A New Year

I must admit, it has been a long, hard start to the year, with many complications and adaptations, but I feel that I'm finally beginning to settle down once more.

The first years all arrived safely and were welcomed warmly, and it's hard to think of this place as  UWCCR without them!  They're so adventurous and seem to radiate energy, which is exactly what we need as stressed second years!

Trimester four is over- the most important trimester for those applying to study in the U.S or Canada (like me.)  It has been an exhausting term, full of surprises on the way.  Nonetheless, I managed to trudge through it, with only the thought of what exciting adventures were to come ahead once work levels subsided. 

I will fill you in on what's happened so far this year..

Roblealto

Each year, all of the students and many of the staff attend camp 'Roblealto'.  It gives us time off campus to reflect on our decisions so far, and to create a bond with those around us.  The camp is located high up in the mountains, and so it's very cloudy and gets rather cold during the nights!

I must admit, it's one of my favourite times of the year, because it gives me a chance to get down in the dirt (quite literally) and have fun.

The camp only lasts for two days, but we make the most out of it!  Each day is jammed full with fun activities, as seen in the pictures below! 

Generations 15'-16'

Big Fat Pony!

Costa Rica's Independence Day:

Shortly after we arrived back on campus, after an exhausting but fantastic time, UWC Costa Rica lead Costa Rica's independence parade around Santa Ana- the town where the school's situated.

It was such a beautiful day full of cultural sharing, as the students paraded the streets holding their flags high, whilst wearing their national costumes with pride!

It's a little unfortunate that my Welsh national costume is made of wool, and so it was rather challenging to walk under the blazing 30+ degree sun, while essentially wearing a sheep!!

Here are a few pictures of the day!

Europe!  (and Sudan haha)

My Buddy Diego (Mexico)

My roomates!
Yifei (China) and Mona (Norway)

Here are the times that weren't listed on the school's calendar, but nonetheless were important to me: 

On this day, we celebrated Diwali with our friend Amiya from India!  It was such an important day for her, as it is considered the biggest and most important holiday of the year in India, which signifies the victory of light of darkness, knowledge over ignorance, good over evil, and victory over despair.

It was really interesting to hear about this wonderful holiday, along with its traditions!

Each year at UWCCR, an event called 'Blind Date' is held.  This entails a second year to go on a 'date' with a randomly selected first year, in order to get to know someone you haven't talked to yet.  This was a fantastic incentive, as the night proved successful, with many students walking away with smiles on their faces after making a new friend.  

The way that this worked, was that second years were given a first year each by drawing from a hat, and the second year had to keep it secret.  The second year would then send the first year an invitation to go, with a dress code and a place and time to meet.  In my case, our dress code was 'masked ball attire'.  My blind date was Cruz from Guatemala and the U.S.  We had a fantastic night full of great conversations and great food.  I hope that there will be another event like this sometime again this year.

Welshies

It's so nice to have someone from the same country as me here.  It's crazy how well we get along!  The best part is the fact that we can speak Welsh to one another, which is a great comfort considering we're both so far away from home.  

Whenever I speak to Morwenna, I feel that I'm in Wales again!  She reminds me of me in my first year a lot, and everybody says so too!  

Here's a picture of us below! 

My Welsh First Year, Morwenna!

Service Day

Tomorrow, on Thursday the 13th of November, I will be volunteering in Poas national park alongside 20 other students.  Our aim is to maintain the paths and rid the area of rubbish, so that the area remains completely natural, causing no disturbance to the biodiversity living in the area.  I am looking forward to doing this, as I will be able to see Poas volcano once more!  

It truly is a wonderful place, and I hope to gain a lot from the experience tomorrow!

Coming Soon..

The students have a break coming up soon, and so many of us are heading to the southern, Caribbean side of Costa Rica, to a place called Puerto Viejo.  I have been there once before, on a short trip at the end of last year with my friends, but did not get to explore all of the white-sanded beaches.  

This time, I hope to snorkel, and see more of the biodiversity that Costa Rica has to offer!

Hasta luego!
  Keep Reading! 

Dilly Hoyt

Project Week

This week, I travelled along with twenty eight other people to Monteverde cloud forest, located in the North of Costa Rica.

We left at 5am monday morning, and travelled around five hours, jumping from minibuses and taxis to public buses.  After all of this travelling, we were dropped off at the beginning of the trail, which we followed by foot until we reached our accommodation for the week.

