races were among some of the most popular activities. Relays included, among others, wheel barrel an adaptive version of egg and spoon race; in the absence of eggs, Hilary and Deborah made use of their surroundings and had us use freshly picked limes instead.
Later on, the parents arrived with their pot luck additions and we all sat down to a FABULOUS dinner. There was soup, chicken, rice, pasta, frijoles, and everything else you could imagine. By the end, we were all stuffed. After dinner, we were surprised with fireworks in Ana's yard (only in Costa Rica, can you actually sit directly underneath the fireworksHow cool!). Next we sang the National Anthem and then listened to our host families sing the Costa Rican National Anthem. Delicious cake followed and we once again ate until we were about to explode. Then after a night of fun, food, and fireworks, we returned to our houses for some much needed rest.

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