Bon Jovi !!!!!

Ahhhh!!!! Bon Jovi in Costa Rica on my birthday!!!!! I had so much fun, the energy from the crowd was so uplifting and Bon Jovi was a dreamy babe magnet. However, you should all know the lengths I had to go through to get this footage....absolutely NO cameras were allowed. There were security guards patting people down, literally taking things out from the deep depths of purses and squishing around in search of contraband. My original plan to obscure the camera with Steph's empty Hidden Valley Chewy Bar wrapper and a few crumpled receipts was definitely not going to fly. So, I decided to go with the 'diversion' approach. I took my jacket off and put my purse on beneath it. My jacket hid the strap seamlessly, obscuring all but the bulging contents seeping from my inadequately sized disguise. I had just seen a girl get smoked as I waited my turn...fear. I walked up to my inspector lady with an enormous 'don't take your eyes off me' smile and exclaimed ‘Pura Vida!' Apparently I’m quite the charmer because my ‘protruding bulge’ went unnoticed, making the following clip (and all future photography posted) possible. Aren't you glad?!

Twenty-One !!!!!!!

Feliz cumpleaños a mí! Today is my 21st birthday and I'm so excited! Last night was wild, my friend from UCLA, Stephanie, and I went out to a bar called 'Bar Rockolas' to celebrate. Steph and I are both in the same program at Veritas University and are both living with Doña Mayra. Mayra had left to babysit Santiago for the evening because Adriana and Jonathon were going out for Adriana's best friend's birthday. They invited us to tag along. Steph and I were left to our own devices to get to the bar which became an adventure in itself.

I had ridin in a taxi with Mayra a day prior and the driver had scribbled down his contact info for if I ever needed a ride. We called 'Ecar' only to find out that he wasn't working evenings, so he gave us another driver's number and said he would call his friend for us and tell him to pick us up at Mayra's at 9 o'clock. So come 9 pm we're dressed to kill and waiting outside, waiting and waiting. No taxi. 9:30..still no taxi. So we decide to sacrifice some of Steph's precious pre-paid minutes on her classy track phone and call up 'Marco'. Keep in mind that we have absolutely no idea how to describe where the hell we are. He answers and by the sheer luck of the penny, Ecar had already told him where the 'dos muchachas norteamericanas' lived. He was prompt and came in just under 3 minutes. We had both rehearsed Adriana's directions and promptly proceeded to forget them upon entering the taxi. I rummaged to find the vague scribblings on a receipt buried deep in my purse... "Taco Bell curridabat" were the magic words and off we went.

Steph and I finally arrived at Bar Rockolas and followed the music upstairs. There were tables upon tables of chatty Ticos having a great time. The theme of the bar was Rock n’ Roll and a live band blasted in the back corner. It was my first time ever in a bar and to my surprise, there was no ‘bar’, and the LCD screens suspended from the ceilings weren’t playing a variety of sports games but rather images of tranquil rivers, migrating birds and monkeys. Muy tuanis! Adriana spotted us and yelled for us to come join her friends. I had so much fun, maybe a little too much fun! But hey, you only turn 21 once! Adriana and Jonathon bought me tequila shot at midnight to officiate the right of passage. Ladies and gentlemen, its official…I’M TWENTY-ONE!!

Crazy Taxi

Talk about a death wish...the traffic here is absolutely insane. The daintily hung traffic lights easily disappear into the background, becoming a mere suggestion. Some of the roads have potholes the size of a grown child and the drivers are accustomed to swerving around them in haste. I'm genuinely worried for my life every time I cross the street.

The other day I got to meet Mayra's son, Jonathon, and his family. He is super cool and athletic and works as a sports bookie. With Mayra's permission, he took me to his house for a bean soup lunch. Jonathon doesn't like to use main roads because they are way too crowded, so I got to go the local way ....not the frustrated tourist way, mwaahahaa. We stopped off at a hole-in-the-wall supermarket to quickly pick up some ingredients for his wife Adriana. There I was introduced to a fruit called mamón chino, It’s red and spiny like a sea urchin... but the spicules are actually way softer than they look. On the inside is this white eyeball looking thing, it’s very sweet and delicious!