The walk was absolutely beautiful-it was one of the first times that I had explored a cloud forest.  Throughout the two hour hike, I saw many creatures: monkeys, lizards, frogs and birds.  Some of them I filmed, like the spider monkeys, (although it's refusing to upload!)

Each day, we worked from 8am until 11.45am maintaining the paths weaving through the forests.  Lunch was at 12pm, which should I mention, was delicious!  After lunch, we'd then go out and work again until 4pm.

Maintaining the path involved widening it,  which required many shovels, pickaxes and rakes.  the majority of us ended up with blisters and sores on our hands from all of the hard work, but it was definitely worth it!  The difference between the path before and after was incredible!

Whilst working on the path, we came across many creatures..

We had hundreds of moths each night visit us on the balcony.  The diversity of species that lived in Monteverde was incredible!


This project week was perfect, as not only did we give to the community, but we also had plenty of time to ourselves, which enabled me to read- a thing that I hadn't done since arriving here six months ago!
Each morning I'd get up to sit on the hammock and read my book, whilst occasionally watching the cloud's shadows pass by on volcano Aronal.
It became quite chilly at night, which was a lovely change from the radiating sunshine and still, humid air back on campus.  It amazed me, the contrast between the environment there, and a few miles away up the path.  Mark, a scientist who worked to protect El Bosque Eterno los niños, spoke to us about how different the biodiversity is from one side of a mountain in Monteverde to another.  The difference between biodiversity was so vast that you could have easily assumed that he was talking about another country when looking at the species list of both areas.
Mark gave an interesting presentation about the mysterious decline of amphibians in the 1980's (not only in Costa Rica, but around the world!)  We discussed several possibilities of factors that could have affected the amphibians, and came to the conclusion that it was not only one factor that affected them, that many factors had played an active role in the declination of amphibians.  These being things like climate change, the depletion of the ozone and disease.
He then gave interesting statistics about Monteverde.  It turns out that although Monteverde is 0.0048% of the Earth's surface, there are over 100 species of mammals, 400 species of birds, and 1,200 species of amphibians and reptiles living within its bounds.  It's one of the few remaining habitats that support all six species of the cat family- jaguars, ocelots, pumas, oncillas, margays and jaguarundis-as well as the endangered three-wattled bellbird and resplendent quetzal.
Overall, I had an absolutely incredible time with awesome people-many of whom I got to know a lot better.  I hope to do many more activities like this over the next year and a half, as it has just made me realise that there is so much more of Costa Rica to see that I haven't explored.. YET!

Keep Reading! 

       Dilly x

Sorry it's been so long!

The Turtle Expedition to Cameronal Beach

From the 30th of December to the 5th of January, I went on an expedition along with ten other students from UWCCR to Cameronal- a beach on the Pacific side of Costa Rica which is well known for its nesting sea turtles.
Here, we volunteered each day, from beach cleaning, to fixing mountain trails. Whilst each night, we patrolled Cameronal beach in search of Olive Ridley Sea turtles which are most commonly found at early hours of the morning on the shore, laying between 70-100 eggs each time.
We were split into two groups for the night patrols; one group took and earlier shift, whilst the other took the later, and each night, we alternated.  Fortunately, I was in the group which managed to see at least one turtle nest each night, the other group on the other hand only managed to see one turtle the whole time being there, and that was the last night when both groups patrolled the beach together!
When we spotted a nesting Olive Ridley turtle (the most common species in the area,) we allowed it to dig its hole for the turtle eggs, and let it begin the process of laying eggs.  Whilst this happens, the turtle goes into a stage similar to a trance, where it cannot feel or see much, and so carefully, we extracted the eggs from the nest, placed them in a plastic bag, and took them to the nesting ground, which is a fenced off area which gives the baby turtles the best chance of survival.  The reason we did this was because the beach is home to hundreds of racoons; each hungry raccoon wants turtle eggs for breakfast, lunch and dinner!  They were so greedy, that they ate the turtle eggs as they're falling out of turtle!
The only way to stop them from doing this was to spot the turtle before she started laying, so that we could scare off the racoons and reach the eggs before they do.  Once we transported them to the nesting ground, we placed the eggs in a specific area, chronologically, so that the people who worked at the beach full-time knew when the turtles would hatch.

This was a fantastic experience, as not only did I get to continue with my research on sea turtles, but I also got to know many of my co-years a lot better over the five days. 

