Our biodynamic conference is winding down, finally marking the end of the insanity here, at least for awhile. Three straight weeks of having every room filled and working as a hotel manager has me exhausted! The exhaustion certainly led to a nice change of pace, though! I can hardly believe that February is most of the way over!

Also, I have all sorts of plans churning in my head for the near future. Dr. Aaron Katz, of Columbia University, has hired me as a virtual assistant, meaning that I am now working two jobs. Somehow I am attending school full-time online and working two jobs. I can hardly believe it myself! As long as I can work everything out, I will probably take a full-time job that Dr. Katz is offering me when I get back from Costa Rica and work for his new company doing public relations and marketing in New York City until the summer is over. I am pretty excited! Plus, I am going to graduate from college with such a killer resume.

On non-business related terms, things here have been really good generally. My Spanish is improving by leaps and bounds and we got so busy that Steven hired a really nice 20-year-old office assistant named Rebecca. We are becoming fast friends and she is trying to learn English while I learn Spanish. She asked if I wanted to come to her Salsa dancing class with her tonight and I think I probably will. Despite my attempts to prove otherwise, I am not all business all the time!

This week will also mark my move from my host family's house to the hotel. Now that I have seen how suffocating being at work all day, every day can be I am not sure if I actually want to move, though! I'll have to consider it, since I really like Walter and Giselle and I would miss them if I moved out permanently. Also, Gianna is coming to stay with me starting on March 1 and I am so excited to see somebody from home! I gave her a list of things I really missed from the US (Sour Patch Kids and hair dye, mostly) and hopefully she will pick up the things on it and bring them for me!! At least the hair dye, because I think people are beginning to suspect that I am not naturally platinum blonde after two months of root growth!

The pace of my life here has very quickly shifted from unbearably slow to unreasonably fast! For the past two straight weeks, we have been hosting conferences for our partner company New Chapter. For the first week, we had big organic business owners hike through the Monteverde Cloud Forest to Luna Nueva. They were inaugurating a new biological corridor that Whole Foods purchased to connect our rainforest to a huge preserve, so the owners of Whole Foods were here, as well as Discovery Channel hosts, other organic business owners, and New York Times reporters. There will be an article about the hike coming up pretty soon in the business section of the New York Times! Keep an eye out for it!

In between, some journalists from a magazine called Natural Solutions came to stay and we all had a great time together. One evening we went to the Tabacon Hot Springs and went swimming in a naturally hot river and had a huge buffet dinner together.

Now, I am at a conference on ethnomedicine with lots of cancer researchers, ethnobotanists, and doctors. I have been watching lots of interesting presentations about natural cancer cures and have been learning a ton about plants. Last night the whole gang and some of the cooks' kids and I went to Lake Arenal for an evening boat ride around the lake. We had a great time and watched the volcano erupt up close! Today at 1 we are all going up to the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve to explore a different type of forest than the one I live in. I am very excited!

Things have been pretty crazy and show no signs of slowing down anytime soon, but I am excited and happy. I have gotten a couple summer job offers from the folks I have been meeting but all of them are in Vermont or New York City. Maybe I will have to spend my summer elsewhere? I really want to take a job in New York!

I hope everyone is doing well and I apologize I have been hard to get in touch with lately! I posted some pictures from the farm and of the boating trip last night, check them out!

pray(ing mantis) for my stomach!

I have caught a horrible stomach bug from drinking bad Costa Rican water but it's okay because yesterday I did my homework for online school with a praying mantis. I found him on my textbook and he was as big as my hand! South America has notoriously large bugs, after all. Also, they have some killer stomach viruses, as illustrated by the fact that all I ever do anymore is throw up!

I hope I am not too sick to see Daddy Yankee (a popular reggaeton artist) perform this weekend!

Pictures, Ziplining, Toucan Battles

First off, my flickr account is apparently full, so I have posted some new pictures here: http://picasaweb.google.com/kellykay1

Other than that, here is an update: I went ziplining and it was SO SCARY! When I went it was pouring rain, so I could barely see as I flew through the rainforest! The rain made it really hard to stop, too, so it was like I was flying a half mile or so at a time, hanging by a thin cord, and wondering if I would actually be able to stop myself! I don't think I will ever do it again, but it is recommended if you are looking for a serious adrenaline rush. Also we rode horses on the way back down the mountain, which was really hard in wet shorts and I got some minor irritations on my thighs from the saddle. It's all part of the adventure, I suppose.

Also, yesterday I witnessed a toucan battle to the death. I walked up to these two fighting birds and they were so engaged in battle that they didn't care that I was standing just inches away from them. Later Steven told me they were fighting for dominance, but one had it's feet around the others' huge bill and they were screaming and pecking each other. It was a very National Geographic style moment and I didn't even have my camera!

Speaking of National Geographic, I entered Luna Nueva in a sustainable tourism contest they are having and also simultaneously entered myself in a contest to win a trip to any sustainable tourist destination in the world. As far as I can see, not very many other people have entered, so maybe I will win! As for work, the busy season is quickly approaching which is tiring and exciting and hopefully I will able to rise to the challenge. Take care, guys!

