The first weekend was filled with family
bonding time, which was wonderful. Our bike tour of Puerto Villamil took no
more than 30 minutes, which tells you how small our new home really was. For
the most part everyone or almost everyone lives near one another within the
development area, while I lived a block from the beach and right next door to
IOI; definitely convenient. My house was quite hidden and you had to walk
through a blocked off alley to get there.
There was a cute, little store in front of the alley to my house that
was owned by woman who happened to be the ‘grandmother’ of one of the girls in
our program. Every time I walked by her store, she had a big smile on her face
and we would exchange pleasantries. But then again this is not against the norm
and greeting people around town happened all of the time. Everyone is quite
friendly and even more so once they got used to seeing us around.
Now back to the weekend’s activities…
I went with my family to the playa
that I thought would be a sandy beach, but instead it was this lagoon covered
with lava rock above and below the water. This spot is located next to the
Puerto Villamil dock and is called Concha de Perla and is used by locals as a
swimming and snorkel spot because of all of the marine life that resides within
its boundaries. Later in our Marine Ecology course we became quite acquainted
with the Concha, going there many times throughout the 2 weeks to observe and
collect data for our projects.
At one point I was standing on some lava rock
that was underneath the water and suddenly I felt something nip at my foot. The
next few moments saw this happening over and over again. My host Mom, who was
overlooking the funny dance that I was doing to try to avoid being bitten, tried
to explain to me that small fish were biting at my feet. Of course at this
point, I understood very little of what she said but later came to find out
that the fish that were nipping at my feet were Yellowtail Damselfish; they are
quite territorial and were not too happy with my feet being on their well
groomed algal lawns.
Snaider is probably the cutest 2 year-old that
I have ever seen. In the first couple of days he really didn’t know what to
think about me but once I started pushing him around on his push-fire truck he
would run into my room and ask me to push him around. We also started making
funny faces at each other, which I think amused my host parents immensely ;)
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