Tamarindo

So we took the shuttle this morning from Monteverde to Tamarindo. Tamarindo is a beach town which is way more touristy than most places we've been. Touristy as in they have a Subway and pizza hut and TCBY and its not as primitive as many places. Suprisingly we couldn't even find a little coffee shop/bakery that was open before hitting up the beach. We ended up going to this little Mandarin Fruit Smoothie place to have a fruity drink. These guys started talking to us and offered to pay for our drinks and we sat down and chatted with them...and the one guy is actually the president of the Costa Rican soccer team...as in the national team that just lost to mexico 3 to 0 and plays el salvidor on Saturday trying to get into the World Cup. He was wearing umbro and had the shirt on too. So crazy as it is he said he could watch his team practice in Liberia anytime and he can give us tickets to the game this Saturday in San Jose...CRAZY!!! He offered to fly us to San Jose from Montezuma but we asked for a 3rd ticket for Braulio... this 19 year old costa rican from Gandoca who is part of the staff... he is knowledgible enough to work with the turtles. He's been at Romelia for like 3 months and we're good friends with him....he's in some facebook pics. We play soccer with him and we thought it would so cool for him to get to go! Anyways... the point is we're going to just take the bus to san jose friday (hopefully if all works out) and catch the game at 11 saturday morning and we can stay at this guys house while we're in San Jose. So... we're cutting our time here short (seeing as all we can do is sit on the beach and we're not going to be volunteering long before leaving AGAIN) and heading back to Romelia tomorrow morning. So basically it was just the craziest thing to run into this guy who is the president of soccer in Costa Rica and have him buy us drinks and invite us to the game for free. We were freakin out (needless to say). So thats what is going on right now... this just happened about an hour ago and we're fixing our plans around.
Aside from that I have some interesting other tidbits. I forgot to say that on our shuttle from Arenal to Monteverde the guy next to us in the van started talking to us...turns out he is from Ogden and just graduated from Weber this May just like me... CRAZY. He's a 31 year old mormon and he's been all over central america the last 3 months. We also started chattin with this guy who was in the serpantarium with us in Monteverde and he said he'd been livin in the Tri-cities a short time as a physical therapist. He was just touring around for a few weeks. Then we saw him at lunch... then he happened to be riding the same shuttle here to Tamarindo. Its just crazy how you meet people...and if you see someone once you'll probably run into them 2 or 3 times... thats how its been.
On the shuttle here we saw our first Toucan, and we saw loads of scarlet macaws at a bus stop. So our wildlife total is:
loads of turtles (olive ridley), a whale, a toucan, scarlet macaws, a sloth, loads of howler monkeys, loads of capuchins, a family of Spider monkeys, loads of enormous Iguanas, a huge stick insect, lots of little stick insects, 3 turantulas, giant grasshoppers, lots of Coatis, another jumping relative of the raccoon, fresh Jaguar footprints, LOADS of Blue Morph butterflies, a few other interesting bird species, an owl, and thats all i can recall right now. Oh except i saw the fleeting image of a small cat at night on the side of the road on our ride from Puntarenas to San Jose on Tuesday but it was so fast i couldnt tell what it was... but i know it was a wild cat.
So thats the news from now...basically we have ridiculous luck and we're going to the Costa Rica El Salvidor game this Saturday for free and staying at the house of the president of the team....and hell for all i know he'll probably have us meet the team