I made it!

As every good teacher will tell you, the study of any new book must include looking at new vocabulary. Granted, different teachers have different ways of introducing this vocabulary, but in your case, you’re lucky. I’ll just give you the words and the definitions. There is a school of thought, in fact, that says all of that time lugging around a huge dictionary and leafing through millions of pages doesn’t actually teach students anything, except to hate dictionaries. Because I’m realizing that there’s so much to tell about the trip so far, I’ll only include one or two new words per post. Of course, the flip side is that I will also be including these vocab terms in every post. Get excited.

So, this week we have:

Ticos (pronounced TEE-cose): noun 1). what Costa Ricans call themselves. 2). a diminutive ending given to words. The use of this ending is said to be the reason for their name.

As things stand, I am currently a week and a half into the trip. Needless to say, I arrived safely in the country and managed to find my address-less house (apparently almost no buildings in Costa Rica have addresses. In fact, as I came to find out, people mostly give directions by referencing well-known landmarks. In some cases, these landmarks have also ceased to exist, although still used to give directions. Take the “Big Fig Tree” for example, which is a reference point in San Jose. It fell down about five years ago. Clearly, this Tico mindset will take a little getting used to).

But let me back up and give you some of the actual details of present location. I’m technically living in Moravia, a small town outside of San Jose. However, like the Five Cities area, there isn’t actually a break between Moravia and San Jose, or San Jose and any of the other small towns and barrios (neighborhoods) surrounding it. Embarrassingly, I don’t actually know the name of my neighborhood. It’s close to Iguarda, but I haven’t quite been able to figure out if my house is in this area or just next to it. You have to remember that my Spanish was never terribly good to begin with, and now it’s had five years to rust over. I’m able to understand about 75% of what’s going on, but as you can imagine, this state of affairs does mean that I frequently miss the details. But those wouldn’t be critical, right?

I’m realizing that these posts are tending towards the long side…there’s so much that I want to say about everything that’s going on. I think it would be best for me to leave this particular post as a reassurance to everyone back home that I’ve arrived safely. I’ll do separate posts to describe my family and school experiences. Feel free to hit and miss any of these posts. Or, if we’re going to be literary about this, feel free to skip to the good parts. It won’t hurt my feelings if your skip the wordy scenery bits.