Goodbye internet/MFC! :crybaby: Hello Costa Rica! :groovy:

[Oakie Doke]

*huggles ambrose for silver*

 

I obviously don't have a camera *msnslap*

 

Jack has taken over the squeaky toy and ripped the squeaky. The boys all love the revolting dog chocolates and are all ignoring the rope

[Oakie Doke]

And I told my dad that I got him a present and he got really angry and then I gave him the lollies and he got really excited and then really angry that I didn't bring back a box of them

[happikali]

And I told my dad that I got him a present and he got really angry and then I gave him the lollies and he got really excited and then really angry that I didn't bring back a box of them

 

HAHAHAHAAH !!! Hug Ambrose from me toooooo !

 

And a big slurp from Mondo !

 

[Oakie Doke]

***Bianca's Spanish Pronounciation Guide***

(Because it sucks when you get the wrong pronounciation stuck in your head the first time you read it)

 

Doña - Don-ya ("ñ" is pronounced "ny") - meaning: ... I don't know, it's kind of like Mrs. "Don" is the male version.

Gallo Pinto - Gah-yo Pin-toh (double l's are like y's) - meaning: fantastic tico breakfast dish.

Tico (lol) - tee-co - meaning: Costa Rican.

Platano - um, platano - meaning: plantain is the english word. It's a fruit/vegetable (I'd call it a fruit but they class it as a vegtable) related to bananas, it pretty much looks like a banana, but they don't eat it raw. There's like 400 different ways of cooking it that all make it taste completely different (and fantastic).

Tortilla - tortee-ya (Okay I know you know that, but see, there's that silly double l thing again!)

 

Okay. So everyone expected a massive detailed report from me and I have just been too overwhelmed by how much I have to report that instead I have done nothing. Soooo maybe I'll just try and focus on some smaller parts and thats better than the nothing that there is now

 

So, Part 1 of Bianca's Amazing Costa Rica Report:

 

Costa Rican Cuisine

 

It seems like the easiest thing to talk about first. It's the biggest change I noticed when I got there, and it's probably the thing I missed most when I came back. Our food sucks!

 

I got a bit obsessive and took ... erm, a lot of photos of food (although obviously only for the first two weeks, grrrr) BUT those were the best two weeks for food, because we had every single meal cooked for us by Doña Suzy, the mother of the family who owned the camping we were staying at, and they were all traditional Costa Rican meals (except for when she tried to do some normal food to remind us of home, bless her [and even that she totally screwed up by making it COMPLETELY FREAKING DELICIOUS AND FANTASTIC] *ahem*).

 

So yes, let's start with breakfast, the most important meal of the day.

 

The national dish of Costa Rica is "Gallo Pinto" (it means "Painted Rooster" in spanish). It's a rice and black bean mix that they eat at breakfast and tastes absolutely fantastic (this coming from someone who didn't like rice - at all - before going to Costa Rica). The name is from the way they soak it when it's cooking so the rice absorbs the colour of the beans. Or something. Basically, it takes way too much time and effort for anyone in Australia or anywhere to ever bother making for breakfast. But Doña Suzy made of for us every day

 

The gallo pinto is basically always accompanied by fried plantains, "Platano Maduras" (I figured out it was called that later on when it was labelled at the hotel buffet ). Fried plantains (or that's how I guess they're cooked) are like slices and they taste kind of sweet, and are my favourite way of cooking plantains. NONE of the hotel platano maduras ever compared to Doña Suzy's but .. well they're better than nothing. Then breakfast also usually includes some egg, scrambled most of the time I think. And/or some fresh fruit salad, ft. ridiculous fruits we don't get in Australia, and all far fresher than any fruit I've ever encountered. It can also have tortillas and avacado. Avacados in Costa Rica are far superior to avacados in Australia, and fresh ripe avadaco mushed up on tortillas became one of my favourite foods. Occasionally there was a type of meat with breakfast, like a sausage or bacon, and in those cases I got ... tortillas and avacado! Wooo! Doña Suzy kept trying to ask if we (me and my friend who also doesn't eat meat) wanted something different and we were like "NO! Avacado and tortilla! Si! Si! Delicioso!"

