after such a busy week, we were able to have a few days to let loose and hang out. it all started with a trip to the beach right by the university we stayed at. it was cloudy, but we were grateful for a chance to lay on the beach and play in the water. some of the boys even decided to take a shot at climbing the coconut trees. they were very successful.
we ate at some fun restaurants while in morales, but one in particular was quite memorable. while we waited for our food, someone (chris) had the great idea of doing the sugar and salt challenge. basically, he got enough sugar packets for everyone who wanted to participate, opened them all up, poured one of them out and filled it with salt, then handed them out. i joined in at the very last minute. stupid mistake. i got the salt packet and i had to swallow the entire thing. it was absolutely terrible and my eyes were watering like crazy. i had to order a few more drinks just to make the taste leave my mouth. 
as we drove to and from the university and the various sites we visited, we kept passing this huge, random dinosaur off the side of the road. nikki and i kept begging dr mellick to let us stop just once so we could get a picture with it. why you ask? because supposedly jurassic park was filmed in costa rica... duh! bless his little heart, he succumbed to our wishes and made everyone stop for pictures as we headed down toward jaco.
the drive from morales to quepos was gorgeous! of course i wasn't able to capture it well in my pictures, but it was a whole 4 hour drive down the coast with nothing but cliffs, water, beaches, and palm trees. we drove through jaco and then continued onward another hour to quepos where the manuel antonio national park is located. 
when we arrived in quepos, we had a very difficult time finding the apartments we had arranged to stay at. throughout the whole trip, we had a caravan of 4 cars, and it made for an interesting time driving through the town trying to follow the directions the owner lady gave us. in the midst of all the fun, the lead car had mechanical problems and stopped working (on a hill, of course). luckily we had plenty of strong men with us that were willing to push and some random costa rica boys jumped in to lend a hand as well. sadly, this wouldn't be the last time this car would have some mechanical problems. 
we finally made it to our hotel and we crashed as soon as we got there. we got up early the next morning (saturday) and headed to the manuel antonio national park. of course, we got suckered into paying a guy $10 a piece to walk us through the park and point out "wildlife" (aka sloths and lizards). we could have made the walk easily for free, but whatever. we were excited however when we made our way to the beautiful private beach located in the national park. the water was gorgeous and so was the surrounding scenery. we spent the whole day here playing, laying out, talking, and just relaxing. 
*this is how bamboo grows... it was so tall!
*dave acting as our tour guide- i would have preferred to pay him over the other guy. what a rip off
as we were hanging out on the beach, we heard a lady scream behind us. we all looked back and realized that while she was laying there, a monkey came up to her bag and started rummaging through it. we ended up chasing the little monkey group for a bit trying to get some good shots of them. 
this is where we stayed in quepos. it was way nice- had this big commons area with a pool table and plenty of hang out room. then it had 2 downstairs apartments and 2 upstairs apartments with beds for everyone, the nicest bathrooms we had come across the whole trip, air conditioning and cable tv! we felt spoiled rotten!
group shot, i love my classmates!
sunday morning half of the group got up early to go on the canopy. i have gone ziplining many times and went while in costa rica when i was there a year ago so i decided to pass. there were a few of us that decided to go back to the beach instead and do some shopping. 
that afternoon, a few of us decided to go kayaking. the young guy in this picture is juan and he was our guide. the other guy was our driver. juan was a great guide and took us right to where he knew the monkeys would be!
as we paddled through the channels, i felt like i was on the jungle cruise at disneyland- minus al the mechanical animals. it was absolutely gorgeous!
i'm not a fan of pineapple, but costa rican pineapple is amazing! so sweet and juicy.
juan took us to a certain area in the channel and made some call-out to the monkeys. all of the sudden, they came out of the trees swinging around in a group of about 20. juan gave us some mangos that we squished in our hands and the monkeys were hopping all over us and our kayaks trying to get the food. i have some videos that i will try to upload. it was one of those "once in a lifetime" things that i loved!
the 2 days we spent in quepos were just what we needed to get geared up for another day of work. i was happy to see as much wildlife as we did and get the rest and relaxation that we all needed.
after a long day at each of our locations, we packed our bags up and drove the 3 1/2 hours to a town called morales just north of puntarenas on the pacific coast. we arrived at an extension campus for the university of costa rica where they studied marine life. all the girls stayed in one room with about 20 bunkbeds and the boys stayed in the room next to us. we had semi community showers (boys and girls were separate) and the bathrooms made me semi nervous. but we were grateful for a place to sleep especially since they let us stay there for free. 
there were 16 of us that were going on this trip and we all flew on different flights. my group had our first flight leaving monday, may 4 at 6am. that made for an extremely early morning for all of us. we were supposed to fly from slc to dallas to orlando to miami to costa rica (ridiculous, i know). however, our first airplane had mechanical problems, our flight got cancelled, and we had to book another flight on a different airline. lucky for us, we took a delta flight straight to orlando skipping the dallas layover. 
we all finally made it to san jose about 9pm that night (longest traveling day ever) and surprisingly enough, all 3 groups arrived within 30 minutes of each other. talk about great timing. we were taken to our hotel in san jose (which was surprisingly nice) and crashed. dr sebastian mellick (an ear-nose-throat doctor in costa rica) helped us organize our entire trip. he found places who needed audiological services and set up the times/dates for each of the locations. we got up super early the next morning (5:30) and headed off to our different locations. we had 3 different places to go to so we split into different groups each day. my group for the first day went to cencinai which was a preschool filled with children. here, we performed otoscopy (looked in their ears at their eardrums to make sure the canal was clear and the eardrum looked good), tympanometry (a test making sure the ear drum is working properly and there is equal pressure between the outer and middle ear), and then we did a hearing screening on all of the children. costa rica has socialized health care, so the children we identified with hearing loss at this school were referred to an audiologist that worked in that area. 
after cencinai, we drove to kinder papillon. this was a school run by a fabulous lady named carla. a few of her students had hearing aids, a couple even had cochlear implants, but many of her students needed to be tested. so, we did the same tests on these children that we did at the preschool earlier. however, at this school, any child that was identified with a hearing loss was fit with hearing aids that we had donated by hearing aid companies here in the us. here, we met adriana, a costa rica native and a graduate student studying audiology. she is currently working as an audiologist but had some equipment donated to her that she didn't know how to use. this equipment is excellent for verifiying that the way you program a hearing aid is what that child's hearing loss would require. we spent a great deal of time teaching and training adriana on how to use her equipment and we were able to make sure that these children had appropriately programmed hearing aids. 
