Mi Familia

Left to Right: Paola, Alejandro, Mi Madre (Brenda), Jose Daniel

Paola is turning 15 in a week and a half! Her 15th birthday is pretty much the equivalent to our 16th birthday. She is having a HUGE party..150 people have been invited. The dress that she is going to wear is a green princess dress that is ABSOLUTELY gorgeous! I wish I could say that I am going to the party but unfortunately I have an Environmental Science weekend trip that I must go on. Paola knows the best English in the family so when I am having a hard time finding a word she is kind enough to help me.

Alejandro is 11. He and Paola are tight. Alejandro and I watch TV together in Spanish. Most of the time I am not exactly sure what is going on..I pay close attention to the body language to get the general gist. Alejandro is very patient with me when I ask him what is going on. Every now and then I teach him a new word in English...last night I taught him how to say "trash" because he was taking the trash out.

Mi Madre works in the Balistics Department. Originally I thought she worked at the hospital because she wears scrubs to work, but I was wrong. She is a great cook and always asks me if I understand the conversation at the dinner table.

Jose Daniel is my little buddy. He is four years old. This year he started Kinder which is like our preschool. His backpack looks like a Penguin! Jose Daniel gives the best hugs and has the cutest smile!

I was not able to get a picture of Mi Tita. I love the sound of Mi Tita's laugh. She laughs a lot and it is WONDERFUL! Every morning before I leave for school she gives me a big hug and tells me "Buen Suerte" (good luck)!

I have an Uncle that lives in the house. I still haven't figured out what he does. I have another Uncle that lives across the street and is in the house a lot. He parks his car in our garage because his house is on a steep hill and my family does not have a car. He is an illegal taxi driver-at least that is what I have been told. Today he gave me his card so I could call him if I ever need a ride and instead of saying taxi driver it says "private transportation".

I finally got the picture to upload! This is my four year old host brother. :-D He loves to take pictures and have pictures taken. He makes me smile so much everyday.

Precious Moments

A couple of days ago I finally opened the box of nerds that Natalie sent with me and Jose Daniel saw me eating them. Of course he wanted to know what they were so I let him have a few. Now everyday he comes into my room when I get home to ask me if he can use my headlamp and to see if he can also have a few nerds.

Last night I had to take my computer home so I could get some work done. For those of you who don't have a Mac there is an application called PhotoBooth where you can distort pictures you take on the computer. Jose Daniel loves to use my camera so I figured he would like to take pictures on the computer. This was seriously one of the cutest memories I have so far! Jose Daniel sat on my lap for twenty minutes pointing to which distortion he wanted to use and we took so many pictures. His favorite distortion was the one that is like a mirror and slices your body so that you can see two of your faces on the screen at the same time.

I will try to upload the pictures later but I am currently having problems uploading files.

Cooking with Mi Tita!

Wednesday night was one of the best nights yet! For our General Studies class we all had to cook a Tican dish with our host mom or grandma. I made Ensalada de Papas Con Atun with mi tita! (grandma). I had such a great time being in the kitchen. Mi tita and I laughed a lot. I absolutely love her laugh, it brings a smile to my face. The potato salad turned out really well too! Everyone seemed to enjoy it at our group lunch!

I did make one mistake though...The potato salad calls for Culantro and I have never bought it before nor did I know what it looks like. So when I went to the store I found the herbs section and picked up whatever was under the sign that said Culantro. When I took my groceries home mi tita told me that I had not gotten Culantro (I am not sure what I got because I couldn't fully understand what she said)!

Going to the grocery store by myself was quite an experience as well. I was really nervous to go alone and have to find everything when all the signs were in spanish. The last item I had to get was the Tuna and I just couldn't find it. I asked the worker who was on the aisle in my broken spanish "donde es el atun?" To my great surprise it was directly behind me!

