Mi Casa y mi Señora

Gallo pinto (GI-yo PEEn-toe) : noun 1). a hearty, traditional Costa Rican dish of white rice, black beans, and a special sauce. It is usually eaten for breakfast. In my case, it’s eaten twice a week with eggs.

Extra credit:

Buen provetcho: saying 1). Enjoy your food. This phrase is used by servers in restaurants, but also by anyone who happens by your table. If you’re eating out on the street, you will have lots of unknown people walking by you and offering this phrase.

I’m not going to lie: my living situation is pretty sweet. I have my own room, I am only 2 minutes away from my bus stop, and we have a beautiful backyard. I also completely lucked out on my señora. In fact, I know it’s early in the trip to be saying this, but I think my señora is going to end up on my “top ten favorite people” list. Not only is Rosa one of the best cooks in all of Costa Rica, she also has a mothering instinct like you wouldn’t believe. She will take very, very good care of us. Other members of the family include Rosa’s husband Jorge and her sister Marta. Rosa and Jorge do have three children, but they live in a house around the corner and we don’t see them very much. I am also living with two other Westmont students and a kindergarten teacher who works at my school.

While I have my suspicions that Rosa knows more English than she lets on, she will only talk to us in Spanish. It’s a good thing then that she doesn’t mind repeating herself multiple times and slowing down to idiot speed. Of course, it doesn’t actually help that she slows down if she’s using vocabulary that we don’t know. I can only picture the deer-in-the-headlights look we must give her whenever we get lost in the flood of conversation (frequently).

While Rosa does many things well, cooking seems to be one of her specialties. Her greatest fear in fact, seems to be that one of us will be hungry. She cooks large portions of many really tasty things and expects us to have multiple helpings. However, she’s also willing to wake up at ungodly hours to cook us breakfast, so I’m not really complaining. As I mentioned in the above vocab. lesson, gallo pinto is one of our most frequent meals. I will say though that eating such hearty and savory foods for breakfast take a little getting used to…

This picture was taken on my birthday. Rosa made her special chicken lasagna with white sauce and a tres leches cake. We had the two other girls from Westmont over for dinner—they live in a different neighborhood—and everyone sang to me (for the record, the words are different here than they are in Mexico). I really appreciated how much trouble Rosa went to in order to make me feel at home, and we all had a really fun evening. As a sidenote, thank you all for your birthday wishes. It was nice to get all of the e-mails and facebook messages from home!

Among the other curiosities in our house, we also have a parrot named Lora. For those who don’t speak Spanish, “loro” is also the word for parrot, so in this case it’s more of form following function name. This bird, supposedly 55 years old, loves bread dipped in coffee and will start screaming for it at about 4:00 every afternoon. It’s pretty funny to hear Rosa and Lora carry on conversations. We’re talking more than “Hello Lora” and “pretty bird.” Marta and Rosa have been known to ask its opinions and tell it stories about the day. That bird probably knows more of what’s going on around here than I do!