Earthquake and Tornado

I love the Geography of Hazards. In fact, I am thinking about concentrating in it when I go to Grad School. Costa Rica seemed like a perfect place to see some of these things first hand. San José is in a prime location to experience frequent earthquakes. We are within a hundred miles of four active volcanos and a whole bunch of dormant ones. Both the Caribbean and Pacific coasts can experience small tsunamis due to the abundance of earthquakes. My host dad has been telling me for weeks that San José has not had a significant earthquake in a long time...they feel an earthquake at least once a month. He expected that I would definitely feel one before I left, and it might be stronger since there has not been one in a while. Of course, the earthquake happened when I was still in Alajuela at the Pineapple Farm!!! It was not significant, and there was not any damage. Many of my friends did say that they felt it and heard it. I was a little disappointed that I missed it...

To top it all off, I missed the tornado too. If you think that the United States is the only place that gets tornados, think again. I came home from school one day, and there had been some storms in the area. Apparently a small tornado took the roof off of my neighbor's house! My host mom and sister were at home at the time and said the sky got really dark and they heard a really loud noise. We all figured it was just heavy straight winds, but my next door neighbor told my host dad that a few people had seen a funnel cloud. My host grandparents live directly behind us, and the damaged house was right next to theirs. The witnesses said that the tornado took the roof off, it flew over my grandparent's house, and landed upside down on the next house over. I came home in time to see the damage. My windows in my bedroom had been open at the time, and I walked upstairs to find my curtains laying on the floor and a lot of my things blown around the room. Apparently the incident made the San José nightly news.