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!