Montezuma´s Revenge

I have a bad habit of writing everything in emails before I write them on my blog. So, I´ll try to include everything, without repeating myself too much!

Dave and I got really sick when we got back from Montezuma. I don´t think I already mentioned that, as I haven´t been on the computer much since then. I don´t know if it was some bad food, bad water, or just very strong tropical germ, but I have never had a fever so intense. It was one of those mind-bending delusion causing fevers. I was so out of my mind that I couldn´t understand, logically, why I was sick. I thought the Costa Rican government, or the US government, was making me sick so that I would be weak and vulnerable and they could rebuild me how they wanted to, as a slave to their system. I think I have been reading too many of Dave´s political science books and having too many discussions with Canadians about American politics. That being said, it was a very strange feeling. I am glad I am feeling better.

I am tutoring a little 7 year old girl here. Her name is Soleil and she´s intelligent and fun, but has the average attention span of, well, a 7-year-old. I am supposed to be teaching her how to read English, but sometimes she just likes to tell me how good she is at reading, rather than show me. I´m not buying it, chiquita! Her parents are Tica and American and she speaks both Spanish and English. She goes to the private bilingual school here, but apparently half her classmates can´t even read in either language, and she´s the youngest in her class. I guess she´s probably better off than the locals, though, who apparently only go to school for three hours a day. George Bush wouldn´t approve- I bet there are children getting left behind.

They are also paving the road here, a first for this town! Their version of paving, however, is not like ours. As another Oregonian said to me, "This isn´t I-5 they´re paving." They also seem to do a lot of work, very repetitively, and hold up a lot of traffic. See, there is only one road that goes through town so when the road is shut down, nothing moves. The funny thing is, no one seems to mind that much, not even the busses, from what I can gather. You don´t really need to go anywhere here. Everything in town, you can walk to, and no one commutes to go to work, so it´s not as though people aren´t getting things done. It´s fun to watch, too. They have been working on the stretch outside The Bakery for the past few days and every day a bit more gets done. They´ve done a lot of filling, flattening, filling, flattening, laying gravel, laying a tarry oil, molasses substance, flattening, filling, and then somewhere in there a semi-flat road gets built. I would take pictures of the process, but no one will ever see them anyway!

Dave and I are now living in a little one bedroom house that has become the tin foil and us the baked potato. In the morning, by about 8 AM, then sun starts beating down on our tin roof and baking us into little French Fries. I usually retreat to the porch (now adorned with a hammock!!) and read my book until Dave emerges from the oven.

Well, the Internet Cafe is closing for lunch so I´ll have to write more another day! I hope everyone is well and enjoying the onset of winter! That could be snide, but winters where some of you are are so pretty and snowy! Although I will be the most tan I have ever been in December!

The Travel Bug took me to Montezuma

After coming straight to Mal Pais without traveling anywhere else first, the travel bug finally caught up to me. On Wednesday, I got off work early and headed to Montezuma with Dave and Brady. Montezuma is a really small, hippie, artsy town (there is an organic coffee shop! and a book store!!!! Guess which one I went for first!?) Montezuma is on the tip of the Nicoya Peninsula and actually only about 15 miles by beach from here. However, the roads here are so bad that it takes much longer than seems rational to get there. We first took a bus east to Cóbano, a slightly larger town than ours. Well, actually, I shouldn´t say larger. Everything you need to find, you can get in Cóbano, so that is why I assume it is larger. However, I don´t think the town is actually that much larger, just more centrally located and more accessible, so that´s why every thing you need is there. Davey and I have this joke that you can get anything in Cóbano because everytime you ask someone where to find It, It´s in Cóbano. "I´m having trouble finding cheap clothing, do you know where I can get some?" "Cóbano," "Okay, how about the vet, for this homeless dog I seem to have adopted?" "Cóbano," "Hmm... okay. I really want to buy a jetpack, so when I go back to the states, I don´t have to take the bus all the way to San Jóse. Cóbano, right, that´s what I figured." I´m off on a tangent.

So we took the bus through Cóbano and then south to Montezuma. The reason people really go to Montezuma is because of the Montezuma watefalls. If you hike up about 30-45 minutes of steep trail, you´ll get to the top of a gorgeous watefall in the middle of the jungle. The first waterfall is a jump (I did it!) of about 15 feet. The second (no way), of about maybe... 40 feet, and the third, I don´t think anyone jumps from there, is about 70 feet, I would guess. So we hiked around on Thursday, then ended up at a little organic coffee shop, where we met a girl from Portland, and stumbled upon Montezuma´s film festival.

