This weekend marked the last of our drive-away Costa Rican adventures. Since we decided to leave on Friday this weekend, we decided to sleep in a little and left for Jaco at 8:30am. Little did we know that because this was a long weekend with the Annexation of Guanacaste holiday on Friday, the traffic was much worse than we anticipated. After a few hours on the Uber (driving through what felt like mini streams and dirt roads at times to avoid the highway congestion), we arrived at a rainforest in Jaco and experienced a one hour Aerial tram. Despite not spotting as many wildlife as we anticipated, we did see a lazy sloth, an albino snake, and many, many butterflies. We ended the day by relaxing on Playa Hermosa (a black sand beach right across the street from our hotel) with books, podcasts, sketchbooks, and a nice sunset.
We woke up bright and early on Saturday at 4:30am and embarked on a 1 hour bus ride + a 1 hour speedboat ride for our Tortuga Island adventure. The island was beautiful and we saw a crocodile and some dolphins along the way. Upon arriving at the island, we went snorkeling and saw so many different types of fish up close. There were multiple points in time when I thought the fish would come rest on me, thinking I was a massive coral. The water felt amazingly relaxing. After that, we got to spend another four hours on the beach, lounging on a beach chair while reading and enjoying the slight breeze and amazing scenery of the water with four different colors was truly a life goal. Our tour also included a delicious casado, coffee, and cookies, so not only were we mentally relaxed, we were also physically satisfied.
On Sunday, for the first time in our many adventures, we did not have to wake up early, so I got 10 hours of sleep and enjoyed a great Costa Rican breakfast with the traditional gallo pinto and amazing coffee. We went for another stroll on Playa Hermosa and visited El Miro, a hotel that never finished its construction but offered amazing views of Playa Jaco and its shoreline, as well as the graffiti on its walls.
Now back to work updates! This week we had two cadaver lab days with Dr. Bogantes, where he showed us microscopic slides of various parts of the brain, and various organs in opened up/dissected cadavers. We learned so much about the anatomy of various organs as well as other surgical processes, such as how bypasses are done. Rei and I even got to hold a brain, a heart, a uterus, and a kidney in our hands! Seeing the organs in a cadaver and understanding their organizational structure is very helpful for our project, as we can now understand limitations related to anatomical arrangements (different thickness of skull at various locations), and potential impacts of nearby structures (all the cerebral arteries are so close together that a mm off in positioning easily results in inaccurate readings). I also finished my CAD drawing this week and started the 3D printing process, so stayed tuned in next week’s post on how they turned out!