 

And then to drink it was usually freshly made 100% fruit juice of some kind of exotic fruits, or quite often iced tea (they really like iced tea for some reason), or a few times we had a kind of oat milk shake.

Edited January 26, 2009 by Oakie Doke

[Oakie Doke]

You're all going to think I'm a filthy liar because I've realised I actually have no photos of avacado tortillas, but they were there! Just on a separate plate! (And you have to understand that I am NOT a morning person. Given a choice, mornings don't exist. So I generally forgot to bring my camera to breakfast.)

 

Gallo pinto, scrambled eggs, tortilla (and avacado, out of the picture, I swear!) and iced tea.

 

Gallo pinto, scrambled eggs, platano maduras and iced tea (iced tea is "té frio" by the way. I don't know how to pronounce that, I just read it off the bottles )

 

One of her western breakasts, pancakes and fruit salad. The fruit salad there is apple, pineapple, mango and papaya. I have no idea what that juice is, see what I mean? We'd have competitions to guess what it was and then ask her and it would turn out to be something we'd never heard of.

 

See! Avacado! And some kind of herby bread roll, I don't know. And that oatmeal milkshake thing, banana flavour this time.

 

Gallo pinto, plantains, avacado and tortillas = perfect breakfast *drools* And again, no idea what that juice is.

 

Another attempt at "normal" breakfast. Cereal (obviously), fruit salad and some weird bready-cakey-puddingy thing ... that was delicious. And mango juice. Yes, one of the few I could recognise. I love me some 100% mango juice.

[Oakie Doke]

And while I wouldn't class this as totally representative of common Costa Rican traditional cuisine, it has to go somewhere, so here's a sample of the buffet breakfast at the first resort we went to (the only one where I still had a functioning camera).

 

Ft. insuperior gallo pinto and platano maduras, but hey, you take what you can to remind you of lovely Camping El Chontal And also a bunch of american breakfast products designed to satiate the rich American tourists and fill the pockets of the cheap Australian tourists who can't afford any meals other than the free breakfast.

 

And some more (it was a buffet ) this time ft on the right a root vegetable (can't remember what it's called) that resembles potatos in taste and texture. Oh, they don't have potatos there, like at all, but for the most part plantains replace them, quite successfully, but more on that later.

 

And again, this time ft. an omlette made by the omlette lady at the end of the buffet:

[Petra]

*eyeing the food*

.

.

.

.

.

.

*takes*

[Oakie Doke]

Guess what guys! That's just breakfast!

(granted, breakfast is the meal they put the most effort into, I think)

I know it seems a bit ridiculous, eating rice and fruit and fried vegetables and all that for breakfast, but it seems so normal over there And those photos are no where near representative of how much we ate, that was the first "oh, don't want to take too much" helping, and then you go back for more after.

Lots of filling gallo pinto is EXACTLY what we needed to make it up the dastardly hill to catch frogs every day, trust me.

 

So after a ridiculously massive breakfast, lunch was a considerably smaller meal, more like a snack really. When we worked with the frogs we hiked back down to the house for lunch cooked fresh by Doña Suzy, but when we worked with dolphins we were out on the boat all day so we got a packed lunch in the morning with breakfast.

 

Fresh lunches varied, a lot. Although they did lways have fresh fruit and fresh fruit juice. But here's a few examples:

 

Oh, this is where we ate. A little shelter next to the main house, and Doña Suzy always stood at the end of the serving table until we'd all taken our food and sat down. We asked Diego (our project leader, who is Costa Rican) why she did this and he said he didn't know, she must just like seeing us enjoy her food or something - she is SO SWEET!

 

Watermelon, salad and steamed vegetables, with watermelon juice (yay! I recognise a type of juice!)

