Ills

Mike arrived Saturday and we tramped off to Monteverde on Sunday. Had a wonderful few days there; the Santa Elena Reserve is one of the best places I've been here. Lots of clouds in that cloud forest, and lots of green things, too. Our guide book said that 25% of the biomass in the Reserve is moss or lichen, which we didn't believe until we got there. Every possible living surface is covered with another living thing. Calla lilies growing in the branches of trees. Mosses hanging down, twirled around vines. Incredible. Strange, too, to be cold, as we were for lots of our visit. Our hotel was way, way, way up a mountain--a 30 minute drive that covered only 9 kilometers (everything you've heard about the roads in Costa Rica is true--esp. in the Monteverde area) and we stayed in jeans and sweatshirts the whole time. The great views of Arenal Volcano and Lake Arenal from our hotel room were almost always obscured by clouds, but one afternoon we just sat in front of the picture window in our room, watching the clouds change shapes and directions, revealing and concealing the views. Better than cable.

But, upon returning home, I have taken ill. Oh yes. I'm glad not to know the highs my fever reached yesterday but suffice it to say I was quite certain, for a while, that my brain was expanding beyond the limits of my skull. Today I am at least awake though the minute the ibuprofen gets low in my system the fever and attendant aches return. Poor Mike--he spent yesterday bringing me cool, wet cloths for my forehead and feeding me cold medicine. He is right now at a lunch/tour with the institute, a treat for us faculty, and he is representing me. I even had to cancel my class yesterday, something I hardly ever do. But I couldn't move, really. One of the students suggested I might have dengue fever, as I've been to both the coasts in the past two weeks and got my share of mosquito bites, but my colleague Kerry had this same thing last week, and with the fever also comes a cough, so I think I've just got the flu. Poor Mike. What a nice visit for him. Anyway, if it is dengue (which certainly sounds tropical of me, doesn't it?) there's nothing to be done.

Maggie comes tomorrow, and I'm bound and determined to be well for her. So I will go back to bed soon and work on healthy cells or something. Positive thinking. The power inherent therein. Wish me luck.

In a little more than 24 hours, I'll have my whole family in one country!!!

Chicken neighborhood

My cousins had a cat named Chicken Neighborhood. I don't know why. Here in Costa Rica, that cat comes to mind frequently because so much of this country is a chicken neighborhood. There are chickens everywhere. At the hotel in Manuel Antonio, I crossed paths with a chicken (and several enormous iguanas) on my way to the room. Walking home from the bank this afternoon, I found my neighborhood, as always, full of chickens. I actually love them.

Two posts in one day! I am dying of boredom. Everything is closed here today. I called a cab, finally, and he took me and Kerry to the automatic teller machine. I realized I was down to about 1,2oo colones, all in loose change (about 2.20 in dollars) and was beginning to worry about how, exactly, I'd pick Mike up from the airport tomorrow, so the cab came and picked me and Kerry up. The whole way there the taxi driver spouted baseball statistics. When he found out we were from Minnesota he shouted "Minnesota Twins! World Champions 1991!" I'm vague on baseball, in general, so I just agreed enthusiastically. He spoke much better English than we speak Spanish (many people would not consider this a compliment) and really, I must say, the man does love baseball. I tried to explain my baseball claim to fame, that Derek Jeter is from my hometown, but that was too much for our limited communication abilities. "New York Yankees! World Champions 1996!" (I think that's what he said.)

The good news is the bank had money, which perhaps is more usual than I initially believed, traumatized as I was by my March 1st, 5 banks, no money ordeal. So Mike will be greeted tomorrow at the airport. No worries! Kerry and I had a nice walk home. The clouds that threatened rain did not produce, luckily, and we enjoyed the exercise and change of scenery. I think people drink a lot here on Good Friday. Certainly our quiet apartment complex was blasting with music and loud singing for a while there.

I am certainly lucky to like my colleagues so well, to have such good companionship here. And I look forward to Mike's arrival for many reasons, but a new one is the enormous dead bug (I mean huge--3 or 4 inches long, at least) in my pantry.

Ok, this really is it for a while. My internet access card is about to run out (I buy them in 3 or 5 thousand colones increments, allowing me 10 or 15 hours of access) and I really should straighten things up around here, or Mike's (unspoken) suspicions about my slovenliness will be confirmed.

