Thursday, May 26 -- Today we started off by heading to a day care center for underprivileged children, many of whom come from single parent homes.  The children there ranged from the age of 9 months to 12 years.  The younger children are able to stay at the day care center all day so that their guardians can work during the day.  The center is also a place where the older children can go after school and receive help on their homework.  Since we visited early in the morning we spent time with the younger children who were very affectionate and excited to see us, especially when they saw we had candy for them! They swarmed us and loved climbing all over us and getting piggy back rides.  At one point, Felipe was a human jungle gym having just about 10 kids crawling all over him!  We sang some songs at the end and the children said a prayer for safe travels for us.  We were able to leave various school supplies and toys that we brought over for them, and the managers were very thankful for those items.  It was definitely a heart-warming experience and we were glad to hear that our visit would leave a lasting impression.

After our visit at the day care, we went on a walking tour of downtown San Jose.  We fed pigeons and got to roam the city's central park.  We also saw numerous national buildings, including their version of the White House.  Next stop was to a market where we got to bargain shop/haggle a bit.  There were so many different homemade crafts and souvenirs that were on sale.  We got to practice our negotiating skills to get the things we wanted at cheaper prices and spent mucho dinero!

Our lunch today was at an authentic Costa Rican restaurant where they served our food on banana leaves.  After our delicious cuisine, our hosts from the tour company brought out a cake for Alyssa's birthday (which is actually tomorrow) and had us play a few games.  The first game was musical chairs where the birthday girl came out victorious.  The second game we played was a different version of musical chairs but we used hats, musical hats!  We had to try and steal another person's hat so that we didn't get caught without one when the music stopped.  The winners from that game were Jessica Woods and Kelly Treser … it must have been their height advantage!   The last game we played was called "sinking ship, Americans may know it as clump, and was won by Tory Storino and Kelly.

We finished off the day by playing a match against another first division Costa Rican volleyball club, Santa Paula.  The first set we started off a little slow and mousy. We rallied with several aces and brought the score close, forcing a timeout by our hosts. We ended up dropping the set by a score of 22-25.  The second set was a bit rough, so we'll just skip that part!  The last set we played started off with a couple aces from Kelly that got our energy up.  The game was close for a while with us down two at 16-14 during the middle stretch, before a few of their national team players started ripping kills and finished off a 25-18 win.  Santa Paula voted Danielle Woods the MVP of the day and it was well deserved as she dug several big swings to keep us in the match.  Tomorrow we will be relocating to San Carlos near Arenal Volcano for some rainforest adventures.  We'll keep sending updates back to the states, and should have some more exciting tales to tell.

Stefanie Kelley and Jessica Woods