ONE month in Santa Teresa!

I'm sitting down inside air-conditioned RendeVous Cafe with a watermelon and mango juice while Amber is just outside painting with an art teacher. Amber got inspired last week to express her creativity and we chanced upon this art teacher's advertisement at the cafe entrance. She's a young Costa Rican lady and by judging from her body language, she seems to know what she's doing. However, I've come to trust less and less my own impressions of people behind their appearances. I tend to attribute negatively more often.

We returned our 24 hour rental ATV this afternoon. BOY, was it fun riding it over the mountains to Montezuma yesterday - Even though Amber and I spent most of the afternoon being annoyed at each other. She had wanted to ride it first probably because she didn't completely trust me riding it safely. Only problem is I got really peeved when she discovered that she had been riding with the parking brake on almost halfway over the mountain. The ride was noticeably less labored with it off. She also doesn't use the full range of gears available and I have to remind her constantly to go up a gear (She does this with her Hyundai back home too and I get tired of reminding her). It's not something I can easily ignore either because the sound of a straining engine drives me nuts! And she drives at the speed limit! 25km/h. NObody drives 25km//h here. Other vehicles zoom past us which makes me nervous, and she stops in the middle of intersections to look at trees or directly over bridges to watch the "beaaautiful" cascading streams. Then when it's my turn she tells me "You're going too fast!" or "Keep to the left of the road!" which drives me insane because I don't think she drives better than I do. I do think I'm a pretty awesome drive by the way, and I probably want some validation and get irritated when I don't get any! We get back to Mal Pais late yesterday and straighten things out successfully. Clearly this is a very one-sided account of what happened so you'll have to read Amber's blog for her point of view.

It didn't stop us from having an amazing time though. We both loved riding the quad and just riding it in the middle of dense jungle with no one in sight was such an exotic experience.

In Montezuma, we stopped at an organic cafe and had some great food and cold drink. It had such a good, loving vibe (as indicated in the shop sign) and made us think about having our own. The town felt rather seedy though. Young local tico men could tell we were new and several helpfully came up to ask if we wanted some ganja.

Back to today...

So Casey had a quick once over when he picked the quad up from our agreed meeting place. Amber and I were a little tense about wearing out that parking break and didn't tell him. Yikes. It wasn't discovered and we left it at that. I really enjoyed having the quad and didn't want to return it. I might rent it again next week.