Write me! Send me emails!

bananas and more

Mike arrives tomorrow. I really can hardly wait. We'll head up to Monteverde and see what's there for a few days, then I have to come back here to teach my class and study Spanish. Then Maggie arrives and I will have my whole family in arms' reach for the first time in six weeks. It's been too long, in some ways, but the time certainly makes the reunion more longed for. Sweet.

Bananas grow in huge bunches. I thought the plantations would be like that Harry Belafonte song: come mister tally man, tally me banana....six hand seven hand eight hand bunch. Not that I really had a clue what that meant. Nowadays, each giant banana bunch grows inside its own blue plastic bag. So as you drive through the plantations, you see tree after tree hung with big blue bags. I heard several reasons for this--protection from pests, to slow the ripening of the bananas, to speed it up--but no matter. It's a weird scene. The huge bunches are cut from the tree by a man and caught beneath by another, who runs to hang them on enormous hooks that are run through the plantation on wires. Like what? Clothes lines, maybe. Or shower curtain hangers. Eventually a whole long string of banana bunches is pulled in for processing to a large room where the assembly line begins. Some guys cut the bananas into the size bunches we buy at Rainbow and toss them into water. Women sort through and grade them according to size and quality. Something gets sprayed on the stems of each bunch, stickers are applied, and the bananas are put in boxes headed for the US. Do know that lots of pesticides are used in the growing of bananas. Apparently the organic producers in Costa Rica sell almost entirely to Gerber. At least we aren't feeding our babies toxic chemicals. The work is hard and done almost entirely by Nicaraguans. Our tour bus actually stopped at a processing facility where we all took photos of the people doing their jobs. That felt weird.

We have had rain here the past two afternoons, which is very odd for the dry season. But the temperature has been heavenly--cool enough at night that I have to sleep with my blanket on. The Central Valley is really so temperate compared to the coasts, where 90s with 100% humidity seem to be the rule. Of course, there's also blue blue ocean to dive into there, which helps.

Emily is in Puerto Viejo at a hammock hotel. We'll see if she's still so enamored of hammocks after sleeping in one for three nights! Then again, I sound like a 40 year old when I say such things, don't I?

I realized I should really look up how to spell the names of these places I write about. But I guess you all can figure out what I mean, spelling never having been my strong suit.

More soon, after Monteverde.

true story

Saturday, March 19th, was the 11th anniversary of my sister Kate's death. On Sunday the 20th, Emily, my colleague Kerry and I were sitting in a bar in the jungle of Tortaguerro, drinking Coronas with lime and salt when a song came on the stereo. It was a Spanish song I know only from a tape of Kate's which we found in her stereo after she died. I don't know the song or the singer, but there it was: in the far jungle, in the far years since she died, my sister's presence. Emily and I smiled and toasted Kate. Even Kerry, who is a new friend, was moved. We felt sad and very pleased all at once. Nothing about that place was familiar and yet. Yet.

And so: endurance. Continuance. Kate would be pleased with this adventure I'm having, I think. An unlikely Cullen adventure, but a likely Kate adventure.

So here's to you, Kate Bailey, wherever you are in this miraculous universe. At least you are here, in me, to this very day.

Bob Marley is The Kine

Or so says a sign on the wall of Coco's Bar in Cahuita, one of the earth's great places. The roads are dusty, cars are few, dogs are many. Tourists, too, but not the jungle-clothes-wearing, binoculared, telephoto-lens-wielding, get-out-of-my-way-as-I-head-back-to-my-airconditioned-tour-bus types I've seen a few too many of. (This is an international type; based on my limited experience here, I'd say the Dutch are perhaps the most, well, what's the nice way to put it? Obnoxious? Americans are obnoxious, too, but in general they seem to smile a lot as they push.) Anyway, Cahuita is too rough around the edges for those folks, which is for the best. The rest of us could walk around in sweaty, grungy clothes, hang out at the beach, eat in the few restaurants, drink killer margaritas at Coco's (they sneak up on you, trust me) where a live band played reggae and a dog sat on the floor next to the lead singer. Lots of pot was being smoked, too, but some of us had had a lot of delicious margaritas and so headed home to bed early. They were made from fresh lime juice, served in champagne glasses. So, yes, I had a few. And a few regrets the next morning, but never mind.