The town is very different than Mal Pais. When I told my boss that´s where I was going, he called me a "god damn hippie," with a smile on his face. The town is a little more condensed, and actually has more than one street! It´s also a little quieter, but there are still enough people wandering around that it doesn´t feel deserted. We stayed in a little hostel on the beach, and after making two trips to the book store, I spent all of Friday afternoon laying in a hammock on the beach, reading my new books. It was so nice, and of course now I´m back at work! Now I have a really strong yearning to do more traveling throughout the country, though. I´m saving up to go to the other side, the Caribbean side, for a week or so. I´ve heard it´s really pretty and actually has a lot of culture to it because of the Jamaican roots that have mixed in with the Spanish Costa Rican routes. Last night someone described to me perfectly how they would define the history and the culture on the west coast of Costa Rica, "Christopher Columbus´ships came, dropped people off in Costa Rica, some of them travelled here, and they´ve been surviving every since."

That´s all for now. Look for me trying to swim to Cuba from the Caribbean side!

ABC, easy as... uno, dos, tres?

This is day two of four of having to get up at 630 for work. I really cannot even say that I dislike getting up that early. In fact, besides the fact that I only get about two hours of daylight outside once I get off work, I really enjoy my job, and the 630 shift. The Bakery has been immensely popular and is in a very good location so I get to meet and get to know a lot of people. With traffic becoming more common every day, walking to work at 6 am down a dirt road, with only the sounds of monkeys rustling in the treetops is my favorite time of day.

At the beginning of last week I met a girl named Franki from South Africa who is here in Costa Rica doing a volunteer ESL program. I met her the same day that I asked my coworker's boyfriend if he knew of any volunteer help needed at the local school. I was just eating my lunch in the Bakery and Franki started talking to me about my job. How strange that things work out so easily sometimes. So I asked her if I could come with her to her class and see what it was all about, or help her out. I think I made a mistake in telling her about my last semester of experience teaching Spanish in an elementary school because she suggested I make my own lesson plan to take up about 45 minutes of class time! Well, I wasn't too sure about that because I had already decided that I was a better assistant than a teacher, but I figured a new country called for a new attempt. So, armed with the most basic outline: working with verbs, I got to thinking. I finally came up with the idea to play, "Mother, May I?" with the kids. Anyone who doesn't know what it is, someone is the "mother" standing at one end of the play space, the rest of the group has to move towards the mother as per her instructions. Anyone who forgets to ask permission, "Mother, May I?," has to go back to the beginning. I was so excited to have come up with a learning activity all on my own! Then I found out that I was going to be teaching adults, rather than children! We ended up playing the game anyway, though, and the class loved it! It was more rewarding than I could have anticipated to watch people learn from my instruction. When we started the game, some of the students didn't even know what the verbs meant that we were using, but by the time we were done, they were looking back at their notes, coming up with lots of different actions to use for the game. I was so excited to see everyone else excited by their new knowledge. It reminds me of my friend Ridley, who told me one time that she is awestruck by watching children learn new words. Thirty seconds before we played this game, someone didn't know the word for "steps" in English, and now they do! This happens to me all the time at work, too. I have learned so many new Spanish words for things in the kitchen, vegetables, pastries, and coffee. They're little things, I know, but it's so cool to be able to speak to someone entirely in Spanish about the ingredients of a salad!

I think my Spanish is definitely getting better since I've been down here, and I attribute that almost all to work. But really, one of the best experiences I've had so far has been helping Franki teach her class on a covered area of pavement while the lightbulb hanging above us sways in the evening thunderstorm. That was more real than any other Costa Rica I've seen.

Tonight Davey and I are going to a bar where our neighbors are going to be doing fire dancing for a reggae themed night. I'm so excited to see it! And in a few days we are taking off for a couple days in Monteverde, which is a huge jungle reserve across the bay from us. We're going with our friends Brady and Andrew and I can't wait to go hiking, and maybe even a canopy tour, in the mountains!

And I also found a toy store a few days ago so Davey and I got colored pencils, which keep us occupied for hours! They also sold jigsaw puzzles there, but they were almost twenty dollars! I got a kids activity book of word searches, one of the closest things I can get to crossword puzzles here! The word searches help me learn new words in Spanish, though, so it's educational. Something worrisome, though, one of the wordsearches was KKK themed. That's kind of strange.

Dave and I have pretty much adopted a dog. I don't know what we'll do when we get ready to leave here. I don't want to think about it, but I really would like to bring him back with us. He's black and white with no tail and he follows us around all the time. Dr. Doolittle (aka Davey) thinks that the dog was beaten by his previous owner because whenever we put down food for him, he hangs back until we walk away and leave it. He probably used to get beaten when he tried to go for any kind of food. He never begs, and never barks. He is really skinny, though, no matter how much we feed him, and I think he has some vision problems because we have to get really close to him for him to recognize us in the street. If he strays too far away from us, he can't seem to find us again. When he sees us, though, he gets so excited and does kind of a horse-like pawing. I love this dog so much! We named him Skeeter, after a cartoon character in Doug. I don't really know why, since they don't look alike, but it seems to fit him.

