Hola from 5 weeks done in Costa Rica! I can’t believe that we’ve been here for over a month, and only have another month to go — crazy how time flies. Here’s the recap from a pretty chill week:
On Sunday, we mostly just hung out around the hostel. Hannah and I went to the grocery store to get ingredients for GMI family dinner, which was *supposed to be* a roasted red pepper pasta. As part of the sauce, the internet told me it would be okay to add coconut cream instead of heavy whipping cream – this was not the case. It was insanely sweet and unsalvageable for a pasta sauce, so we ended up turning it into a “curry” (I wouldn’t even call it that, it was basically a smoothie) and making some rice. Afterwards, we went to Lolita for some dessert.
The work week was pretty relaxing. On Monday, we went to CENARE, the main rehabilitation hospital in San Jose, to work on blood pressure monitors. We did the standard routine — check the monitor with the simulator to make sure it works, and clean. Tuesday, we drove to Limon, a coastal town on the eastern coast. Here, we did more work on vitals monitors and anesthesia machines. The first anesthesia machine that we had to work on needed a lightbulb replacement, which sounds simple, but was not. On top of the anesthesia machine is a sheet of metal that covers the screws needed to be unscrewed to access the light bulb. After a half an hour of scraping the metal sheet off, we were finally able to unscrew the top off and change the lightbulb. I’ll include a picture of the destroyed metal hunk below! Since we got all of our work done on Tuesday night, we were able to spend Wednesday morning at the beach before heading back to San Jose. The beach was really rocky, which made swimming hard, but it was still super beautiful! I forgot to bring sunscreen on our trip, so I got super fried in the sun and had to miss work on Thursday since I didn’t feel well from that :(. I also had Friday off since there weren’t any technicians doing maintenance that day.
The hunk of metal we destroyed from anesthesia machine
Playa Bonita en Limon
Overall, my first month in Costa Rica has been an absolute blast and I’m so grateful to have the opportunity to explore this country. 5 more weeks to go, hasta luego!