flora y fauna de costa rica

Alright, well, I went to Costa Rica, for my good cousin Nina's wedding to good cousin-in-law Lorcan!
My parents made it a two-week trip, so we went down a week ahead of most of the rest of the family party. It's a different world down there, especially in the road rules department. Crazy driving! But we managed to drive all over the place in one piece. For a full report on what we did and where we went, check out my mom's blog, at the bar to the left!
One of my favorite parts was the Tabacon hot springs resort---no, not for the hot springs or the fancy resort, though those were physically comforting---it was these lizards! Technically these are called Emerald Basilisk lizards; and they're bright green with earthy stripes and blue specks. This is a girl, I believe, because she doesn't have the amazing fins that line the big male's heads, backs and tails. Too bad I couldn't catch a sketch of one of those. But literally every pool I went to I'd see one, maybe two. Seemed like everywhere I looked, if I wasn't looking for them intentionally, I'd find them. I seemed to always find them feet in front of me, staring me down. It was amazing, like looking into the eyes of a dinosaur baby.
Also something I absolutely adored drawing and watching were these two pet toucans at our first hotel in Alajuela, just north of San Jose. These two toucans lived in an aviary with a rabbit (don't know why...guess they get along ok). They seemed so thoughtful, peaceful, sort of sad. One had a scruffy tail with a couple feathers missing. I liked that one best. He or she seemed to be out in the open more often than Regular Tail, who hid in their box a lot, or flapped around a lot, or acted just a little bossy. Unlike most birds, these guys could move slowly and gracefully if they wanted. Not much noise out of them, I only heard them once. This isn't a great scan of my pencil drawing of the scruffy tailed one. I used coffee for the rim.
At one of our hotels there was a frog pond with stepping stones that went across it in three paths, so you could go out and sit in the center of it. I went out with my watercolors and painted a fountain spilling into it. I'd love to work more with watercolors, so I can get some sort of balance between value and saturation and shadow and color...that green spot at the bottom still makes me flinch, but oh well. A reminder for when I do my next watercolor.
I'd recommend Costa Rica, especially the Arenal Volcano area. One hotel we wished we could have stayed at was the Arenal Volcano Lodge Observatory. But we could observe it pretty good from our own window, several miles away!
Anyways, it was a great trip. Now back to wrapping up school, and taking a summer off :)