Viva la Vida

Our morning's activity today was a visit to the Museo de Cultura Popular, the Museum of Popular Culture. We started the day off by cooking these delicious coconut cookies, that I'm sure would make my (real) dad's mouth water, and then proceeded onto to explore the museum. Though I don't know if I'd really call it a museum. I have a feeling that this mostly happened simply because we didn't have a great guide, but I'm not really sure what the museum was about.

Our guide began by explaining to us that this was not a museum of tangible objects, but rather a museum of smells, touches, experiences, etc., which seemed to make sense at first when you looked back at our experience of cooking the coconut cookies. All too soon however, I lost him. There were some pretty cool things that he showed us, but it seemed to be a random hodge podge as we walked around a field with a building in the middle of it.

One of the first things he showed us was this plant that grew these fruit-like bulbs, that looked a little like mamones chinos, that if you broke open, you would find small berries that had a red dye in them that people used for clothing and as make-up. Well, that cleared up the question of whether or not there was blood on his pants, we figured it was just the red dye. He also showed us how to know when a coffee bean is ripe for picking.

Next, he set us loose into a house with all of it's doors and windows closed and told us to open all of them. All of them were barred with a bar that came up and off of two supports on either side of the opening, which meant that when I tried to open a door in pitch black, the bar obviously fell and crashed to the ground. In response, the guide himself came crashing through the door I somehow managed to open to make sure everything was alright.

The house was a bit random as well, but some artifacts he brought out were cool. One was a ceramic doll with the number 13 and a horseshoe on the side. In American culture, this would be considered unlucky, but in Costa Rican culture, the number 13 is lucky, and the horseshoe as well. The moral of the story was that it all depends on perspective. This was followed by a can that was similar to a watering can, but the spout went downwards instead of up. We learned that this was to help bathe babies and pregnant women in the olden days. The last artifact was a wooden egg, which is apparently used for darning socks and by putting it in their nests, making chickens think they already laid an egg and responding to this by laying more.

Then, quite abruptly, the tour ended. It was interesting, but the concept of the museum, as the museum claims to be itself, was just a little too intangible for me.

Yesterday, the LPI group headed on over to the pool, which is located in something called El Palacio de Los Deportes. We spent our time swimming and just laying around, since the water was absolutely freezing cold. We're working on a scavenger hunt during our stay here, and my group agreed that I would make matching friendship bracelets for everyone, so I worked on the bracelets (I finished the last one today, now the question is if I should make one for myself...). We missed all the global impact students as well as the two-weekers, but there was nothing to be done.

Later yesterday, I tested my luck with my phone. While I was at the beach this weekend, we at some point put our things too close to the water, and as the tide got higher, our stuff got washed up and soaked in seawater (which is most of the reason why everything was soaking wet after our trip, and the fact that it started pouring after our trip to the beach). My camera somehow made it through barely wet, without being in a ziplock bag or anything. My phone, however, was not so lucky. Drenched with sea water, after I disassembled the phone some and dried off the surface, the inside of the screen started to fog up with water vapor after I took a hair dryer to it at the hotel. I kept drying the phone until the screen stopped fogging up. However, I was still not convinced. I didn't want to try running a current through the phone while there was salt water hidden inside, so I left the phone without a battery until I got home. I asked my host father to let me borrow a few handfuls of rice, and he helped me bury my phone within the dry rice, so any remaining moisture would be absorbed. I left the phone like this for a couple days, as I worried about the salt water. It'd be one thing if it was freshwater that had flooded my phone, but the salt from the water had the potential to be much more harmful. Most people say if you go as far as to drench your phone in salt water, you should first wash it out with freshwater to remove all the salt. I was too nervous to do that though. When I got home that evening, however, I risked turning on my phone, and to my absolute delight, it worked. Whether or not the rice helped, or I got most of the moisture out myself is unknown, but regardless, I'm not complaining.