 

Some kind of bread thing. Never found out what it was called. But I would kill to know. It was like a roll with vegetables in it (there was one with meat and vegetables too though), completely freshly baked. Sooo nice. It kind of resembled a rolled up pizza, but with vegetables and bread. We had it cold in our packed lunch once too, and we were all complaining about how it wouldn't be as good and it's a waste of such an amazing food, but Diego just told us to shut up and wait and see, and it turns out it's totally fantastic cold too.

 

Pasties. With rice and vegetables in them. Nice! I don't know if you've realised, but EVERYTHING is made from scratch. Like ... no pasties out of the freezer, no pastry out of the freezer, they're made of flour and such. Everything is. I miss it so much.

 

Packed lunch! It was usually a salad sandwich, or sometimes something like the cold roll thingy (pictured) or a cold pastie. And always with some kind of fruit, watermelon pictured here.

[Oakie Doke]

Uuum, on my first day in Costa Rica, in Heredia, we went into a cafe and ordered sandwiches. (Fun, seeing as they spoke no english and we spoke no spanish other than "vegetariano?") We got these lovely salad sandwiches ft this amazing bean paste stuff they use. Sooo nice. Basically mushed up beans, but it tastes sooo good.

 

But then as soon as we'd finished they brought out a plate of steamed vegetables! Totally unexpected but very nice :-)

 

Lunch on the tour half of the trip (second two weeks) consisted of tortillas and things stolen from breakfast. Dinner consisted of the same

 

I started off with peanut butter tortillas (ft. no knife) and then progressed to mushed avacado tortillas and by the end of the trip I was fine dining on mushed avacado, tomato and bean paste tortillas (SERIOUSLY the best meal ever).

 

Peanut butter tortillas. Simple and tasty. Slightly grotty.

 

Advancement to the next level. (Camera didn't last for the next step unfortunately)

[Petra]

*goes to find out costa rican recipe*

[Oakie Doke]

Before we move on to dinner, let's take a moment to look at snacks. Due to monetary circumstances there was not much spent on snacks, although I did become addicted to a few things over there.

 

Namely - Plantain Chips. Oh my god. Someone import me some plantain chips. I'm dying here.

 

I actually first discovered them in Heredia on my second day in Costa Rica, when we were told that we might need some snacks for on the bus ride to our project, so I went to the supermarket and bought some random interesting-looking snack foods.

 

Here I am savouring some of those plantain chips from my very first packet (Oh the memories ... *wipes stray tear from eye*)

 

When I bought them I assumed they would be like dried banana, you know? But they are NOTHING like dried banana. Well, they look a bit like dried banana, but thinner and cut long ways (and they are plantains, not bananas ). But they more resemble potato chips, which is what they replace for Costa Ricans ... but they are just sooooooo much better! *fangirls plantain chips*

 

But these commercially produced city-plantain chips so do not even compare to the ones we could buy at the store at our project. They were obviously hand made and packaged by some local, made with one of those at-home sealing machines. And they were 150 colones a packet. Which is like 50 cents. Which is like TOTALLY AMAZINGLY CHEAP. Me and my friend went there every single day to buy them, and the girl that worked there knew as soon as we walked in what we wanted, it was just a question of how many

 

The thing was, we'd been stuck buying the Chilli flavoured ones for our entire stay because they were the first ones on the rack and we didn't know how to ask what flavours the others were or how to ask for them (all the stuff in the store was behind the counter and you had to ask for it). We just pointed and said "Uno platano?" So then on the last night we happened to be at the shop at the same time as Nadiah, the girl in our group that could speak spanish, so we asked her to ask what the flavours were ("chilli", "more chilli", "more more chilli", "lemon" and "sweet"), then we made her ask for one of each, and we had an exciting time back at the camp trying them all. But made a MOST AMAZING discovery. The ones he described as "dulce" (which is one of the few words we know, because the place we were staying in was Golfo Dulce, "the sweet gulf") infact were a dried chip form of BREAKFAST PLANTAINS! They tasted exactly like breakfast plantains! Ahhhhh. And of course we discovered this on the very last day at our project. So then we had to spend the rest of the trip trying to figure out what this flavour was called on the commercial packages (because there was none with "dulce"). Then finally I saw the "platano maduras" label on the breakfast plantains at the buffet and, yes, there was a flavour of plantain chips called platano maduras, and yes it was this fantastic one (although not as good as the ones we got at the project, but what can you do?).

