puerto viejo is a hot, humid town full of bob marley and marijuana smoke. my week-old sandals fell apart on saturday morning, and passed the rest of the weekend held together with bandage tape and a saftey pin. the town was small and relatively quiet, considering the massive amounts of tourists packing every bus, hotel, and restaraunt. we rented bikes and found a little beach where the surf was calm and the water perfectly warm. i fell asleep on my towel and woke up with immense bites over every part of my skin that had touched sand. we biked back through the beginning of a storm that never materialized, and had dinner in an italian place with the best lobster and basil raviolis a body could hope for. in the reggae bar friday night, i'd been groped and grabbed and fondled every time i stepped onto the dance floor. once, when i left to take a break, someone grabbed my belt and tried to convince me to follow him off into the trees. eventually meredith and i enlisted brent's help and he gallantly agreed to dance with us when the groping got too intense. sunday, we opted for a bottle of bicardi, two bottles of coke (in returnable plastic), and a long and ridiculous game of silent football. emphasis on the ridiculous. sunday was a few hours of lounging on the black-sand beach followed by a long, long bus ride back.


i was disappointed a little because i'd been hoping to get some idea of culture while we were there, because that area of the carribean coast is unique in its history, but everything seemed extremely touristified and we had neither the time nor money to take the really-interesting-looking indigenous cooperative tour. so we instead took a break from rice and beans, took advantage of the carribean tendency to know english, and spent a touristifull weekend ourselves getting sunburned and eating too much. it was sort of nice.


however, given that (and the fact that my sandals are out of comission for a while), i think i'm going to try to get back up to the mountains again, do some hiking, make my body do something other than sit in class, sit on a bus, or lie on the beach. don't get me wrong, lying on the beach has some considerable high points, but nonetheless. it'd be good to get my muscles sore. take some of the focus of my poor, sore brain.