When we got to Jonathon's house, I got to meet Adriana and their son, Santiago. Santiago is the happiest smiley baby, and he is going to grow up to be one cool kid with parents like that! Adriana is a lawyer and she is super gorgeous and high spirited. They were very hospitable, we started talking so much that we even forgot about the bean soup! I learned some Costa Rican slang from them; tuanis (twah-nees) means that something is cool. Then there is the saying Pura Vida, which means pure life...or hang loose bro! The overly used phrase 'dude' in our language, makes its appearance in Costa Rica as the word mae (mah-eh), everything is 'mae this, mae that'. Muy tuanis!

Pura Vida Amigos!

Let The Rain...

The nerves are gone, but I still can't help but feeling a little bit sad to be away from home. My flight went well, I was lucky and sat next to an incredible lady from El Salvador. She was dressed in traditional indigenous clothing and was wearing a beautiful wreath of blue beaded necklaces. One of her eyes was glazed and clouded over with blindness and her other was a deep brown, full of sadness. She held her fragile hands curled tight in her lap in anticipation of take-off and I noticed tears welling in her eyes….not your typical seat partner. I asked her what was wrong and she went on to tell me about the passing of her father just three days prior. He had died of stomach cancer which had spread to his prostate. We spoke for about an hour and while I couldn’t always understand, her expressions told me all I needed to know. Her life read somewhat like a soap opera - four sons from a sour divorce and a traitor ex-husband who eloped with her niece and then had a bastard child with the wench ex-family member. Imagine that.

I’m learning the system quickly. The currency in Costa Rica is the colón and the exchange rate is approx. 500 colones to one dollar. I felt so rich when the money exchange lady handed me 25,000 big ones, too bad my inflated excitement burst today when I threw down 7,000 on Pantene Pro-V shampoo and conditioner and a tube of toothpaste. San Jose is wild; it’s dirty, grungy, ghetto and fabulous - all at the same time. Pretty difficult to drink it all in at once.

My host is an elderly woman named Doña Mayra and she’s flippin’ cool as all heck. She was the Javelin champion of Central America in the 60’s and was voted the #1 female athlete in ’61. Doña Mayra has countless medals and trophies lining her shelves and newspaper clippings framed on her walls. Her life reads much like soap opera as well – a tumultuous first marriage to a man only in love with her success, a second marriage plagued by a claustrophobic mother-in-law and an only son caught in the middle. Her son, Jonathon, has a new 7 month old baby boy with a beautiful Costa Rican woman named Adriana. I’m going to meet them today.

Ok, I feel as though I need to devote a few moments to describe the rain. It’s unlike anything I have ever experienced. It sounds like the love child of a tenor belting a glass shattering high B flat and a seriously tee’d-off King Kong, fighting against the guy who invented fireworks, in a bar brawl. No joke.


Pura Vida

The Final Countdown

Only four days left until departure and a queasy champagne supernova is materializing in my guts. Let’s all hope for the sake of the flight attendants and my fellow seat friends, that it stays corked for the full duration of my flight. Upon landing, I am to look for a man carrying a placard with my name. I will then be escorted to my host family’s ‘casa’, which I have failed miserably in locating on Google Earth. Despite my minor in Geography, an address roughly translated into English as “100 meters south of the Park of Mangos, 10 meters east of the big rock, the blue house with black trimmings on the left hand side” somehow did not compute. I am officially trading in my GPS for a local ‘burro’.

Palm Frond Surfing

I went to the Sherman Library & Botanical Garden in Newport Beach yesterday and I came across a plant curled into a perfect wave. I felt suddenly transported to a silky Costa Rican wave and wanted to share the plant inspired tubular experience with you all.