My December Break

Since the very day I left campus, I was eager to come back!  I missed everything about the place, but mainly the people!  It was weird being in the U.S.A, where none of my friends lived- as one of the most beautiful things about living here is the fact that your friends are literally 3 metres away from you, and so if you ever get lonely, you can pop in to see them and have a great conversation.  Whereas, many of my nights in the U.S (at the beginning of the holiday) were either spent twiddling my thumbs, or watching Breaking Bad (although I do love Breaking Bad..)

My holiday then got a lot more exciting when I took a bus to Chicago, then a train from Union Station to Urbana to visit my friend Mara from UWCCR!  I had a wonderful time!  I met many of her friends back at home, watched her high school play a basketball game, and visited her high school, which was nothing like high school musical should I mention!

It was a very beautiful yet short adventure, which ended with a hug goodbye, and meeting my father for the first time since I left for Costa Rica, at the bus station in Chicago.  It was such a surreal moment, looking out of the bus window to find my dad standing in the snow with his colourful beanie hat on, wearing his well-known, gigantic smile on the slightly pink face of his.

I realized then, how much I missed him.  But the most beautiful moment of all was the fact that just about everything was the same between us.  We still had our same old jokes and he still treated me the way he did before, yet there was a certain something that was different- he understood that I had grown up a lot and was now a lot more independent, so that making decisions came very naturally to me now.  

The whole train ride back to Michigan was spent reading ebooks on our kindles, just as we once did , four months earlier.

But I'm sidetracking now, the whole point of this blog is to describe my experiences in Costa Rica, and so I'll continue with my adventures..

First Year Show

Soon after arriving back on campus, my co-years and I began frantically arranging our meant-to-be-secret first year show which, if you don't know, is a compilation of acts put together in order to entertain our second years.

We went about this by practicing in classrooms at night, or meeting in obscure places during lunch time. Unfortunately, the second-years caught on immediately, which meant that our cover was blown, and our unexpected, spectacular show, became expected, but nonetheless spectacular!

We had altogether around 20 acts, consisting of dancing, singing, poems and mimes- some entertaining, whilst others were emotional.  I  participated in a few acts, a Bollywood dance whom my friends Amiya from India, and Peppi from Finland choreographed, the year-group dance which everyone participated, including the second years who joined in, after watching us dance the routine a couple of times.  My main act was accompanying Mara and Pele (Ghana) to a Les Miserables compilation of three songs which I mashed-up a couple of days beforehand.  

It was silly how we didn't think about the lighting of the room before hand- it was terrible, and so my seven page piece which was relatively easy became a nightmare in the dark!  Although I played awfully, Mara and Pele compensated by singing tunefully!

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed performing in the first year show, and I'm sure that the second years enjoyed watching too!

Mal Pais Party

A couple of weeks ago, one of the residences had its annual party.  Where there was chocolate fondue, live D-Jing, and even a fire show!  The majority of the school attended this event.  

The theme was a traffic light party; you wore green if you were single, yellow if it was complicated and red if you were in a relationship.  This was a lot of fun, but I was very tired by the end of it, and so I ended up in bed by 11pm-my earliest night here yet! 

Trimester 2 Ends

It's crazy how time flies by here so quickly, one minute you're counting down the days until you're reunited with your family, whilst the next, you're counting down how many days you have left with your friends at UWCCR!
The months have flown by, and trimester two is already over!  This means only one thing, a very long and grueling trimester three is about to begin, meaning lots of studying and less socialising!
If this means getting into a good university, so be it!

Service Week

This week, I will be heading out to Monte Verde on my service week along with another 20+ students. During this period, we will do many things, such as clearing the mountain trails, hiking and maintaining the National Park.  There is also a beautiful waterfall near the guest house that we'll be staying at, or so I have heard.  You'll hear a lot more about that next week upon my arrival back on campus!

Wild Creatures on Campus

I think that I should do a weekly article on this topic alone, as I have come across so many strange yet wonderful creatures in the small proximity of this campus.

Here captured, a mother scorpion found in Lucas' shoe along with at least another 80+ baby scorpions.  Luckily, no animals (including humans) were harmed during the making of this photograph, eve though the scorpion was awfully close to my feet at this point..

Here, if you look closely, you will see an iguana behind the toilet!!  Haha, apparently, last year, there was one in the showers, but this year they've gone for somewhere with a little more objects to hide behind!  Who can blame the poor soul for wanting to do its business hygienically!

Thanks for reading!Dilly x