I told mi madre y mi tita that I wanted to make an American dish for dinner sometime. Mi madre wants to learn how to cook the American dish from me! I think I am going to make a beef noodle bake. :)

Puerto Viejo

Friday morning I woke up at 4:30am so that I could meet five others at a park near by to catch a taxi to take us to the bus station. I had no idea when the sun came out until Friday. The stars were still out as I left my house and I was definitely nervous to be walking in the dark by myself for 7 minutes. In order to make myself feel safer I held onto my key chain that has a small pocket knife on it. (There was recently a robbery in my neighborhood where someone was held at gunpoint..so I had reason to be a little worried)

When we got to the bus station there were not many other people there. Our bus was scheduled to leave at 6:00, by 5:45 the area was full of travelers with surfboards and large backpacks. Almost everyone had a heavy duty camping backpack full of their clothes. Two boys who are studying near San Jose sat in front of Jessica and I on the bus. We only talked to them long enough to realize that one was from Holland and the other was from Brazil. They were going to Puerto Viejo to enjoy the waves and also staying at Rocking J's Hammock Hostel. After we had been in the bus for a couple hours the boy from Holland started talking to an older local man who was sitting across the aisle from him. I practiced my listening comprehension by eavesdropping on them (because everyone else was asleep and I had not brought my ipod with me). To my great surprise I was able to understand a lot of what they were saying! I learned that the boy from Holland (I later found out his name is Yurit) can speak five languages fluently! Needless to say, I felt unaccomplished after hearing this.

Upon arriving in Puerto Viejo we were greeted by those who had left the night before from our group in San Jose. Everyone told us how much they loved being there and how friendly the locals were. The Rocking J's is a collection of art everywhere. The place is covered with beautiful mosaic tiles and paintings on every surface. Unfortunately I do not have pictures because we were warned that Puerto Viejo was "muy peligroso" (very dangerous), so I decided to leave my camera safely tucked away in a drawer at my Tica house.

Saturday we watched a surfing competition at a beach that was a ten minute bike ride down the road from the hostel. Biking was definitely an experience. We rented our bikes for 3,000 colonnes from a lady who kept calling us "mi amor". This translates into paying about $6 to have the bikes for two days! Our group of six definitely got the best deal! The bikes were road bikes with baskets in the front. The roads were not designed for road bikes; they were littered with pot holes. It was necessary to pay close attention to where the bike was going to navigate on a level path. Many people had their chains fall off or get caught in their bikes. The locals were very nice and helped us fix the broken bikes. I even learned how to fix the chain myself!

Being in Puerto Viejo was very different from being in Manuel Antonio. Manuel Antonio is a much more family friendly beach resort destination. Puerto Viejo was full of backpackers and young travelers from the UK. The beaches were not as pretty-but still nice. There was a lot of coral in the ocean and a few of us cut up our feet from swimming.

It was a wonderful feeling to come back to my Tica house and have dinner with my host family once the weekend was over.

I wanted to share this because it is so beautiful.

Thing I am more grateful for now...

WELL MAINTAINED ROADS
Manuel Antonio I learned today is only 100 miles away from San Jose. It took us FOUR HOURS to get there. We traveled through windy mountain roads and there were so many potholes! On our drive to the beach where we went horseback riding the driver had to slow the car down to almost a complete stop to maneuver the van around the potholes.

Being able to flush toilet paper
For the first week I had a difficult time remembering to throw the toilet paper into the trash can instead of into the toilet. At my tica home I am able to flush the toilet paper, but not at Mesoamerica or most other places.

HOT WATER (for showers)
The houses do not have hot water heaters. Instead there are little machines that are attached to the shower. I think I have finally gotten the hang of how to maneuver the nozzle so I get warm water. The first few showers I took were the quickest showers I have ever taken in my life because they were so cold.

INTERNET
I am only connected to the internet when I am at school. This has been a pretty cool experience though and allows me to spend more time talking with my tica family while I am at home. It has also given me a chance to spend more time reading! :)

Manuel Antonio

On the way to Manuel Antonio we crossed a bridge that stretched over a river full of crocodiles. There were three crocodiles hanging out on the edge of the river and we even saw some of them swimming upstream.

As soon as I walked out of my hotel room which I shared with Jessica I was greeted with a beautiful view of the area right before the beach. Jessica and I had a hammock on our porch that I lounged in for a little while.