The beach there is spectacular. The water wasn't so warm as on the Pacific side, so it was in fact more enjoyable. Em and I were just getting in for our second swim when a big stingray swam by. We tried to continue swimming but realized we were both sort of treading (shallow) water, afraid to let our feet hit the bottom so we got out to lie on the beach. The trees come practically down to the high tide line, so you are lying beneath the trees and next to the Atlantic. The air is hot and the water deep blue. What more could one want?

Tortaguerro--we stayed at a lodge in the jungle across the river--was fascinating and worth a visit. The town has no cars (it's accessible only by air or water) and so of course the streets aren't really streets, more like winding pathways through the village. I didn't really know places like that existed in the world anymore; it was magical, but of course it was also poor. The local school consists of two buildings, built right next to the sea, without real windows, just rusty metal bars, and is furnished with desks, chairs and a chalkboard. That's all. I don't know, really, if the beauty of the place, and its slow pace, provides enough for the inhabitants. Who can say? But--there we were part of a tour group (horrors! never to be repeated!) and seeing our group members photograph the lives of these people made me uncomfortable. Emily was so upset she walked ahead of the group, sort of pretending she wasn't with us.

I could go on about the absurdities of putting 25 people in a group and dragging them through the jungle together--it was a real study in group dynamics. Suffice it to say the Dutch people told the Spanish people to keep their kids quiet, or else, but the Spanish people ignored them and their kid scared off the monkeys in the jungle. The Dutch people got mad at us because we sat at the wrong table one night with the German woman. The Spanish people asked the Canadians to move at dinner one night so they could all sit together. The Dutch man kept bumping Em out of the way whenever a photo op would pop up, never so much as smiling as he elbowed past her. The German woman ended up traveling with us to Cahuita (one boat ride and three bus rides!) but she got bit by a bug on her eyelid the first night in her $14 hotel and left. We realized we didn't even know her name. I hope she's alright. Needless to say, we did fine and amused ourselves studying the group, but there were moments when I could have punched someone. So I'd suggest Tortaguero on your own. But that's just me. I'm not much of a joiner.

We saw some really cool stuff though--parrots and toucans and green herons and blue herons, monkeys and sloths and iguanas, a crocodile, a strawberry poison dart frog, a green tree frog. I feel so lucky to have seen all these things, to know these creatures still live on this earth. I mean: in Minnesota all this jungle stuff is an abstraction. Waking up 5 of the last 6 mornings to the howl of monkeys is not an abstraction. Even, by this morning, it wasn't so much a thrill as: yep, there they are again. It must be about 5:15. Still, seeing them climb through the trees with their babies on their backs never gets old for me.

On the long bus ride back home, I sat my smelly stuff next to an equally smelly Norwegian who was travelling with his teenage kids. They had just been in Panama, which he raved about. He'd lived in Costa Rica for 5 years, about 7 years ago, and he said that the reason everyone has bars on their windows is that for a while crime was really bad. It's not so bad now, but since everyone has bars on their home, if you didn't your house would, clearly, become an easy target. He also said the Costa Ricans tend to blame the crime on Nicaraguans, who are the farm laborers here--picking bananas (that's hard work...we drove through mile after mile of banana plantation on the way to the river to Tortaguaro), coffee, etc. It was nice to talk to someone who really knew the country but wasn't Costa Rican, so that I could ask questions I wouldn't ask a native.

So much more I could talk about--the banana plantations, the travel, the sunburn, etc. But I'm so tired already at 7:30 that I think I'll call it a night.

Scorpio?

Ah, no. Scorpion.
As in: walking down the hall of my apartment. Si. Lucky for me, my friend and colleague Ellen was here to slay it while I screamed. But first I got a photo of it. I'll try to post it in the next week on my snap fish site I just now opened and don't, yet, know how to direct anyone to. So, the morning after the scorpion we headed to Manuel Antonio where Ellen hired a guide. This turned out to be a very wise decision. (See photos?) We were able to see monkeys, which I'd seen before, but also a nighthawk, a kingfisher, a toucan, and several Sloths! I was thrilled, as seeing a sloth was one of my heartfelt wishes. And was it ever fulfilled. I actually got a photo of what looks like the sloth smiling down at me. We saw lots of bats, too. The whole experience was sort of magical.

