Our students are taking two classes here in Costa Rica and their courses have a service learning component. Today we were supposed to go to a local school to work with the kids there learning about recycling but schools here are still closed while the government tries to stop the spread of swine flu. We still have the bus reserved so we headed into San Jose to tour the National Theater and the Gold Museum.
The National Theater is a large, impressive structure with plenty of marble columns and statues everywhere. It’s said to be the finest building in all of Costa Rica. The ceilings have wonderful murals painted on them (above photo of the group looking at the ceiling); scenes of Costa Rica at the turn of the last century. One of the murals is used on the 5 colons bill I photographed and posted over on my Costa Rica 2009 Flickr site (there's more photos of everything there, just not enough room here at blogger). We all enjoyed seeing the men’s smoking room as well as the room where widows and divorced woman were allowed to sit.
The Gold Museum is located underneath the Plaza and the National Theater. This museum houses pre-Columbian artifacts made by the indigenous peoples of Costa Rica. I love the tiny little gold frogs, there is an entire display of them…It has numerous other displays; it’s a very nice museum.
That afternoon both Ana and Chuck lectured. We meet back at the Esplanda (our standard meeting place for field trips) later that evening and headed over to the Costa Rican legislature in hopes of hearing President Arias speak to a gathering of think tank folks from UNA. Arais is helping to mediate the Honduras situation and wasn’t available but we all dressed up and enjoy the fact that we were sitting in on something akin to a senate subcommittee meeting! It was an amazing day.
Don't WCU faculty and students clean up nice!
--Pat
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