So I am long overdue to post a little retrospective about our trip to Costa Rica with the Nashville Children's Choir. We packed a lot of interesting stuff into about 6 days of time in Central America. We arrived a day earlier than the choir was required to arrive, after getting on a flight from Nashville at 5:25am, we arrived at the hotel in the early afternoon tired and not really ready to get out and do too much. So the day was spent at the resort pool letting the kids splash off some energy.
On the second day we had our welcome lunch at the San Jose event Center, which is on top of a bit of a hill overlooking the city.
That evening we went to see some of the choirs perform at the former Airport turned San Jose Art museum. This very interesting building plays host to an array of local art, including paintings, sculpture, and this really intricate wall mural. It was plaster cast in the VIP Lounge when the building was still host to the airport. The mural covers all four walls of the room, and depicts the history of Costa Rica.
Our choir did not perform that first evening, but we were able to enjoy performances by several other choirs, including the Boys Choir of Chattanooga. It was pretty cool to go all the way down to Costa Rica and see people from so close to home.
The next day we headed to a small town on the outskirts of San Jose, here we stopped at a local church which is entirely made from metal on the outside. It's a pretty cool building, as seen below. But the most striking thing here was the intricately carved Stations of the Cross. I didn't take pictures of them here, but there were others that I got pictures of at a church our choir performed at later in the trip.
After visiting the church, we headed to a local elementary school where our choir performed for the students. My wife become a quick celebrity with some of the first graders when they realized that she spoke spanish.
Meanwhile the kids were performing , to the delight of the young students. In Costa Rica, they teach English from pre-school, but there was not a lot of understanding. I have a feeling certain parts of the country make a bigger deal of it than others. At one point the choir tried to get some audience participation from the students, trying to teach them the chorus of a song, but that didn't go over terribly well.
We then proceeded to have lunch at another cool little overlook restaurant. Just about everywhere we went there were some pretty magnificent views to be seen for those who went out to take a look at them. Our guide was really good about telling us when we needed to think about putting on bug spray or not. In spite of the reputation of Central America having mosquitos and malaria issues, I think between the three of us we might have gotten bit once or twice the entire trip even though we spent a fair amount of time in the trees.
Next we had another performance, this time in a catholic church in San Jose. This time I have some pictures of the stages of the cross from this church. Again, these are really intricately carved. A lot more detailed than the ones I grew up with at Catholic elementary school.
If you are not familiar with the Catholic stages of the cross, you can check out some information about them here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stations_of_the_Cross
On this night our choir shared the performance time with a couple of local choirs, and one other choir from the International Choral Fest. This one was from Trinidad. They were a lot of fun to watch and listen to. Their director got up before their last song and said that he was going to surprise the choir with their last song. He sat down at the piano and started playing a song. They just had to be prepared to sing whatever it was he played, and they did fabulously.
Yet another really intricate sculpture of Jesus carrying his cross looks over the choir as they perform.
The next day we made our way up to the Irazu volcano. This is the tallest volcano in Costa Rica, topping off at over 11,000 feet above sea level. On the way up, we stopped at a little snack shop rest area where we could look down on the local Sanitarium. This was a place where patients were treated for tuberculosis. It ceased operation as a sanitarium in 1963 after an eruption of the volcano along with the decline in tuberculosis cases. After this time the buildings were used as a orphanage, as well as minimum and maximum security prisons before permanently shutting down in 1973 after another eruption caused serious structural damage. This location, the Dural Sanitarium , is considered the most haunted place in Costa Rica and has been featured on Sci-Fi Channel's ghost Hunters International. I need to find that episode and give it a watch!
Once we made it to the top of the volcano, we were able to walk around in the black sand of one of the former craters. It was incredibly foggy and a crisp 54 degrees at the summit. We couldn't see very well, and I temporarily lost connection with my wife and son as I wandered off through the fog seeing what there was to see.
We thought this was the crater of the volcano, and at one point it was. But volcanoes open new chimneys over the course of time, and this area is no longer the active portion of the volcano. We were actually above the active crater at this point.
Here you can just make out a hint of the bright blue lake of the principal crater below us through the fog. The crater lake actually dried out about 3 years ago and has been slowly refilling. Prior to the dry out it was the green color you would typically expect of a lake, but when it filled back up it took on the bright turquoise blue more reminiscent of the ocean.
Irazu has a claim to fame of errupting during John F. Kennedy's state visit to Costa Rica in 1963, just a few months before his assassination in Texas.
That night found us at another Catholic church performance. This one was not as elaborate as the previous churches, but it had a huge seating area that was full of locals watching the chorus' perform. This time they performed with a choir from California.
The next day was the final concert, this one featured four or five local Costa Rican choirs, then the choirs from California, Chattanooga, Nashville and Trinidad all had opportunities to perform on their own, before finally having all of the choirs gather and perform five songs as a truly International choir.
The final full day of our trip was a chance to just sight see. There was no performance on this day. So we headed to the Fortuna Waterfall. Along the drive we passed by the Rio Sucio (Dirty River) where mineral laden waters from the Poas Volcano meet with the "clean water" and they travel next to each other for awhile before mingling into one mixed color body of water.
We also had the opportunity to see a three toed sloth in the wild, as well as some monkeys, and we also caught a glimpse of a tucan off in the distance in a tree. We stopped at a fruit stand and had a tasting of a variety of local fruits including pineapple, mango, coconut, sugar cane candies, starfruit, and sugar covered cocoa beans amung other things.
We were making our way toward Arenal volcano. The peak of the mountain was covered in mist for most of the day, but we did catch a few glimpses through the cloud cover where you can just make out the top.
Then we made it to the waterfall. It is a 500 stair hike down to the water level below the waterfall. It is a pretty easy climb down, but not nearly as pleasant on the way back up.
We spent this final evening at the base of the volcano in a Hot springs resort. They had a pool that the kids loved, and a series of Hot Springs that the adults loved. The had cut off the natural path of the spring water into a series of man made pools. The further up the set of pools you went, the hotter the water got as you were getting closer to the source water. The base pool was barely above tepid, while the pool at the top was a very nice hot tub temperature. The resort also had a swim up bar filled with the spring water. This is where I spent most of my time, as it was a comfortable temperature, was within sight of the pool where my son was playing and had a good view of the television where I could watch our home town Vanderbilt baseball team play against Michigan in the College World Series finals.
The final day saw us make our way back to the San Jose International Airport and the duty free shop where I picked up some of the local fermented sugar cane, otherwise known as Rum. This is a seven year aged rum that I brought home to enjoy as a memory of our time in Central America.
And once in the air, I took one final picture of Costa Rica as we flew over the mountainous region.
I'm not sure how many miles we covered over the course of the week. I would estimate that the time we spent in airplanes and buses would be around 40 hours. It was a lot of time for sure. We were further south than we have ever been and it was my son's first time out of the United States.
We're back home and settled in now, but we won't soon forget our trip to Costa Rica. Unfortunately, out of the country is not a regular destination for the Nashville Children's Choir. Next year we get to go to the incredibly exotic location of St. Louis! Yippee!
All photos in this post are mine, taken on my Samsung Galaxy S9+.
