Nicole's Adventures

The rest of my time in Costa Rica was awesome and a little dried than before, thank goodness! And to update you... I didn't have any problems with my ATM cards, turns out it was all of the three machines in Monteverde which apparently don't accept mastercard even though the banks say they do! Crisis averted :) I spent my birthday on a bus and a boat gtting to Montezuma. Montezuma was soo cute, and small. The atomsphere was fabulous.  I headed to the beach as soon as I arrived and met some French Canadians who were throwing a frisbee. We went out to dinner and they treated me to my bday dinner. After, I hung out with an Aussie I met in my hostel and the bar made sure to play their cheesy "feliz cumpleanos" song and some free shots of Casique.. the Costa Rican sugar cane rum.. Which is quite rough, kind of like rubbing alcohol. The days after that I enjoyed a waterfall hike with Adam, the Aussie, days on the beach, and a snorkeling tour. After Montezuma, I headed...

HOLA from Costa Rica! Pura Vida is the perfect way to describe this country. It is so easy going and laid back, friendly and just lovable. I can see why so many tourists love this place. The first week Tyler and I were here we did a little tour of San Jose, mostly it´s just a typical city. We walked around and found an adorable pink school, and all sorts of crazy hustle and bustle traffic. The next morning we headed straight to the beach on the carribean side. We enjoyed relaxing so much over there that we decided to make the most of his short time away and hang out there for a week. During the week we spent time surfing, biking, and visiting a jaguar rescue center. We didn´t see any jaguars there but got to play with baby monkeys, see an anteater, owls, snakes, red eyed frogs, sloths, and toucans! It was really awesome. The people there were so sweet and so much fun. Tyler got to learn how to climb a coconut tree and use a machete to get to the stuff out of the coconut!  For Tyl...

Happy September :) I just returned back from a road trip to Wisconsin with my mom but more on that later! Let's get everyone caught up on the last two months!  The rest of the SSP summer went really smoothly. There were very few major hiccups during the weeks of campers. We did have a bit of some challenges during week 6, which is the last week of campers and when all the projects are supposed to be completed. We had a day and a half of rain.. so one day all the projects had to hang out in the gym.. We had a team help the cooks prepare lots of meals for the week, and another two teams helped do some cleaning at the senior center, but the rest hung out and played games. The next day, most of the teams except roofing and painting were able to do some work. However, this time was essential for finishing our projects in time.. Because of this delay and a few other material delivery delays, we had half a roof to finish, lots of balusters to be placed on a deck, and some touch up pai...

As always, time is flying! The second week of campers have just left. Being a site director is a little bit different than I pictured it but nonetheless I'm definitely enjoying myself and keeping extremely busy and pretty much disconnected from the real world. Two weeks ago my cell phone decided not to turn on. I left it off for a week. Now it is turning on but some things are erased like the pictures, and some things like music and a few apps are still on the phone. An error message keeps popping up. I have a backup verizon phone to use that someone sent to me but I haven't tried to hard to connect it yet. I'm kind of enjoying being phoneless. I was already pretty disconnected because I had terrible cell phone reception but then also because our internet is extremely slow. We have two 3g wifi hot spots among seven people means very slow, if at all any internet. Our first week went really well. It is definitely weird to be in the position of power and having 6 li...

I cannot believe it’s that time again.. time to pack my bags and leave. The week before leaving is the absolute worst. I feel like i’ve finally adjusted to being home, and have happy friends, love my job, and enjoying spending time with my parents.. But that is exactly when it’s the perfect time to leave. Being in my comfort zone means it’s time to push myself to the limits and head onto new adventures. My LA plans have kind of gone kaputz… Sooo i’ll be working on sorting something out tonight. Many friends are busy and have flaked. Hopefully everything works out. I will be in LA for 3 days then San Fransisco for 6 days, is the plan right now. After my days in San Francisco I will head onto Sacramento via train to begin my summer as a Sierra Service Project Site Director on June 9th. While my adventures in Arizona aren’t quite the same as my traveling adventures they have still been a blast! I was participating in Ultimate Frisbee League and my team made it to semi finals on th...

