Day 4: Children's Museum

Today we took the tour bus in to the heart of San Jose to visit the much awaited Children's Museum. Our ISA guide, Pri, explained that it used to be a police station that was later converted in to a jail, which was then converted in to the Children's Museum that it is today. The museum was a beautiful structure with iron windows and high arched ceilings. The first thing you notice upon entering is the colorful light displaythat leads you into the museum.The museum was essentially a gigantic play room crossed with a science center. Everything in the museum was hands on, which made the fact that our Spanish is minimal seem obsolete. We were able to capture our shadows on the shadow wall, examine dinosaur bones and test our archeological skills in the sandbox as well as pretend to be pilots

in the cockpit of an airplane.

The range of displays the museum had to offer was astonishing.

We were able to record our own song (soon, we will become rock stars), and try our hand at dancing for a somewhat strange music video.

We saw a mummy in his sarcophagus and we were even able to become mummies ourselves.

There was so much interaction between the museum staff and the visitors and everything was very lively. Every room had so much to offer, it was hard to take it all in. We all felt great being able to act like children at the age of twenty!

After the Children's Museum, we took our little blue bus further downtown to the market district. Everyone seems to be amused by how lax the rules of the road seem to be here. There are hardly lines separating the traffic lanes and the people walk dangerously close to the streets, crossing without a care in the world.

The market district was filled with venders selling a variety of fruits ranging from pineapples to mangos and huge bushels of bananas. Pri explained that right now, it is mango and pineapple season, which means 3 pineapples should be sold for roughly 500 colones or $1.

The district was incredibly busy and sometimes we had trouble deciding where we wanted to go. We went inside a shop that sold everything from wild birds in little cages to butcher shop meat and fish beside it. Again, the fruit selection was extremely abundant.

A lot of the girls are very excited about the beautiful selections of flowers we seem to encounter everywhere we go. They light up the

streets and smell wonderful! If only we could

bring them back through customs, I know we would all be purchasing these amazing plants.

We made it back to our hotel just before the rain set in. Everyone is quite exhausted from our long day of city touring, shopping and exciting museum adventures. Tomorrow, we will be going on our first school visit!

-- Sarah & Deonna