And hot. We took the bus home. For 3.50, one really can't complain about anything but I think I'm just going to briefly mention how hot it was. Very hot. On the bus. But the private bus that took us to M.A. cost $25.00 and wasn't any faster. (Though it was air conditioned.) So all in all, the express buses are a very fine deal. Just here's some advice: wear natural fabrics, preferably in dark colors.

I'm off again tomorrow. Early early. We leave for our spring break week at 5:20 a.m. This time I'm headed to the Caribbean side of the country, to Tortuguero and then Cahuita. Emily and I are going, along with my colleague Kerry. We should have adventures.

I think the bird that calls each night here in Alajuela is in fact a nighthawk. Its song is so incredibly lovely, a little forlorn. I have come to love its song.

I have to say, too, that getting back to Alajeula this afternoon, tired and hot and sweaty, I realized that this place now feels like home to me. I asked the cabbie to stop at the bank and the machine had money in it. The air here is cool and unbelievably lovely. The sunset made us all rosy and beautiful. Ah. This place is magic.

And did I hear there's lots of snow in Minnesota?

culture clash

It's not just language I get wrong. Today a famous writer came to my class and I thought he was going to talk about a beautiful story he had written. He talked instead about the treatment of women since, well, forever. He was very learned, and very engaging, but the point remained obscure to me. Finally, I raised my hand and asked if we could talk about his story; he bristled visibly and said, "I have been for the past hour." To think when I came here I imagined meeting writers and joining a community! I manage instead to offend the first one I meet.

Last night I swam laps in the pool. My family will find this quite amusing as I've been the one who watches all these years. How many thousands of hours have I sat at swim meets, watching, critiquing, cheering? And still, swimming back and forth across the pool yesterday, I was shocked at how hard it was. I was out of breath immediately. I didn't glide gracefully the way Mike and Maggie and Emily do. No, I was entirely conscious of my butt dragging me down to the bottom, of my arms flailing inefficiently. I was utterly shocked. Shouldn't all that watching have worn off on me? Apparently not. This was after my pleasant surprise that, I thought, I could suddenly understand Dutch. A woman and her son were at the pool, and I could understand much of what they were saying, which for some reason I assumed was Dutch. I learned later that they are German, and I studied German, and so of course I could understand it. But why didn't I know it was German? It's sort of like the night I was watching TV and thought I couldn't understand the English. Weird things happen to my brain here.

Because we are so close to the equator, the sun rises at 6 every morning and sets at 6 every evening. By 9 or so it really feels like bedtime, and I struggle to adjust to both warmth and dark, as in Minnesota when it's hot the sun is out until 9:30 or later.

As I walked to my front door this afternoon, I looked down and saw a bright red flower with a long stamen wobbling down the sidewalk. Wobble. Wobble. On looking closer, I saw it was being carried by a very determined ant. That flower was at least 20 times the size of the ant, and yet the ant moved along quickly, an inadvertent beauty made from his effort.

Adios, then, from the dusk of 5:30.

Almost the Ides of March

Last week, on Tuesday, three gunmen opened fire on a bank in Monteverde, a beautiful and peaceful little town here. Two of them were killed in the initial shooting, but one made it inside the bank and took hostages. Before it was all over, 9 people were killed and 17 injured. The surviving would-be-robber surrendered to police after holding hostages for 28 hours. The assailants were from a Nicaraguan gang that police think had robbed several banks in Costa Rica in the past year.

Aside from the violence and shock of such a thing happening in so small and peaceful a place as Monteverde, what strikes me about this event is how I managed to miss it entirely. In my house I have cable t.v., and I watch CNN occasionally. From that news broadcast I gathered that what had happened in the world last week was that Michael Jackson's trial began. That's about it. I try to watch Spanish-speaking tv shows sometimes, for practice listening, but I haven't found the local news on tv yet. And of course, the international press doesn't seem to pay much attention to Central America, as far as I can tell. I must get better at picking up the local papers, because it wasn't until last night, reading Friday's edition of the Tico Times--an English language weekly--that I fully understood the story.

