February 5, 2013 morning

Hi,

Day one in country.  To continue last night’s blog with pictures of Miguel’s artwork, I got the photos downloaded.

This first picture is of his art studio, all made from coffee plant parts:

Here is Miguel’s workshop:

This next picture is of Miguel in front of his house with Tony and Dave to the side:

This is the stream that runs right below Miguel’s studio, just very common scenery of the lush vegetation you see everywhere:

These are statues Miguel and his brother Hermes have carved and are for sale in their shop:

And these are several of the statues I selected.  The two end ones are of coffee picker’s, the middle one on the left is an ape (it was the only ape he had, there’s no apes native to Costa Rica, don’t fret 🙂 ), and the weeping lady at the middle right is a pretty famous legend.  She was taking her kids across a raging river and lost them and has weeped and haunted ever since.  I don’t know if this legend is exclusive to Costa Rica because I have seen it referred to a number of times elsewhere.  The TV show Grimm even did a story based on it:

Here’s pictures of Dave with Claire on the second floor porch of Miguel’s studio:

Here’s a tree that has been carved into someone with raised hands in a parking lot of a closed restaurant/bar down the street  from Miguel’s studio:

Here’s a picture of the Inn we stayed at while in San Jose, La Gioconda House Hotel:

And finally, here’s a picture of the Honduras embassy which is right across the street from our Inn.  Every day lines form in three directions (both ways on the front street and up the side street) of Hondurans looking to extend their work Visas.

Well, that’s it for now.  I REALLY need to figure out how to delete the old pictures from my camera because every time I download, it downloads ALL the pictures, which is becoming awkward.  It will soon be a nightmare.  There’s lots more from yesterday that I hope to talk and show tonight.

Have a great one,

ed