 

 

Hehe, I have so much more food to explain in exquisite detail, but I am actually feeling tired now so maybe I should take advantage of that and go to bed before everyone else in the house gets up for work for once

[silver]

So - the gourmet's guide to Costa Rica.

 

Did you ever get round to looking at the wildlife? The scenery?

[Oakie Doke]

So - the gourmet's guide to Costa Rica.

 

Did you ever get round to looking at the wildlife? The scenery?

 

Costa Rica has wildlife and scenery?

 

(Yes I am still here, I just read through this entire thread. Because I am dedicated to never having any kind of normal sleeping pattern. And because reading my real-time reportages gives me tingles )

[Oakie Doke]

HOW THE HELL DID YOU GET TO OVER 10,000 POSTS? Holy crap!

[Oakie Doke]

I WANT YOU BACK BIANCS !!!!!

 

 

 

http://fr.youtube.com/watch?v=HAyKt2fZFl8

 

http://fr.youtube.com/watch?v=YsZ3917pzNM&feature=related

 

Awwwww! I never clicked on these links before! You found a relevant Kooks video for me (that I've never seen)! Awww!

[silver]

HOW THE HELL DID YOU GET TO OVER 10,000 POSTS? Holy crap!

 

It'll be 11,000 soon

 

 

 

PS That food all looks yummy

[nico_collard]

!

 

 

 

*msnslaps you for being far too apologetic*

 

 

*thanks you for the ****ing amazing collage that is giving me butterflies*

 

****, I wish I could remember what happened, but I was sooo ****ing tired

 

But it wasn't exactly like this. They played at least one (or two?) more songs between see the sun and stormy weather (Right Tegan? Do you remember?) I remember thinking "huh? Shouldn't this be Stormy Weather yet?"

 

Hmm, the rest sound right though, I think. God,. maybe my brain confused me, who knows. I need sleep. I need dinner. I am going!

 

That list seems pretty close to me, but I was feeling tired, sore and very thirsty...

 

As long as everyone has their clothes on:shocked:

*sings* Why are we waiting....whhhhyyyyyy are we waiting:naughty:

Glad you can take a hint:wink2:

 

 

...and still you're here

 

Yeah righto woman!

 

HOW THE HELL DID YOU GET TO OVER 10,000 POSTS? Holy crap!

 

She got there in December... I feel slack cause I've been here for at least 6 months longer than her and she's past me... then again, Mzee is past me and she's joined a few months after me...

[Oakie Doke]

It'll be 11,000 soon

 

PS That food all looks yummy

 

I remember when you were well below me and we made those jokes about you getting to 1,000 before being official, awww, those were the days (Back when we had even the tiniest glimmer of hope that Mika could ever follow through with anything he says in anything that can be considered a reasonable time frame)

And tell me about it

 

That list seems pretty close to me, but I was feeling tired, sore and very thirsty...

 

Yeah, I since realised that it's 100% correct

 

She got there in December... I feel slack cause I've been here for at least 6 months longer than her and she's past me... then again, Mzee is past me and she's joined a few months after me...

 

I'm not sure if slack is the right word ... maybe more "like I have more of a life"?

[Oakie Doke]

*goes to find out costa rican recipe*

 

*fangirls Petra for no other reason than she is awesome/I haven't replied to any of your posts*

[nico_collard]

I'm not sure if slack is the right word ... maybe more "like I have more of a life"?

 

Hardly

 

 

I didn't have much access to MFC for a few months, so maybe that's it... and I haven't been whoring myself around the forum much...

[Kelzy]

All that food looks pretty yummy

Who'd've thought you (of all people) would go there and come back with good taste buds.

[Oakie Doke]

It's okay, I've resigned myself back to eating crap

 

I just had a hard boiled egg I found in the fridge as a snack. And for dinner I had rice with baked beans. It resembled gallo pinto in concept, but little more

[Wendi]

Great pics Bianca - glad to see you back!!