I am getting very tired of my continued suckiness in Spanish. I just can't speak. I open my mouth in class and little squeaks of words creep out. At first I was sort of amused by this, but now I am just tired of it. Today I was thinking of something, and realized that instead of trying to find the Spanish word for it, I was thinking of the French word. This is alarming when you understand that I know about 28 French words. "Moi?" Si. Oh, it's a bad, bad jumble in my head right now. I have at least mastered the daily "Coma esta?" "Muy bien, y usted?" that greets me when I get to school. And the very nice woman who sells the coffee always smiles so kindly to me when I say "gracias", responding, "con mucho gusto." But oh, verbs. My teacher almost clapped aloud today when I said "mis ojos son azul" because I used the right form of the verb, but I don't think she knew that I had just read it on a handout. I did not generate that verb form on my own. I could do that, had I about three minutes to think things through. Unfortunately, conversation at school moves more quickly than that and in the real world moves so fast that I give up, resorting to my happy little phrases.

So, in summary, this shit is hard. My sister had an incredible gift for languages. My brother seems to. And me? I got zip. Nada. Ah, what can you do?

Et tu, Brute? Oh wait, that's for tomorrow. And it's sure not Spanish.

take care, all.

Don't go chasing waterfalls

Sorry about that title. I couldn't resist.

I'm just back from a day's guided tour, with all the students in our program, to Poas Volcano and La Paz waterfall. I was cold for the first time here (sorry to say that for those of you in Minnesota). Even with my polar fleece, jeans, and a raincoat that now seems like a brilliant investment (though I wondered about spending that 26 bucks at the time) I shivered nearly the whole time at the blustery, rainy, and completely obscured-by-clouds volcano. We got a nice workout walking the trails, but as we were actually inside the clouds, there was nothing to see. By the time we left the volcano, about 11, the place was totally overrun with other tourists who would see exactly the same cloud we saw. Truly, the gift shop was so packed I got a wave of claustrophobia just glancing in.

The crowd at the volcano should have prepared me for the waterfall, but I just blithely assumed we were the only folks in all of Costa Rica wanting to take such an excursion. The first stop at the waterfall site was actually the butterfly garden, a truly spectacular place. I don't know how many butterflies floated around--hundreds, thousands--landing on the clothes of some lucky people. There were red and black ones, yellow ones, orange ones, and the most beautiful huge blue ones that excelled at avoiding being photographed. When the blue ones closed up they looked like big brown moths, but when they opened their wings and flew, then they were magical. Many of us attempted to wait out the suckers, aiming our cameras at the unremarkable brown, closed wings, but I tell you it was impossible to catch that split second between rest and flight, between plain and stunning. In a way, though, not catching the image made the experience more remarkable.

When we proceeded to the waterfalls, we got caught in human traffic. We waited and waited for our turn to descend to the first of the falls. Once there, we all tried to snap photos before the next group pressed in. One American man in the group after ours turned to one of my students and said, "Move." This was not fun. It was not pleasant. I, particularly, struggled to enjoy nature in spite of, well, everything. At another waterfall (there are five and they are maybe the most beautiful I've ever seen, for the brief minutes I could actually look at them) I was standing quietly, trying to just relax and take the scene in, when a woman came up and asked me to move so she could take a picture. I understand that there aren't easy solutions to such overcrowding--the country needs the tourism, and everyone else there had as much right to see the falls as I did. But the experience was marred, to say the least, by the too-many-human beings.

As we drove through the coffee plantations on the way up to the volcano, a man stuck his tongue out at our passing tour bus. I thought about that as we returned from our trip. If I tire of tourists, being one, what must the native Costa Ricans think? How do they put up with us?

But, on the road home from the waterfall, a herd of slowpoke cows, moving back to the barn to be milked, stopped traffic in both lanes. The bus driver sort of herded the cows from behind while the farmer kept redirecting the few that really wanted to left instead of right toward home. How can I not love such a place?

observations

I don't understand why, but since yesterday my internet service has slowed down to a crawl. Ah, but I can still access the internet and thus, it seems, the world, from home, and that's such a nice sense of connection. And then it's back to studying Spanish, something I have not done and which may account for some of my struggles!

I thought to write today about some of the things I've seen here in Costa Rica that were surprising to me.

Mayonaise is flavored with lime here. It comes in squeezable plastic bags with a little spout on the top. While at first I found this off-putting, the sensibility of it has won me over. No knife. No heavy glass jar. I find the lime flavor interesting too.

Yesterday I bought lemon-flavored peanuts. They tasted most like salt-and-vinegar potato chips. I think I liked them.

Salsa just means tomato sauce (I was indeed surprised) but upon searching I found a little plastic bag of what I mean by salsa--tomatoes, peppers, onions, cilanto.

