SLOTH!! (and Monteverde)

Well, check goal #1 off of my list. Let’s just stop for a moment and admire this progress: I have officially been in Costa Rica for just over one month and already I have successfully completed my first and second goals. Not bad, if I do say so myself. I guess my next project will be to come up with a few more goals…

Vocabulary phrase of the week:

Pura Vida: literally, it means “pure life.” However, it’s similar to the Australian’s phrase, “no worries.” Saying “pura vida” is appropriate in contexts where you wish to convey sentiments similar to: 1). No problem, don’t worry about it 2). totally awesome and completely cool! 3). well, that’s Costa Rica for you 4). way to be. Basically, there isn’t really a wrong way to use it. I suspect it’s a little more touristy than authentic, but hey: Pura Vida!

In terms of adventures, last weekend was an especially good one! The Westmont group joined with two other Lincoln teachers and we all drove up to Santa Elena, a small town near the Monteverde Cloud Forest. When you picture “rainforest,” this place is it! Santa Elena is a one- main-road town that pretty much just functions as a hub where tourists can sign up for fun things to do in the rainforest.

On Saturday, all of us participated in a charity run/walk for an international school in Santa Elena. It might be interesting at this point to stop here and take a vote to see who thinks I did the run and who thinks I did the walk.

However, that takes up more space and time than any of us can spare for a blog like this.

I’ll be honest: I walked. There is no way I’m a distance runner, especially at that altitude. The walk was lovely. It was fun to see some of the back streets and scruffy forest in the area. I’m especially glad I made the choice I did when I came to this hill. This picture does not do the hill justice. Picture a completely vertical line. Slant it about ten degrees. That is the incline of this hill. It was a killer, even for the walkers!

On Saturday night, three of us signed up for a night hike, which was one of the coolest things I’ve done so far on this trip. Not only did we see four sloths (one of which had a baby!), but we also saw lots of bugs, several birds, a tiny tree frog, two tarantulas that were bigger than my hand, and a poisonous snake in the tree above our heads (it was pretty windy, which didn’t make the situation any more comfortable. One kept imagining the possibilities of falling snakes…). To be honest, seeing all of these animals made me wonder how many were out there, close by us, that we didn’t see.

On Sunday, most of us got up at some unreasonably early hour and took a bus to Monteverde itself so we could be there when the park opened at 7:00. We were pretty much the only people the in the park and we hiked up some great trails. Of course, they call this the cloud forest because the mountains are literally in the clouds. Our goal was to hike the continental divide, and we did. We even saw the sign to prove it. However, our visibility was all of about ten feet. I’m sure the view was lovely; we just couldn’t see any of it. The hike, though, was worth it. We heard a howler monkey at what we thought was fairly close range, and got to spend the entire morning wandering around in the thick jungle. If you’re ever in Costa Rica, I would definitely recommend making a stop in this part of the country!

Goal 2: check, done!

This is Volcan Poas, one of the few active volcanoes in Costa Rica. We got to see it on a completely clear day, which is apparently pretty rare. As stated in my list of goals, we did walk up pretty close to it and hike on the nearby trails. Poas is about a 2 hour bus ride from San Jose and has a big change in elevation. It wasn't exactly cold, but I was glad that I had my jacket with me. We had a picnic at the lake in a nearby crater (picture on the left. The picture on the right also has some sort of lake, but I'm pretty sure it's mostly sulfur :)

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!

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.

The Prologue

There are many wonderful things about opening a new book: the cracking sound the spine makes as you open the book for the first time, the smell of the paper and ink, the anticipation you feel for the many happy reading hours in store, and the slight feeling of apprehension as you wonder whether or not you’ll like how the book ends. Of course, most people want to rush right into the book itself and skip all of the fluff that comes before. Forget reading the introduction; it’s by somebody that you’ve probably never heard of anyway. Besides, their gushing analysis usually just gives away the plot. Next, the dedication: why waste the time on a one-liner that’s probably an inside joke between the author and the dedicatee? Finally, you arrive at the prologue. Now here’s a section of the book that appears a bit more promising than the rest of the rubbish you've already passed over; here is where the author sets the scene. It may not be a lot of scene, or really much more than a sketch of a fleeting moment that in some way shapes the rest of the entire book. Sometimes this prologue flows naturally into the first pages of the first chapter. On the other hand, sometimes this moment seems to have absolutely no bearing on what initially happens and you don’t discover the connection until you've almost given up hope of there ever being a connection.

In terms of this post, my guess is that these musings will have almost no bearing on the events immediately following in subsequent posts. This entry, standing as it does before the trip even begins or I have anything noteworthy to report, works as the prologue to all of the blogging to come. To the dedicated few who actually choose to read these types of introductions, let's take stock of where we are. We haven’t gotten to the action yet, and we’re not even sure who the main characters are going to be. I flatter myself that I will have a fairly prominent part, but I’m not sure who the rest of my (ahem) supporting cast will be. However, we can establish at least some concrete facts:

Setting: Heredia, a northern suburb of San Jose, Costa Rica
Beginning of the adventure: Thursday, at 11:30 pm when I board my all night flight
Traveling companions: four other girls from the Westmont teaching credential program

With such sketchy information do we begin the story. In fact, the title of this blog, Cuentos de Costa Rica, means stories of Costa Rica. Of course, these aren’t just any stories from Costa Rica. These will be my stories of the everyday events, the inevitable cultural blunders, and the life in a third grade classroom that will make up my experience in Costa Rica.

At this point, we don’t know how the adventure will turn out. To be honest, the heroine hasn’t even begun packing her bags yet, so we’re off to a bit of a nail-biting beginning. However, spirits are high and I’m looking forward to an incredible five months.

Thanks for opening the book.