Victory!

The luggage has arrived! All of it, and in one piece. Thanks for the prayers!

Back Again

Traveling, I have heard, is supposed to be a "broadening" experience. Of course, no one ever says in which way you are supposed to stretch. It looks like my first few days in Costa Rica will be teaching me how to make do with very little. I knew I was tempting fate by taking down so much checked baggage; hoping to get all four pieces on time and in good condition was really rather optimistic. However, I didn't expect that I wouldn't get any. Luckily, I was not the only one to be missing bags. Based on the long, sleep-deprived line that queued outside of the Frontier office at 5:30 yesterday morning, there were quite a few of us that were less than pleased about being stranded without luggage. The best that the airline could do was to assure us that it would come soon and that they would deliver it to my house. Being the skeptic that I am, two doubts immediately came to mind: 1) Costa Rica doesn't use addresses in the same way we do, therefore leaving the exact location of this house a little vague, and 2) Costa Rican time is distinctly longer than California sense of time. By "soon," I'm hoping for sometime this week.

Nevertheless, I'm here in one piece and, after a good night's sleep, feeling in pretty good spirits. A little prayer about all (any!) of my bags getting here would be much appreciated, of course. At least I'll have a lot of time to recoup and take it easy until the bags arrive: nothing to unpack, either here or in my classroom!

Costa Rica: the sequel

It seems a little odd to be thinking of sequels before finishing the first story, but we have come to an important moment in the narrative: is it time to bring things to a close and shut the book, or should we hope to continue the story in many more block-buster volumes? I’ve heard that every good author is always looking ahead while they work. While it would certainly not be true to say that this author had the end in mind when she started this saga, it would be true to say that I’ve been giving the “what comes next” question quite a bit of thought. In the end though, it’s come down to this: I have decided to come back to Lincoln School next year and the story will go on. I don’t know what grade I’ll be teaching, but I think it will be in the lower-elementary area. To be honest, it’s kind of exciting to think about really having my own classroom. The idea that I will be personally responsible for 23 small children does seem a little intimidating, but I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it (in six weeks, actually). I will still be coming home for the summer, but I’ll be coming back here to Costa Rica during the last week of July for orientation. I’m realizing though, that many of you don’t know very much about the school where I’ve just spent the last four and half months of my life. So, here’s a quick overview:

Lincoln School is an American-based school that was set up in 1945. We use an American curriculum and every Monday morning, bright and early, we all sing the U.S.’s national anthem right after we sing Costa Rica’s anthem. There are slightly less than 1,300 students (about the same size as Westmont) and includes grades K-12. Costa Rica also has an extra grade between kindergarten and first called “preparatory,” which means that since students start school at about the same age as they do in the States, almost all of the students are a year older here than what we’re used to in California.

Lincoln has quite the impressive bus system! Over half of the students take the bus because many students live 45 minutes or an hour away. One of the funniest parts of the day is watching the convoy of 35+ busses leave school at the end of the day. It is quite the parade! I also take the bus to school, but I get to ride the teacher bus that stops close by my house.

Because Lincoln charges a fairly high tuition, it has pretty incredible facilities. There are two libraries (one for the elementary, one for the high school), two gyms (again, one for the elementary, one for the high school), and a science lab. Students have “specials” everyday where they go to another teacher for art, Spanish, music, and technology. These facilities are way beyond anything I’ve seen in California. Hopefully with all of the extra support teachers and time I’ll have to teach fun lessons, this will be an easy first year.

Looks like I can’t hang up my blogger’s hat quite yet…

Funny quote of the day

On the whole, my students are really pretty intelligent, and are all much better at English than I am at Spanish. However, sometimes we all struggle with translations. For instance, today one of my students asked me another way to say "bald." We'd been talking in class about how we should be polite with the things we write about people, and that sometimes our descriptions of others, even though we don't mean them to be rude, may include things the other person wouldn't like. So this student asked me if he could say "bald."
"I mean, Teacher, how else can I say it? He doesn't have much hair? His hair is unavailable?"

"Yes," I wanted to tell him. "Just like that. It makes it sound like you're saying his hair can't come to the phone right now, because it's currently unavailable."

I may not have told him exactly that, but he thought it was a pretty good joke when I explained why I was laughing. Good times in Costa Rica!

Arenal

Hello once again! I’m sorry that it’s been so long since I’ve updated the blog. Never fear; I have been using the time to complete big projects for Westmont and plan units for my students. I’m hoping to follow this entry with a longer one, but just to tide everyone over, here are some photos from a trip I took two weeks ago to Arenal. It was a great trip! Although it is the rainy season, we get several good looks at the (still active) volcano. One of the coolest moments was hiking through the jungle, looking at the volcano, and being in the middle of a huge thunder and lightening storm. I feel like I should make some metaphor here about battling elemental forces, but as I can picture most of you rolling your eyes at this point, I will refrain at this time from doing so. Another great story is the saga of the lost key, but this story loses some of its humor and vitality from just being written on the page. Ask me about it when I get home though, and I will be happily to tell it!

Toucans! We did a long hike through the jungle, but the only exciting wildlife we saw were a few toucans. Still, they’re kind of cool to see in “the wild.”

I took this photo (to the left) especially for Dad. Our guide pointed this tree out to us: a naturally-growing jungle bonsai. I did kind of want to correct him and say that anything can be turned into a bonsai, but for the sake of politeness, decided to keep that comment to myself.

Another exciting adventure from the trip was our hike to Arenal Waterfall, otherwise known as Catarata de Arenal. As a side note, I think “catarata” has become one of my favorite words in Spanish. You say it with very pronounced “t’s,” which just makes it fun to say and listen to. Our guidebook merely said that it was a nice three mile hike, easily done on foot. What the book didn’t mention was the three almost vertical hills that were part of the hike. Also the fact that the humidity was probably at about eighty percent, that there would be absolutely no shade at all, and that we should factor in our high altitude. I will be honest: I was hurting by the end of our trek. However, the waterfall itself turned out to be worth the pain of getting there. We hiked down a million steps to where there were several pools and spent much of the afternoon swimming in the river. How many times in your life do you get the chance to swim in a relatively warm river in the middle of the rainforest?