Michael Gaillard (Harmony Artist-In-Residence)
Glimpses of Costa Rica, as seen through the lens of my 8×10 camera (please click on a thumbnail to load the slideshow)…
Michael Gaillard (Harmony Artist-In-Residence)
Here are some images from the rodeo/fiesta in the town of Nosara, a few kilometers inland from Playa Guiones where the hotel is located. This is a five-night event, and the entire local population, children and adults alike, Ticos (locals), ex-pats, and tourists, all look forward to the event with great anticipation. I decided to […]
Michael Gaillard
The Harmony Hotel’s first Artist in Residence talks with the Harmony Blog about his work past and present. Artist Michael Gaillard is grappling with too many names. For over a decade now, he has produced photographs of Nantucket landscapes as “Michael Gaillard,” while making a separate, more conceptually driven body of work under his New […]
The Good Farmer
Fashion designer turned farmer, Christopher Totman, returned to his family farm in Western Massachusetts and then created a farm-to-table program for The Harmony Hotel. It was 2008, and Christopher Totman was asking himself the harder questions. â??Where are you the happiest?â? And: â??Why is it so difficult to do what makes you the happiest?â? At […]
Support Nosara’s New Recycling Center
Nosara’s new Recycling Center got off to a good start in summer 2012. Now the students hope to return to Costa Rica to complete it. Architect Tobias Holler explains how you can help on their new Kickstarter campaign: This past summer my absolute favorite building project, the Nosara Recycling and Education Center, made a huge […]
Surf Survival Camp
Yesterday Lauren blogged about the great waves you’ll find in Nosara. Today, we’re telling you how to survive them no matter how big: go to the Harmony Hotel‘s first Surf Survival Camp with the Dr. Andrew Nathanson, author of last year’s best selling book, Surf Survival! You’ll learn how to handle a lot more than […]
“Next Stop:” Nosara
Writer Bonnie Tsui reports on her recent trip to Nosara in the “Next Stop” column of the New York Times‘s Travel section. The article mostly focuses on the surf schools, and her experiences: During a week in Nosara surfing with Mr. Hill and his crew, I became a bit of a surf nerd, learning the finer […]
The Annual New York Times Latin America Travel Section
Last weekend the New York Times published its annual issue featuring Latin American getaways. It includes stories on Managua, Nicaragua; Bogotá, Colombia; food destinations in Mexico City—not in Latin America, I know!—and Buenos Aires; and more. Most relevant to readers of this site, however, is an article on Chile’s surf coast. From that last story: About […]
Earthquake News from Voz de Nosara
We’re grateful to the Voz de Nosara for updates about last week’s earthquake. More news from the Costa Rican Red Cross here.
The Very Bad Wizards Podcast
One of our goals for the Philosophy in Residence program was to finally launch the podcast series that we had been developing this past year. From the beginning, Dave and I loved the idea of presenting accessible and (hopefully) entertaining discussions about the central issues in science and ethics. But we had a problem: neither […]
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Become a Philosopher-in-Residence
Why would the Harmony Hotel care about what a philosopher and a psychologist have to say about ethics? It’s a question I kept asking myself well into my visit to the beautiful and peaceful property last week with Tamler Sommers. Tamler (the philosopher) and I (the psychologist) had both been invited to stay for a […]
Nosara’s New Recycling Center
Architecture students from New York Institute of Technology collaborate with locals in Costa Rica to build a sustainable recycling center. The main waste-disposal site in Nosara, Costa Rica, lies at the end of a dusty roadway aptly nicknamed “dump road” by locals. There, jungle gives way to a clearing in a small valley. The full […]
Study Suggests Leatherback Turtle Decline
From Yale Environment 360: A warming climate could exacerbate threats facing leatherback turtle populations in the eastern Pacific Ocean, creating conditions that could trigger a 75 percent reduction in turtle numbers by the end of the century, a new study says. Even under existing conditions, turtle births ebb and flow each year, researchers say, with eggs and hatchlings […]
Web Surfing for Stories on Surfing
My blogging colleague Lauren has posted several highlights from the time we recently spent in Costa Rica. I’ve savored looking through my holiday photos, but when I need an extra shot of fantasy-getaway images, I’ve taken to looking up the “surfing” tag on travel websites. Here are a few to whet your appetite for an […]
Pura Vida Raw Foods
Pura Vida Raw Foods in Playa Guiones is a must! On a recent trip, Frankie—the owner/master chef—treated a group of us to a tasting of all of his delicious concoctions. From dehydrated pineapple chips to his signature “sushi” rolls of compressed and sliced raw organic chocolate and fruit. And good to know: the Ca$hew-Buttah Cups and […]
Ostional Wildlife Reserve
A few pictures from our visit to Ostional Wildlife Reserve on a cloudy, overcast afternoon. According to nicoyapeninsula.com: The beach of Ostional is the scenery for a rarely-seen biological wonder. The week before new moon hundreds, and sometimes hundreds of thousand sea turtles come to one specific mile of beach at Ostional to dig their eggs […]
World’s 20 Best Surf Towns: Nosara!
Nosara has been named one of the 20 best surf towns by National Geographic!
Toot Toot!
We’re not big on tooting our own horn, but sometimes you just can’t resist. The Harmony Hotel was recognized in a CNN article today about 10 luxury eco-hotels around the world. They had such lovely things to say:Â “I have yet to find another hotel that inspires green living more than this sweet spot in the […]
Free play
Derrida: The concept of structure itself — I say in passing — is no longer satisfactory to describe that game. How to define a structure? Structure should be centered. But this center can be either thought, as it was classically, like a creator or being or a fixed and natural place; or also as a […]
Not so the traveler
Angels & Demons, Nosara, Costa Rica, 2011, by Arthur Ou [A]nother important difference between tourist and traveler is that the former accepts his own civilization without question; not so the traveler, who compares it with the others, and rejects those elements he finds not to his liking.—Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky
Silence
Fish Scales, Nosara, Costa, Rica, 2011, by Arthur Ou There is a way to master silence Control its curves, inhabit its dark corners And listen to the hiss of time outside. — Paul Bowles
Begin at the horizons
Birds, Nosara, Costa Rica, 2011, by Arthur Ou A poet makes himself a visionary through a long, boundless, and systematized disorganization of all the senses. All forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he exhausts within himself all poisons, and preserves their quintessences. Unspeakable torment, where he will need the greatest faith, a […]
An inexhaustible well
Rocks, Nosara, Costa Rica, 2011 Arthur Ou Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don’t know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It’s that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don’t know, we get to think of life as an […]
Into the rainforest
A little video I did with Erik Gustafsson and Deborah Moss for a Costa Rican rainforest ecolodge called Lapa Rios.