Hello blogosphere!
I recently learned about the blogosphere, the complex web woven by blogging. If you'd like to see a picture of it, you can do so here: http://brandingme.files.wordpress.com/2007/06/blogosphere.jpg

Aside from contributing to the blogosphere, I have been doing other things too. We finally have guests which has meant a lot of entertaining! Throughout my young life, I have gotten pretty good at entertaining and hanging out and cooking people food and making them coffee is so nice! We have an Irish actress staying here right now and she's a vegetarian so we picked rainforest greens and I made us a great salad and later today we are going to take a canopy tour. This means we are ziplining through the canopy of the rainforest, and since most of the biodiversity is located in the canopy, we will see lots of monkeys and snakes and other cool animals that you miss from the vantage point of the floor.

Also, we took four elderly botanist women on a tour of the medicinal plant garden yesterday and they all knew so many cool things about plants! And lastly, Fabien (our hotel manager) had his entire extended family staying here, so his girlfriend and I made them and all our other guests lots of pizzas in our outdoor clay oven and everybody went in the pool together.

Life is pretty nice, is basically the point of this entry. I never sleep anymore and I feel pretty bad that I barely see Walter and Giselle anymore, but I have been so busy. Amber the Irish actress told me that if you're doing what you love, you'll never work a day in your life, and lately I haven't felt like I've been working at all. I obviously have a lot of life to live but at some point I think I'd be really happy building a big ecofriendly house and opening a vegetarian bed and breakfast somewhere in the distant future.

As for today, wish me luck as I am hanging hundreds of feet above the ground in a harness searching for wildlife!

Lately I have started doing my work outdoors on my laptop which I think has led to me feeling a lot happier and less cooped up but also less self-conscious about doing things like updating my blog during work hours. Today I have a million resumes to read; we are hiring a new hotel manager and I am in charge of paring down the applicant pool for interviews. Steven has also given me a laundry list of administrative work that needs to get done which means I will have to leave my machete in the shed for awhile. I don't mind too much.

In other news, I am constantly being offered jobs here. We had these absurd American jacuzzi repairmen staying here and trying to fix the solar heating on our jacuzzi and they told me that if I ever wanted to come back to Costa Rica they needed more Americans to work at Solar Costa Rica. I don't think I'd want to work for them but it was a nice offer. More importantly, I just had a really pleasant phone conversation with somebody who at the end of the call revealed to me that he was the CEO of New Chapter and that he was very excited to meet me and needed a new intern. He also just got back from Portland where he was spending some time with his good friend, the CEO of New Seasons (a quickly growing local organic grocery store chain), and mentioned the prospects of work for me in Portland as well. I knew this job could lead to some potential job opportunities, but I have plugged into a crazy network of environmentally friendly corportations, the owners and CEOS of all of which are old friends of my boss!

And, on a personal note, I made a birthday cake for Walter and Giselle (they have the same birthday and it was yesterday) and we had a really nice birthday party where lots of their family members came to visit for a few days and we ate a lot of food and played cards. Emilie and I caught some tadpools and she is very excited to watch them for proof of the fact that they are baby frogs and not fish. My family took me to Fortuna, where there is an awesome active volcano that you can see from the tower at Luna Nueva, and I saw it up close and also got to spend some time in a popular tourist area. I got a phone call in the office a few days ago and Daniel, the younger brother of an old friend, is living to Costa Rica and moved to Fortuna this weekend for work. It is the closest big city to me and I can take a single, short bus ride to visit him. I am honestly a little nervous about traveling alone, but the trip is short enough and I am going to make sure to do it during daylight hours in both directions. I will probably go next weekend.

I hope everybody is doing well and I have started taking a new batch of pictures (we have some really cute baby chickens right now) which I will get up within the week.

Kelly

Machete

I have been doing such difficult labor lately and there is only more in store, as I can tell from the fact that today I got my very own machete. I hope we start having guests so I stop having occasions to use the machete and just get to carry it around with me places instead. We had a tour yesterday for the first time since I got here and the hotel was buzzing with such a nice of feeling of people getting things done and cooking big meals and practicing their English. The guests were a couple from Washington DC who traveled all the way here to see our garden because they are really into the company that buys all of our organic herbs and sells them in the United States, New Chapter.

After four hours of cutting and moving and digging and planting, I am off work for the day and my weekend starts momentarily. I don´t have any plans, as usual, but will probably get in some good reading and spend some time with my family. It is getting pretty hot out and I might take the opportunity to swim in the resort´s freshwater pool.

Things are still really lonely here but next month we are booked solid with conferences and the month after I have slowly but surely assembled an amazing cast of visitors to keep me company. Furthermore, this morning my parents changed my ticket home, so I will be returning home on May 7, 2008 instead of June 1, 2008. Changing the ticket makes me feel sort of cowardly, but it is still a very long time to be in a foreign country and I haven´t decided to give up and go home immediately. I just don´t think I will want to be here for all of May once it rolls around. I guess even if it makes me a little bit of a coward, the prospect of my newly changed ticket has eased a lot of my anxiety about living here.

I hope everybody is well,
Kelly