In lots of tortilla chips you will find BBQ flavoring. This I do not like.

In the square in barrio San Jose, Emily pointed out to me what she calls the screaming tree. It is full of (invisible) birds who make so much noise the tree seems to be shrieking.

In most places here, one cannot flush toilet paper. This takes some adjusting to.

Bananas as we know them in the US are nothing. Here, they taste entirely different and unbelievably delicious. The the farmer's market, I can buy a bunch of about 25 small bananas for 250 colones--about 5o cents. They are beyond description. The same can be said for the mangoes and the pinapples.

In general, the many, many dogs here are smaller than in the US. They bark a lot in the night, protecting us from something or other. Or frightening us? I haven't decided which.

That's about it from here. Back to the verbs. Ser. Estar. Vivir. Bailar.
Oh dear me. In the taxi last night, after Emily and I went out to dinner, I said to the driver:
two places please. first barrio La Trinidad and Apartamentos Palme Real.
(I had no idea how to say second or next.)
Emily leaned over and said, "You could use a verb."
And then demonstrated by asking the driver to go to La Trinidad.
Show off.

That's all from here today, where the sun is out and the temp is about 88.

challenges

I thought today I'd write about the harder things about being here. I probably am in the state of mind for this today more than usual, having been struggling all day with an intense wave of homesickness. So. Homesickness is a challenge. I especially struggle with missing Maggie and Mike, feeling particularly like I should be home for Maggie, want to be home for her. I miss her funny ways and her messiness, I miss her laughter and her hair. I miss hearing about her daily life. And Mike, well, I have to say that living apart from him for the first time in more than 20 years proves to be difficult in ways I couldn't have imagined. Partly, though, that was the point of this adventure!

Other challenges:
today I sat by the pool and wrote while a very nice woman, whose name I still don't know, cleaned my apartment for 8 dollars. I find that uncomfortable in so many ways: I am in fact the rich white American in those moments. I could explain why I have hired her (I have no cleaning supplies and don't want to buy them for these nine weeks, for example) but that's not the whole story. The fact is the cost is so low that I'd rather she do it than do it myself. But then, by the pool, I felt guilty and lazy.

Today the taxi driver snapped at me when I asked him to turn on the meter ("Ponga la maria, por favor") and then proceeded to drive about 60 miles an hour down a local street while reading his newspaper.

My Spanish, if it can be called that, continues to plague not just me but anyone who comes in contact with it. Where do my verbs go? How can I not remember anything? When I'm in bed at night, beautiful Spanish sentences float through my head, but come morning, come any mild necessity to communicate, and I am nodding my head and saying, "it's ok" over and over in English.

When I call for the taxi that takes my colleagues and me to school in the morning, I had trouble at first remembering "trece" or 13, my apartment number. After one particularly mortifying morning where I kept counting, under my breath, "uno, dos, tres, quatro...etc" to get to 13, which I never managed to do, I decided to just make up a number when I called, as we always meet the taxi at the gate anyway. I settled on dos. Then yesterday when I called, the woman at the taxi place recognized my voice (and terrible Spanish, probably) and said, when I asked for a taxi at Apartamentos Palme Real, "apartamento dos?" Sigh.

I am very tired of being blonde, of signifying all the time. Blue eyes. The men here are pretty harmless though they honk a lot and call out "rico" which means, approximately, rich or delicious. As often as I get that, though, I get the anger, the frustration, from average people who do not like what I represent. I understand their frustration (see above) and know why they feel it (see above) and yet I also hate what I represent sometimes. Last week, for the first time, a woman in barrio San Jose looked up at me, smiled broadly and said "Hola !" I was so pleased to have a stranger be so kind, but then I realized she was in fact the woman who cleaned my apartment. Sigh.

Bugs. Lots of bugs. I am not afraid of them but covered in their bites.

Fear. People here live in intense security. Fences, gates, barbed wire, locks. I don't understand yet why or how afraid, exactly, I should be. My own experiences have been pleasant, entirely. But there must be some reason for this fear, mustn't there?

Systems. Sometimes the phone just doesn't work. Sometimes the bus doesn't come. For a whole week I couldn't get money out of the ATMs because they had none.

Ok. These are the challenges. But they do not outweigh the glories. Let that be clear. And I am learning and learning and learning everyday.

