Los niños

 love children. I knew even before coming down here that I wanted to look for an opportunity to work with children, see the Costa Rican school system, or volunteering with children. I was able to combine this desire with my photography course. Our final projects were photo essays. A photo essay is a story told through a series of photographs. I decided to take my photographs of the children in an orphanage nearby the university. This is not an orphanage in the traditional sense of the word. The children are not up for adoption and they all have a least one living parent. The parents cannot financially provide for the children and this foundation La Fundatión Mi Tía Betel has given the children a place to live. I loved every second I spent with these children. They did not care if I misconjugated a verb or if my sentence was not in gender agreement. I was able to practice my Spanish, take photographs, and get down on the floor and play. It is really inspiring to see a child, who is not being raised in necessarily the best of environments, smiling, laughing, crying, playing, and just being a child.

Crowding around a phone

Playing with my lens cap

The bond between siblings

Siblings

I love the faces she makes

Finally looking at the camera

He swiped my sunglasses

Life Behind the Lens

For the month of July, I took an elective course, Cultural Photography, in the afternoons. I love being in a photography class finally. We mostly meet on campus and show each other the photos we took for whatever the day’s assignment was. Some days we have gone downtown to the plazas, to museums, to art galleries, to see graffiti, and even to meet a Costa Rican photographer. We have had some very interesting assignments and experiences. I loved talking to the photographer about his work and seeing his dark room. Some of the assignments were also projects I have previously thought about doing, but never actually completed, such as the light painting. We also viewed work of other Latino artists, worked a little in Photoshop, and tried doing photo transfers (transferring a photo onto another piece of paper using alcohol… it did not completely work, but it was a neat concept). Overall, I really loved the class and it was a good prompt to help me continuously take photos in Costa Rica (not that I really needed any reminding). I do, however, wish the class had focused a little bit more on the cultural part of the title. I thought we could have visited more local places and less touristy ones or meet and photographed more ticos, Costa Rican citizens.

Light painting

An assignment on finding lines

Line assignment

Biblioteca Nacional

Downtown San Jose

People in motion

Repetition and patterns downtown

Downtown San Jose

Art Museum

Art museum

Costa Rican Photographer

Photography Transfers

Pura Vida

This past weekend I was able to escape San Jose for the rolling mountain sides of Monteverde, Costa Rica. Monteverde is beautiful with lush green forests and has more of the adventure sports for Costa Rica, such as ziplining.



Our first night was spent at the Balding Hot Springs Resort. There is naturally heated water as it flows through the volcano Arenal. Balding has piped this water into waterfalls and pools for guests to relax. The water also creates natural saunas. Some of the pools were as hot as 104 degrees Fahrenheit! It was nice to relax in the waters, but it fogged up my glasses a lot!

The next day we drove to La Fortunate and hiked to the waterfall. It was a lot of steps to climb, but nothing when compared to the waterfall we climbed in Nicaragua! This waterfall, however, had a bigger deeper pool at the base of the fall. The water was a little chilly, but we still got in and swam. The waterfall was beautiful and I can officially check swimming in a waterfall off my bucket list!

Our last day was the adventure day! We went on a zipline tour. There were 10 regular ziplines, 1 superman zipline, 1 rappeling aspect, 1 very rickety wooden bridge, and 1 Tarzan swing. The ziplines were a bit of a workout. Being too short to simply clip me to the line, I did a bit of a chin hang every time they needed to clip or unclip me. The superman zipline was one of the scariest things I've done! You went across the zipline stomach down, facing the fall below you. I screamed the whole way across. The Tarzan swing was kind of like hunger jumping feet first. Needless to say, I opted out of the Tarzan swing.

My face on the superman zipline.

 The beautiful green of Monteverde

Overall it was a great trip and I met some new people. I was finally able to zipline and it was great to get away.
Pura vida!