Sustainability and the Environment: "Last Chapter and Worse"

All good things must come to an end. Ice cream cones, "Friends" the tv show, even study abroad sustainability courses. It's sad but it's the way of the world, and you can take solace in the fact that there's a few more blog posts here to wrap things up, so hopefully you'll get some nice closure, here at the end of all things. 

When the adventurers came back to Monteverde from the second field trip, they only had a few weeks left in beautiful Costa Rica, and they decided to put that time to good use: mainly by preparing for the final symposium, where they would present their awesome internship projects to the local scientific community. All of the adventurers were really excited about it, because they'd been working all semester long on these cool and different projects, and they finally had a legitimate platform to brag about how great a job they'd done. 

Here's Adam making sure Emma isn't going to say a bunch of curse words during her presentation 

Now I'm not going to go into too much detail about what all these cool adventurers did for their internships, because they all wrote their own awesome blog posts about their experiences, and I really feel like they can do a better job explaining things than I can, so those blog posts will be coming along shortly. Keep your eyes peeled. For now, you can check out these nice photos of the adventurers presenting their projects, in cease you're their parents or something and you want one of these pictures for your mantle. 

Ian clarifies where the audience should be looking 

Hannah and Julia explain what it's like working in a local radio station 

...while a spy in the audience captures everything 

Morgan, Aislyn, and Rachel talk about the sweet educational videos they made about ecotourism in Monteverde

Here's Channy talking about all the awesome marketing she's doing for Bajo del Tigre

And here's Sadia discussing all the interviews she conducted with locals as market research for Bajo 

 Tessa worked with a local planner to assess the infrastructure of roadside Monteverde and Santa Elena

 Amanda worked with Tessa to look at infrastructure too, and made an educational signpost for tourists

Emma worked at the study center to build vertical gardens out of recycled and repurposed materials

Eilish seems excited; she worked in the garden and created a book of local recipes in an effort to preserve the heritage of Monteverde 

Erica bridged the gap between the Boruca community and a local Monteverde tailor to bring the beautiful dyes of Boruca to the mountain town 

Meg got to work in the new and emerging Monteverde public library, which she was really stoked about

Angela worked in the library too, and she and Meg revolutionized how great a public library can be 

Dan and Leah worked with the Monteverde Friends School to help them in their effort to achieve carbon neutrality  

And that was it-- the Symposium had fallen to the talents and slick presentation skills of the adventurers. When all was said and done, all the questions answered and all the sources cited, the adventurers went outside and took a bunch of pictures together so that they could remember this day forever and ever, even when they started to get old and senile.

Dev and The Video Girls (which sounds like a great band name) seem happy with their results

Girls run the world  

Morgan and Julia make a classic Angela sandwich   

They don't need dollar bills to have fun tonight-- they love cheap thrills

With the symposium all taken care of, there was only one thing left for these adventurers to do: compete in the CIEE Olympics, which was Ian's major project for the semester (aside from, you know, his internships and tests and schoolwork all that stuff). So on one of the last afternoons all the adventurers headed up to the garden to throw down and go hard in the paint, and it was a pretty great way to finish up their time in Monteverde. 

  Ian's team is still figuring out how to use the ol' binoculars 

Karen almost broke Sam's arm off, but he managed to escape with all his limbs intact 

The final round of the Olympics was a round of Twister, and it's a good thing that all of the adventurers were pretty comfortable with one another at this point

Competitors Dan, Angela, Julia, and Morgan pose together in a rare photograph with the photographer 

The Epifighters, with their wrecking ball and assorted tools

And with the closing ceremonies of the Olympic games, the adventurers's semester in Monteverde had drawn to a close. In the next few days, they would board the Gravy Train one last time, journey back to San Jose, and fly back to their ancestral homes, leaving the cloud forest and all their new friends behind. 

But friends never say goodbye, at least according to Elton John in The Road to El Dorado, so the adventurers weren't too sad about leaving their four-month paradise. And they knew that, probably, they would return someday-- having learned.