The beaches in Manuel Antonio National Park were absolutely beautiful. The sands were white and a lot of wildlife lived in the "wet forest" that bordered the beaches. Before we actually went to the beach we went on a guided tour of the forest. In the forest we saw sloths, monkeys, land crabs, bats, and many plants. One of the trees grows pepper, our guide told us that the process of getting the pepper out of the tree takes about two weeks. We also smelled the stem of a leaf that contained a natural insect repellent. The repellent smelled like a nice citrus. Two of the people in the group even ate a leaf that had quinine in it, which is used in malaria pills.

After spending some time at the beach in Manuel Antonio I went horseback riding with Jessica, Rebecca, and Landis on a rural beach about 40 minutes away from our hotel. The rural beach was extremely different than Manuel Antonio. We did not see anymore than 20 other people while we were on our horses. The guide told us that in Manuel Antonio there are over 200 hotels and in the area that we were in only had 3 hotels. Our guide was so nice and told us a lot about his life. His name was Roberto. Roberto owned the horses and had been working with Iguana Tours for over 20 years. Previously to working with Iguana tours he had also worked as a teacher in the mountains and on the ranch with his father. Roberto was extremely pleased to hear that Jessica, Rebecca, and I were all education majors. He told us how Costa Rica does not have a military army, but rather an army of teachers. On our way back to where we began riding the horses we got to see a beautiful sunset over the Pacific Ocean.

Sunday was spent traveling back to San Jose. I was looking forward to seeing my Tica family again. I missed having breakfast and dinner with them over the weekend. Jose Daniel greeted me at the door with a huge hug and I spent most of the evening hanging out with him. We even had a pillow fight!

Nature is beautiful

This morning in class Jessica and I looked out the window to see our second rainbow in two days. The spanish word for rainbow is "arcoiris".


As I was walking home yesterday after class with Eric and Jessica we saw our first rainbow! We were nervous to take a picture of it because we have been warned to be very careful with our more valuable belongings.



After taking a picture of the rainbow I turned around to look down the hill and was greeted with this picture. There are so many beautiful colors surrounding us in nature around here. Everyday I am in awe of the views on my walk to and from school.

A few differences

In spanish class this morning we were playing Bingo to learn more vocabulary. Jessica, Jesse, and I noticed that there are a lot of words that we learned in our Spanish classes in the US that are not the same here. We had all learned pastel as cake in America but here it is caque (pronounced cake-ay)...also I don't think I spelled it correctly. We are also not learning the vosotros form for verbs because they do not use that form in Central America. The word for socks is different as well.

Families live a lot closer together as well. In my house the there is the grandma, her daughter, the daughters kids, and one of the grandma's sons. Across the street lives another one of the grandma's sons with his son. Familly walks in and out of the house all the time.

The sidewalks are not well kept either. There is a lot of broken glass and tile littering the streets. There are a lot of holes and pot holes in both the streets and the sidewalks. It is necessary to be very careful when you are walking around so you don't trip over yourself.

My family does not turn any of their lights on in the house unless it is absolutely necessary. Most of the time I think that it is going to be dark outside but it is always so bright.

I am getting used to the differences and learning to appreciate them for sure.

I am going to state the obvious..this is the bed that I sleep in. It makes a lot of noise when I sit on it. I try not to move around too much because mi tita's (my tica grandma's) room is right across the hall from mine and I don't want to bother her while she is trying to sleep. My room is right next to the eating area and the family room.

Jesus es Amor..that is the only decoration that is in my room besides what I brought and the furniture. My tica family is Catholic. The three year old boy tries to say grace before dinner with much assistance from su tita y su madre (his grandma and his mom).

The courtyard is in the backyard of our school. We have on big classroom on the first floor. There are no other rooms with desks like that, but there are meeting rooms upstairs where I think we will be having class.

Mi tita saw the yarn on my nightstand near my bed and showed me all the scarves and vests that she has knitted/is in the process of knitting. We now have plans to sit out on the porch together and knit. :-D