One more thing, today while I was at work, a woman who owns a group of rental houses here asked me, while I was ringing her up, what I went to school for, and if I would like to tutor her daughter in English. I said sure and she said, "We'll talk," before bustling out the door. I have no idea if I'm even up for the job! And she is Costa Rican, but speaks perfect English. Who wants to learn American English, anyway?!

I'm about to go enjoy the last few minutes of daylight. I miss you all!

Either Or

I've been thinking a lot about 'either or' lately and the absolutes that people place on things. Sports for example, is a small example of how people become very absolutist. If you're a diehard Yankees fan, for example, then the Red Sox absolutely must lose the game they are playing against opponent X. But why does the Yankees fan have to turn it into such a negative experience? Instead of swearing at the television every time the Red Sox get a run, lamenting their success and seeing it as a reflection of the Yankees, why not cheer for the the Red Sox opponent? Why does that game even have anything to do with your love for the Yankees? I have been spending a lot of time in the sports bar lately, can you tell? But for lack of anything else to do when I get bored of games, I started to watch people watching sports. And it relates to a lot more things in life than just sports. I have been thinking since I got here, either Costa Rica or the United States. I've had some trouble adjusting here to the slow surfer nightlife and the strong prevalence of pot and alcohol to pass the long nights, something that gets old really quickly, for me. So I put myself into an unwinnable situation. I was going to consider myself a failure as a citizen of the world if I left here and returned to the United States. Because, I kept thinking, what would be next after this but settling down somewhere in the States? This travelling experience should not be either Costa Rica or the United States. So I've been thinking about where else I would want to go.

I was trying to remember this morning what I expected of Mal Pais, Costa Rica before I came down here. I couldn't remember what I had expected, all I know is that it wasn't really what I found. I love that it's different than I expected, though. I mean the phrase, "Expect the unexpected" is not really profound in any way. When are expectations really met in the exact manner that we had assumed? Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that my next goal is to try and save up some money here and maybe go travelling somewhere else in the spring. That depends on a lot of things, mainly how much money I can save here, but it's a tentative plan that keeps my thoughts going.

Other than that, Dave and I tried surfing last week. He's a complete natural, of course! He was standing up on the boarding, catching waves all on his own on our friend Cedric's short board the first day out there! Meanwhile I'm trying to drag the 7'10" board through "small" waves just to get a chance to catch one! I think surfboards must have a strong magical power to change your mindset because as soon as I got into the ocean, the waves looked a lot bigger than they had seemed on the shore. Hmmm.... must be that surfboard leash pulling my ankles out to sea, it just couldn't be my own fears.

We also didn't have water for about two days. Some woman crashed her car, leaving it hanging perilously over the bridge near our house. I'm not sure if that was the cause of the water line break, but both were unfortunate circumstances for sure. Our landlord now has to come by everyday, pay someone for water, and fill up our well. The woman who crashed her car was fine. Half the town was gathered around the bridge at 6 am when I was on my way to work, watching this woman screaming at the backhoe driver (what could he do anyway?) to "levantalo todo!", "Lift up the whole thing!" At The Bakery, Rosa told me she knows this woman and is quite a partier so I'm guessing guarro (a local alcohol which seems to roughly equate to liquid crazy) or maybe too many cervezas drove her off the bridge.

One of the owners of The Bakery got into a really bad crash on his quad on Friday night. Unfortunately there was also a really bad storm that night so the air support couldn't land in the ocean to come get him and the ambulance took 4 hours, and about $4000 dollars, to get here. By the time he got back to the hospital in San Jose, he was in really bad shape. He has recovered and is mending and resting in San Jose and will hopefully be back in a week, but Halloween at The Bakery was very tense and I felt awful for all his friends just waiting by the phone there. I will be so grateful for the day that I walk to work and see him there!

I'm at Zula Restaurant right now, using their computer, where I had an amazing Israeli breakfast of Shakshuka, I think it was called. It came with pita, hummus, poached eggs in an onion, tomato, garlic sauce, a salad, and french fries. I am also now on my third cup of Israeli coffee, which is a lot like the strong, sweet Cuban coffee we had, but earthier. Some of the best coffee I have ever tried.

Have I mentioned before that there is a large community of both Belgians and Israelis in Mal Pais? Davey and I are about to go try surfing again! Well, I try, he does.

Oh, and I met a girl yesterday who is here for six months doing volunteer work teaching English at the school here. I had been trying to find a way to do just that thing so I think I'm going to start helping her out with her lesson plans and classes. Exciting!