hello all. spent the weekend before last at monteverde. went on a sky trek, which is zip lines through the canopy, very fun but it was a really windy day and so it was very scary aswell. monteverde was a huge change from flamingo. it was windy and rainy and i only have one jumper with me, got it muddy on the sky trek on the first day and so spent the whole weekend covered in mud. also went to a serpentario while i was there. saw lots of snakes and katie was brave enough to hold a tarnatula which she shoved in my face and i am not kidding i nearly had a heart attack, the guide laughed at me for a full 5 minutes he thought it was so funny. also visited an orchid farm, the flowers were greaat but the guide was in spanish so me and cat were thoroughly borede whilst our friend katie trieed to translate as best she could. to make up for my weekend in the cold i have spent the last week by the pool sunbathing. my tan is coming along nicely. but i moved to the other school in heredia yesterday and whilst it is sunny there ius nowhere to sunbathe properly and so i may lose some of the browness which will upset me a lot! this weekend i went to la fortuna, a town just down the road fron volcan arenal. it is a beautiful little town and we had to drive via lake arenal which is also beautiful. saturday was really cloudy and so we couldn'd see the top of the volcanoe but it was still impressive. looking down the main street of fortuna you can see the volcanoe as if it was at the end of the road. saturday morning we went to the hot springs at tabacon and it was fantastic. in the afternoon we decided to go to the lake again and drove for aabout 20 minutes before we hit roadworks. now roadworks are bad enough but these costa ricans were digging up the whole road and we couldn{t get through. they said it would only be 5 minutes buit after 20 we decided to head back to the cabinas. sunday was a much better day and managed to get a photo of the whole volcanoe, it is very cool. now i am in a town called san joaquin de flores near san jose and am missing the use of the hotel in flamingo. i hope i will warm to it but right now i prefer flamingo, my lesson this morning was awful. however my family here is fantastic. i have a whole little guest apartment to myself. in the downstairs i have my bathroom, upstairs i have my bed with desk and chair, fridge, tv (only 3 tv channels in spanish but it is tv), wooden floors, i am in heaven. also they feed me breakfast food for breakfast, not rice and beans, yeah! well better go, people to play with, study to do. hope all is well in england and you are all missing me. speak soon vicki