¡Hola a todos! This week I will be writing about my trip to Irazu Volcano and more updates on my projects at Establishment Labs.

Highlights:

• Trying a torta chilena for the first time
• The monster of a sandwich I had at Papadog
• Somehow finding the correct bus back to San Jose from Cartago after following a random woman with a pink backpack

Lowlights:

• The water in the main crater at Irazu being dried up
• Getting altitude sickness??
• The cookies and cream ice cream at Pops

Irazu Volcano National Park

On Saturday morning the GMI crew all took a trip to Irazu Volcano National Park, which is the tallest volcano in Costa Rica. We first met up in San Jose to take a 2 hour bus ride from there to Irazu. The weather up there was surprisingly cold, it was only in the high 40s when we got there! We first walked by the smaller crater, Diego de la Haya. It was a small crater with a small pond in the middle. We then saw the main crater, which was far more impressive, however, to our disappointment the bright blue water that is typically shown in photos to be in the crater was all dried up. Next to the crater was Playa Hermosa, a large flat area with black sand. We all had a good time taking in the pretty views, however, by the time we were hiking back to the parking lot, we were dead tired and some of us even had headaches. Considering it we were so high up in altitude (~11000ft), we thought it was because the air was thinner. We took a break at a small cafe in the park and I got a torta chilena, which is a dessert made with layers of pie pastry filled with caramel in between the layers. It was sweet, crumbly, and very good! Finally, we took two buses to get back, one from Irazu to Cartago, and then another from Cartago to San Jose. 

Diego de la Haya Crater

Main Crater

GMI pic at Irazu

Torta Chilena

After heading back to San Jose we decided to go to Escazu for dinner. Vanessa and I were finally able to show the rest of our cohort our abode, and then we walked over to PapaDog, which was a food stand that serves hot dogs and hamburgers in crazy portion sizes. I ordered the pepito, which was an enormous sandwich consisting of beef, chicken, bacon, ham, lettuce, tomato, cheese, and a fried egg. After this filling meal, we ate ice cream at a Pops that was next to the food stand.

Pepito from Papadog

Establishment Labs

This week at Establishment Labs, Vanessa and I took a trip to Tips with our team lead. Tips is essentially a big warehouse store full of different cooking supplies and utensils, and we went there to find prototyping inspiration for the new insertion sleeve. As someone who enjoys cooking, it was cool seeing so many kitchen tools and gadgets gathered in one place. We first went around the store and grabbed anything that seemed useful, and then we sorted out which items we actually wanted to buy to use for our prototypes. We then went to a second kitchen utensil store, however, it was much smaller than Tips and we weren’t able to find anything of use. This was an interesting way of finding inspiration for brainstorming or prototyping, and it is definitely something I would consider doing for my projects at Rice. Later in the week we had a couple of meetings discussing what we wanted to do with the supplies we had bought, and we plan on prototyping and modifying them next week. For my IoT project, I finally finished my IoT company research document. The document contains lots of details on each of the IoT companies I had listed in my previous spreadsheet, as well as their final ranking in terms of relevancy to the project itself. I plan on finishing my research document on existing biosensor technologies as generating a list of potential biosensor features next week.

Rows and rows of kitchen utensils at Tips

That wraps it up for this week. Tune in next week for more updates on my projects and fun trips!