I arrived in Cambodia after a very long journey from Dalat, Vietnam. I had taken a bus to get to Ho Chi Minh City, then met with Royce, and bought a ticket to continue onto a night bus to get to Siem Reap. For the first time, the bus attendant requested he hold everyone's passport for the journey so it would make everything easier at the border. I was absolutely terrified, also had to pay cash for the visa cost. In my guide books it advises to never give your passport to be held or pay cash because the bus company will keep them, and then you have to pay the border control again.. Well, I asked around, everyone else waiting for the bus had done this.. Soo I unwillingly gave them my passport. This sleeping bus was much better than the Laos Vietnam journey because I had a double section to myself. Some friendly german guys were across from me, and we ended up becoming quite close during the journey. There were random noises and I just couldn't sleep for whatever reason. It was ...

Althugh I only spent about two weeks or more in Laos, I found it absolutely charming. I entered Laos via a river crossing from the North part of Thailand. I did one of the “bucket list” backpacker epic journeys spending about 16 hours floating on a huge house boat down the Mekong River to reach Luang Prabang. The border crossing was very relaxed and there were no surprises unlike Vietnam. Paid the fees, attached the necessary documents, and was admitted. After being admitted I made my way to the house boat dock. Despite taking the first bus out of Chiang Rai, I still barely made it in time for the house boat. I didn’t have a ton of time to stock up on food. I did grab a sandwich… which the rest of my trip had these delicious sub sandwiches on every corner! Thank you France for the bread influence! Unfortunately my seat on the houseboat wasn’t super comfy and my neighbor had her head phones in the whole day. There was a group of rowdy kiddos at the back but the engine was soo loud back...

Sooo I'm still missing a few pieces of the puzzle on my blog to get you all up to date! I need to blog about Cambodia and Laos. I'm still waiting on a few friends to put up their pictures so I can put together an awesome video like i've done in the past for each country. Time just always seems to slip away so fast and my calendar fills up like crazy! I returned home Dec 17th and again managed to kick jet lag in the but by sleeping lots and lots on the long plane trips, and by staying up the entire night before taking off early at 5am Vietnam time! The first food I ate was a huge Chipotle Burrito followed by a nice little dinner that my mom set up for me with some family friends at Oreganos.. I felt like i've never stuffed my face like that before, and topped everything off with a pizookie (or pizza cookie, a somewhat unbaked cookie fresh out of the oven with ice cream on top). That week I enjoyed spending time with my brothers after they returned from Tucson, a family...

THAILAND! What a land indeed. :P I met a sweet girl named Ploy this weekend at my Ultimate Frisbee tournament in Phoenix who is from Thailand which inspired me to get my blog about Thailand up soon!! We talked about a lot of things and it was really interesting to hear some of the things she had to say and different ways we saw her country. Thailand was insanely beautiful! There is such a wide variety of landscapes, sights and scenery. I flew into Phuket from Manila and decided to book (I believe one of the two times I booked a place to stay in advanced) a hotel close to the airport instead of making the mini trek closer to the main parts of Phuket.. I was soo happy I did that because the beach was incredible! The water was perfectly teal and I had a beautiful long run along the beach in the morning and enjoyed the sunshine for the first time since Ppines didn't show me a whole lot of sunshine. After that I headed towards the infamous Patong to meet up with Daphne! I had no ide...

Hmm, writing about Vietnam is something that I find harder so far than other things. As I mentioned in my frienship village post, I'm currently reading a book titled, The Girl in the Picture which I've been learning more and more about which has made me kind of change the way I think about my experience in Vietnam. I arrived in Vietnam via an 31 hour overnight/ day bus leaving from Vang Vieng, Laos at 1pm. Arriving in Hanoi around 6pm the next day. It was an interesting bus journey for sure. Thank goodness there were two dutch girls on the journey with me. But i'll save the rest of that story for the Laos blog.. I decided to tag along with the girls from the bus journey to the hostel they had booked. Turned out to be an excellent one where you could meet tons of people but it was huge! I think, 7 or 8 stories, a huge lounge, computer lab, outside hang out, a bar downstairs, luggage storage, etc. The next morning the girls and I went on a walking tour of the Old...