This weekend was truly a unique experience. Where Kyle, Rosa, Emily, and Izzy decided to go explore the Caribbean side of Costa Rica, me and Joyce stayed back with a plan of our own. Since Joyce and I had already visited the Caribbean on field work we decided to take advantage of out newly made friend Roberto. Roberto is a local from the city of Cartago who works in the seismic lab like us. He had offered to take me and Joyce the Volcano Irazu and then a visit to the his city to get a grand tour.
After another experience with public transportation, we picked Roberto up in Cartago and arrived at Irazu. It was really cool seeing what used to be an active volcano. As soon as we arrived, we made sure that we took advantage of the decent weather to check out the crater.
As soon as we saw the crater, 10 minutes later a cloud blew in and we were fully surrounded by fog. This was a cool neat experience on it own since we could not see anything around us.
After the volcano, we took a quick pit stop at an abandoned asylum on the way down the mountain. This was really cool because I am one of those people who likes to visit weird new jersey locations and they recently opened it to visit. Me, Joyce, and Roberto explored the abandoned asylum and then took a bus down to Cartago.
In Cartago, Roberto showed us various historical mouments, whether they were ruins of old buildings or the most beautiful churches in Costa Rica. Lucky for us, this was during a national wide holiday where people from around Costa Rica walk from their houses to this church in Cartago. It was amazing experiencing this holiday and they way locals celebrate.
After exploring Cartago, me and Joyce headed home and prepared for the week of work. We have been working on locating earthquakes everyday like I explained in my first blog post. It was very hard to be efficient at first, but I think me and Joyce are becoming quite the masters. In the upcoming weeks I feel like we will be professionals!