Day 2: (Monday 13)

Didn’t sleep last night. Since when is it allowed to be this HOT and HUMID? MK has a fan. I do not. Hmmm.
MK arrived at around 8am. We rode bikes to the farm and received our boots. Toured the finca, sampling the organic goods at the same time. Quite an operation. Everything from rice plants to papaya trees, yucca trees (the yucca are the roots), hearts or palm, aloe verde, lettuce, tomatoes, bananas, butterflies, basil, oregano, and a whole mess of other things. My favorites are the pineapple plants. They’re ground plants that look like giant spider plants or something with a pineapple sticking up jauntily out of the center. There’s a swamp in the back and a room in which to dry plants out for medicinal value. There is also a giant blue bucket that is upended for an ant house? They are the biggest ants I’d ever seen. They should not be housed, they should be squished. I hate ants. Man, I can’t even remember it all…
Returned for lunch, exhausted. Am slowly finding that it wasn’t so much Costa Rican cuisine that I love, as much as it is the cooking of my host mom in San Jose. Which is to say not so much the food I’m getting here. So I guess I don’t feel bad when I can only eat about 1/4th of the thing. It’s so hot here. I can’t imagine anyone eating.
Fell asleep after lunch. Lovely nap.
Returned to the finca at 4 without MK (who was still sleeping when I got to her house) to chat with Don Julio. Boy is that man ever passionate about organic agriculture. And can he ever TALK! That is to say, he never seems to shut up. After a good hour and a half of nodding, I headed home, stopping at MKs to chat for a few hours. She’s got some fancy anti-mosquito stuff. Pills, this thing that plugs into the wall. All I have is two bottles of carcinogenic liquid. I suppose it’s six to one, half dozen the other.
Found a cockroach in the room and had to have my host mom help me remove it. She went for it with her bare hands, grabbed it and tossed it out the back door. Apparently, they don’t live in the house, because there’s no where to hide, but they do sometimes fly in. (Wait, what? Coming soon, The Fuckers Fly? Part of the Costa Rican Cockroach saga) Will probably wrap myself up in the mosquito net tonight.