[Oakie Doke]

*resurrects thread*

 

Okay okay, so I can see no one is going to sign up to travbuddy to comment my report to prove that they have actually read it, so I'll post it here.

 

 

December 3rd - Sydney!

 

Well, of course I left everything until the last minute and got no sleep before rushing off to the airport, speeding the whole way (I don't think I'd have it any other way). I checked in with few hassles, and my dad walked me to the security gate before waving goodbye like a normal person (no tears involved, I mean). I proceeded to Gate 7 by myself, only to find that I was supposed to be at Gate 17, and had to speed walk back out of security, to the other side of the airport, through security again and to the actual correct gate, making it JUST in time. Assuming my window seat (yay!), I settled down to attempt to sleep, but all I ended up with was a sore neck. The sunrise through the clouds was extremely pretty, but I wasn't sure if I was allowed to take pictures before the seatbelt light turned off, if cameras count as "electrical devices" .. and by the time it did the sun had fully risen. Overall, a passable first solo flight experience.

 

After collecting my bag I went about trying to contact my hostel for their "free shuttle bus service". I called them, they told me where to wait and that someone would be there in 15 minutes. An hour later I called them again and they seemed slightly shocked and said someone would be there any minute. 15 minutes later a crazy man walked past talking into his mobile in a crazy language (later found to be Hebrew). I heard him mention "Headquarters" (my hostel's name) and "Bianca", so I looked up, and then he motioned for me to follow to his slightly dodgy-looking van, which was manned by another guy who could speak no English. A short while later we were joined by an American girl, who also complained about a long wait, but who was going to a different hostel. We weaved in and out of crazy roads at at least double the speed limit, through some real-life homeless slums, as I held onto my seat for dear life.

 

Eventually I was dropped off at my fantastic ice cream-coloured hostel. The receptionist spoke to me in German for quite some time before he finally realised I didn't understand a word he was saying. He was quite sure I was German. I assured him I am not. He seemed confused. He gave me my blanket and sheets, a short tour of the hostel (in English, even), and my key, and that was that. My room was a complete mess (and that's really saying something coming from me), fully equipped with a naked woman duct taped to my bed. All in all it was quite a nice hostel though ... and ice cream coloured, did I mention that it's ice cream coloured?

 

 

 

By the time I got to the hostel it was 2.30 or so, and extremely hot. It was raining in Perth this morning, but it's totally gross and hot here. so I changed my outfit about four times trying to figure out the coolest/comfortablest ensemble, and then set out to explore Sydney. I didn't have a map, so I just started walking in the direction I sensed the city to be in. I soon came across Kings Cross station, which I decided to enter simply because ... well, Harry Potter. Much to my disappointment there was no platform 9 or 10, or 9 ¾, but I decided I may as well take a ride, and after looking at the ticketing machine for roughly 20 minutes I blindly stabbed at it and ended up with a return ticket to the next station along, which was sightly closer to the city centre, I guess. The tickets work like in Harry Potter too. I thought it was brilliant fun, and was really quite disappointed when the machine ate my ticket at the end of the day (I really wanted that as a souvenir, bastards).

 

Edited March 12, 2009 by Oakie Doke

[Oakie Doke]

 

 

There was a gigantic Christmas tree where I got off, so I walked towards it. It was really ... gigantic. Even surrounded by all the massive Sydney buildings. There were also hundreds of funny little kiosks just like in the movies. I took photos of them. And of the Starbucks, Krispee Kreme store and peculiar alley way art installation. I started walking down a road that I sensed would lead towards the harbour (my rough goal), and rejoiced when I finally spotted a bit of Harbour Bridge between the buildings up ahead. So I walked down and around one pylon of the bridge, stopping to take pictures of and have pictures taken by a random European tourist. I spotted the Opera House and Luna Park on the other side of the harbour, but couldn't figure out how to get there, so took pictures of them. I walked back towards the city through The Rocks, and saw a ridiculous Christmas tree made of chairs.