Virtual Levin

Howdy! This is my firs post. My name is Marcy Green, I work on one of local nursing homes in the capacity of social worker.
Christmas is coming :)

Well, the second semester ended last Thursday (Aug 3) with presentations on projects from both Semesters. The second project I worked on was a managment plan for a farm that wanted to focus on sustainable agriculture as well as eco-tourism. This was the difficult one out of the two that I had worked on. Mostly because up until two weeks before our deadline, we really werent sure what the client was looking for.

There were four of us working on this project: 2 planners, 2 landscape architects. The farm is located on the Pacific Slope Trail and has a lodge there that can provide lodging to hikers. At this point there is the lodge with 16 bunk-beds, cooking facilities and bathrooms with showers. Our job was to document the existing conditions as well as design ways in which the farm can be improved for sustainable agriculture and eco-tourism.

I apologize for not posting earlier, the last two weeks have been very busy with course work. The project that I am working on required going out to our site several times--several times because the weather would not cooperate again. The first day we tried to survey the area, a thick fog rolled in. The kind of fog that is in scarey movies. The second day we tried to do our survey it started raining after we got to the site. We did our survey anyway but got soaked. Things are different here, not only because we are in a foreign country, but we dont have the luxury of a car that is easily available to us. So we end up doing a lot of walking and our site surveys take the better part of the day to finish.

I got back last week and was happy to be home. I'm glad that I spend some time with my grandparents, but I was truly getting tired of all the bureaucracy we had to endure during a simple visa registration, customs, passport controls.
Overall my trip was good with no bags stolen or lost, no major delays and lots of good summer weather.
Here is the link to pictures
http://avika.myphotoalbum.com/view_album.php?set_albumName=album02

Today is Saturday and I am the only student from our group in Monteverde. The others decided to travel to the Volcano Arenal. It rained all night and cleared up this morning. When I walked to the Monteverde Institute the sun was bright, the view was clear and I was hot by the time I got to the studio. Now, about an hour later, the mist is rolling in as I watch it from my desk on the second floor of the studio and I am wishing I had brought a sweater. For the most part it is quiet here, the bugs do their little buzzing thing, and you can hear birds chirping and screaming in the trees and there is some thunder in the distance. There is, however, a little industrial noise pollution but that is the price we have to pay for being within a 5 second walk from the Monteverde Cheese Factory where they have awesome cheese and even better ice cream.

It has rained to some extent everyday since we arrived. Today we woke up to rain and everything is wet and damp, and things just do not dry. Up until now we have had a lot of meetings to get oriented with our projects and yesterday afternoon we chose what projects we wanted to work on. The projects are: The Los Llanos-Santa Elena road side planting and trail improvements (this project involves designing and planning a trail that will be used as a walkway for elementary children on their way to school. Right now there are no trails and children are walking alongside the road where there is a lot of car traffic as well as large tourism bus traffic. This is my project and I will be working with a landscape architect student on this).

Hello. Originally I thought I would post this text and an attachment of the text with photos, but attachments take a long while to attach, so as soon as I figure it out, I will post it. I may be that I have to go to an internet cafe to do big attachments. Now, on to the post....

This will be my first post to Virtual Levin from Costa Rica. I arrived on May 28th and stayed with friends for one night. The following night I took a taxi about 15 minutes away, to a part of town that I was not familiar with, to the hotel (Apartotel de Esteyo) to meet the other students from the group. The other students arrived after 9 pm and we all walked a few blocks away to get some dinner.

Unfortunately I won't be able to post pictures, not until I come back. The weather here is very hot and humid. The number of automobiles has increased tremendously since my last visit and the city is very smoggy. I found out that people who live in this region get 15% added to their paychecks because they live in a heavily industrial region. My grandma says that when the local power plant used coal, oil and gas to heat up water to generate steam, the air quality in the city was much worse. Now the plant uses only gas.
60% of Orsk population has fruit and vegetable gardens ouside of the city. My grandparents have one also, about 15 min away from their apartment. There they grow everything from cherries to potatoes. Just two days ago we finished planting green peepers and eggplants.

We got here after 18 hours of travelling. Everything is changed here, but people are still the same. We went to the imigration center today to check-in and stood in line for two hours to find out that we don't have the right documents. Then my mom and I went to browse the city and found an internet club, yey. It costs 50 rubles for an hour, that't about $2. I'm happy to find this place so close to where we are staying. Next entry will have pictures I promise. The weather is about 20C or about 70F.
Thant's all for now.

I'm going to Russia and Ukraine for two weeks. I will upload images and update the blog to the best of my ability. I will spend a week in Orsk a small citi in Central Russia, where internet coffee shops are rare.
I think the world is drowning in the sea of blogs, yet I'm writing another one. I promise it will be concise and fun.
Thanks