At Manuel Antonio I watched a perfect sunset over the Pacific--all red and gold over that vast blue. And I said my best wishes for Mike, for Maggie and for Rose. You were all in my heart then.

Love to all.

Monkeys

We went to Manuel Antonio national park on Thursday and it looks like paradise. The paradise one always imagines--jungles falling steeply to the sea, little islands dotting the horizon. The only surprising thing is how hot and humid paradise is. Truly, playing in the waves (which were warm and big) didn't cool me down at all. I emerged from the ocean wet, sticky with salt, and still hot. As a girl who's used to the ocean as it is in Maine, I found this disconcerting. But nice.

Then we had a whole group of howler monkeys outside our hotel room. There must have been about 30-40 of them, climbing around in the tree, making the most amazing noise. My brother said it sounds to him like the sound when you froth milk on the cappachino machine. I think they just sound like monsters. But cuter. Then in the park itself we saw squirrel monkeys, who are tiny and fast, and capuchin (sp?) monkeys with white faces. Those were the really curious ones. Not curious about us, I think, but curious about what potentially delicious foods we might have with us. Mama monkeys with babies on their backs. The whole experience was stunning. But did I say it was hot?

Now back in Alajuela where yesterday the wind started to blow and so last night was a delicious, almost chilly evening. Chilly like a late August Minnesota evening where you don't need a sweater but might want a light blanket on the bed. Perfect.

My brother and his wife left today. They spent the week on the Caribbean coast and loved it. They, and I am jealous, saw two sloths. Two! I will be on the lookout when I get over there in a few weeks.

Otherwise all is well. I had a funny conversation with a cab driver who forever endeared himself to me by being clearly shocked when I told him, in my broken Spanish, that I am 40. His English matched my Spanish, but we managed well enough. Only later did I realize that I had forgotten every single verb I know, and so was reduced to ridiculous phrases that required his common sense to make sense. So I said "Spanish school" and "my husband" and the like, but I was just totally verb-less. Lying in bed that night, I went over and over all the things I might have in fact been able to say, but oh well. I am learning a lot about the difference between book smarts and street smarts, let me tell you. Smilingly understanding my Spanish teacher is way different than comprehending the glaring woman at the grocery store. Luckily, as I've said before, most people here are exceedingly patient.

Julie wins the contest! There wasn't really a contest, but I thought I'd make it sound fun. She sent my first piece of mail and it was such a happy surprise to receive it. Thanks, Julie! (Should I mention that no one else seems to be in the contest?) The next winner will be whoever sends me a bottom to my bathing suit, which I left at the hot springs at Arenal. Black bikini bottom. Size 8..... Just kidding. I do have another suit but it was a poor poor choice one sad afternoon last summer and in it I don't look 40, I look closer to 60. It has red flowers. And a padded bra. Hideous. Really.

I do get email and such here, so keep in touch. And take care in whatever weather system you are currently enduring.

reflexive verbs

Ah, yes. Reflexive verbs. I get the concept but I don't like it. Or maybe I should say I think I get the concept and mostly, since I learned it this morning, I have forgotten. I excel at forgetting. My Spanish teacher for the past two weeks, Julio, is truly one of the most patient and gifted teachers I've ever met, but miracles are rare and I did not, unfortunately, suddenly develop an ability for languages. Still, in six days we've worked through present, future and progressive tenses. No wonder I feel so dazed.

Then after four hours of Spanish, I taught this afternoon for three and half more hours. My students are really working hard and I am so appreciative of their effort in spite of their exhaustion. We loved Dario's "To Roosevelt" which contains the following, particularly relevant stanza:

You think that life is fire,
that progress is eruption,
that the future is wherever
your bullet strikes.
No.


Just more proof that things change less than we imagine.

Today when I got on the dulce nombre bus, the driver said something to me, twice, and finally just shoved a lot of coins into my hand. I must have given him too much money, but who knows. I imagined all those Costa Ricans just shaking their heads at me, but in fact I think they weren't paying much attention. When I got off at my stop, I passed a man on the corner selling onions. Further down the street was the chicken party. I call it that because those chickens always sound so festive. I don't know if they are enjoying themselves as much as I imagine, but I like walking past all the commotion.

And now I've completed two weeks of work here. I leave tomorrow for my first trip to the sea: my dad, stepmom and I are headed to Manuel Antonio where monkeys will steal your backpack from the beach if you're not careful. I can't wait.