Personal Journal Week #4: My Week is In Ruins

Personal Journal Week #4:

While many of my fellow students are returning I am continuing to plow on in my Spanish courses. Next week my classes are switching from super intensive to regular classes in order to give me time to work on community projects and go out and practice using the language. Given all that I have learned over the past four weeks I am looking forward to having time to master some of these new concepts.

Well, as I stated in the title, this week my life is in ruins. Exploring ruins that is and I have three quick stories. Over the weekend I traveled to Turriabla. Turrialba is a small town located in the central mountains located near (can you guess it?) a volcano by the same name. While a major train hub that connected both the Caribbean ports to San Jose in the past, only the remnants of this history can be found in a few exposed tracks here and there. An earthquake much worse than the little tremble I felt a day earlier put an end to Costa Rica´s railroad network about eighty years ago. It was replaced by highways.

Today this quaint little town is know for sweet cheese (they feed the cattle bananas people don’t eat), white water rafting and canoeing (more on this in the coming weeks), and professional baseball bats. According to my guidebook Barry Bond’s record winning homer was hit with a bat (enhanced?) from this very town. As I wrote to my daughter, it can be a bit crazy at night. The locals enjoy large fire crackers that randomly go off and trigger car alarms. Sleeping here was an interesting experience, but I digress…

Anyway, the next day I hired a local guide Raul Garcia to take me out to Costa Rica’s largest and most significant ruins. As we headed out he told me that archeologists have only explored about four percent of the site. While nowhere near as extensive as larger cities in other parts of the Americas, archeologists estimate that Guayabo housed approximately 20,000 people. The site is interesting in that it:

• Was built in a lower area. Many of Mayan and Aztec cities were built high in order to survey the surrounding landscape and provide better defense. Apparently !Pura Vida! was not an entirely Spanish concept.
  
  
• No large temples or other religious structures have yet been discovered though archeologists believe a large rock near the market was used as either a sacrificial stone or form of capital punishment.
  





• The freshwater cisterns, which are more than two thousand years old (when cleaned out of sand) still work perfectly. Pretty cool.
• Was mysteriously abandoned around six hundred years ago. There are many theories but no concrete ones. My own twenty colones (two cents) would guess that the city collapsed as European diseases spread throughout the indegenous world shortly after contact.

While petroglyphs exist, archeologists have yet to crack the code. I headed back to San Jose with more questions than answers about this place. One follow up to this is that we saw quite a few bird including a group of toucans. One reason scientists are hesitant to dig up more of this area is because of the numerous species of rare tropical plants and animals supported here.



The Third Story Later on This Week: My Visit With the Lucky Lady La Negrita (Basilica de Nuestra Senora de los Angeles) in Cartago.



Okay, I am going to finish this story despite the fact I lost my camera (see the post for week 5). The Lucky Lady La Negrita (more formally known as Nuestra Senora de Las Angeles) is a small, beautiful, and quite mysterious artifact located in the main Basilica in Cartago. According to local sources Cartago is the oldest Spanish settlement in Costa Rica and was once the capital city. Unfortunately this city was located in an unstable area and many parts of it (including the origional basilica) have been repeatedly destroyed by volcanos and earthquakes. However, the Lucky Lady La Negrita has surrvived it all to inspire and heal in this region. In fact, there is a story that she even returned to the exact location after being stolen by a local writer. I took several pictures of her and of local pilgrims profering to her on their knees but those photos mysteriously disappeard in a local taxi (actually I probably forgot to get my camera - but why did I forget? Hmmm....). Anyway I am content to believe that my images of the Lucky Lady La Negrita were returned along with my camera to do important work here in Costa Rica.

¡Pura Vida!