Wednesday:
I missed another dance class…for a gira! We went to Cartago to learn about mushrooms and flowers and visited three different locations. I sat next to a man on the bus who seemed a little shyer than the rest. Most of the adults get so excited and talk so quickly that it sounds like chickens when we're all in that little bus, which can get overwhelming, but he was very soft-spoken (sometimes a bit too much, as it took me a while to start to understand him). We chatted on the bus and ended up keeping each other company at each stop. We visited someone working to phase out chemicals when growing mushrooms, two men growing mushrooms and making compost for a profit (these mushrooms were grown in crates, and the stalk and cap came out the sides! I’ll post a picture soon, it was really neat), and a flower nursery. The flower nursery works to produce flowers and seeds for exportation to the US and Europe, and the guide kept emphasizing how sad it was that ticos didn’t get to enjoy them. Except we could buy the flowers next door, and they were practically free for US standards (I’m no gardener, so I shouldn’t say, but it seemed that way from everything I remembered and even the ticos thought it was cheap…12 garlic plants for $2, a pot of flowers for less than $2, big hanging arrangements for something like $5), so I don’t think they’re THAT sad about exporting. The guide took us into the greenhouse, taught us how to how to tell male and female flowers apart, then how to fertilize flowers, and finally little bit about production (manual pollination is more efficient than natural pollination for seed production, etc.).
When I got home and turned on the tap, it spurted out differently and surprised me. I turned it off, and realized it was no longer dripping. Figuring it was something the new person living with us had seen and fixed, I asked if he had changed the faucet. He was extremely confused, and then so was I, but then I saw that a little cap had been put over the tap. Maybe my tica mom finally decided to believe me about the leaky faucet!? Whatever happened, yay, that sink was driving me crazy.
Thursday:
Today on the farm (that is so cool to type…haha) we dug flower beds (they’re called ‘camas’ in Spanish, too), turned the non-working compost heap (mmm, cockroaches, nice little sign that things aren’t going as planned), and planted seedlings. The Biodynamics calendar says this week is good for ‘leaf’ plants, or plants such as basil and lettuce where the leaf is the part that is consumed, so that’s what we planted along with thyme and chive-like onions. I got my first official nasty blisters, and I found a caterpillar hanging out on the compost bag. I asked if it was poisonous, and apparently it only causes problems when it touches somewhere on the body with hair. So, hands were safe, arms were not. Strange.
I had to mail a ballot to vote on a proposition from home, and just as I was making all the signals in the crosswalks and really hauling butt to be able to make my bus on time, I trot up to a boarded up post office. Half-hoping that there were no nearby post offices so I could just give up and go home, I asked and someone told me it relocated to just around the building and across the street. Well, after bitterly admitting to myself that I wouldn’t make the bus, I found the new office and took the long way home.
I was a little angry after missing the direct-route bus and having worked digging holes and hauling things for six hours, but I consoled myself by promising myself a dessert at the bakery I pass on the way home. I always say ‘hi’ to the security guards I pass on the street if they aren’t busy and are more or less on my path because I figure we’ll be seeing a lot of each other, I think it's the proper social thing to do here, and I’d like them to save me from crazy people if the need should ever arise. I passed a security guard and said ‘hi’, to which he responded ‘¿todo bien?’ with a big thumbs up. So I told him, ‘¡todo bien!’ and gave him one back because everything really WAS fine, and my grumpy went away. When I went to the bakery, I told the woman I wanted to try a bunch of different things before I went home, to which she replied that I would be returning home with a few extra kilos in a playful manner. Thankfully, after trying the desserts, now I know that won’t be a problem. I HAVE liked desserts from here, but just none that I’ve bought myself. It’s always someone else picking a place or letting me try what they’re eating. I guess it’s better that way, as desserts are waaaay too cheap here for me to be safe craving them.
I finally got lunch, at around 4, and decided to stay home from choir and do homework. I didn’t end up doing homework, though, because I chatted with my new…dorm-mate? He got stuck in Miami after a conference due to the volcanic eruption (of a volcano whose name I couldn’t quite catch…being that it was a pretty crazy name) in Europe, and therefore couldn’t go home to Switzerland (the ash cloud prevented more or less all the flights in Europe). It was cheaper to fly to Costa Rica, study Spanish for a week, and fly back than to just stay in Miami, so that’s what he did! He’s a new dad and a backpacker, so he told me about his family and his trips. It was really nice talking to him, and surprising to learn that he didn’t know what a piñata was. I feel like I’ve just always known, but I don’t really know why. Culture is fun. His business pertains to Internet, so we griped about how slow it is here, and then did an Internet speed check and validated my claim that a short youtube clip takes more than 10 minutes to load (it said 13 for a 3-5 minute clip, if I remember correctly). Good fun! He left today (Friday) to do touristy things before returning to Miami and then home, and I was sad to see him go. But, there is a couple interested in staying here a few days, and we find out tomorrow if they will (they wanted to pay less than tica mom wanted, so I suppose they’re deciding).
Friday:
My alarm didn’t go off again, but I realized it was because the power had gone out. I mentioned this to my tica mom, and she told me that her daughters’ shower had broken so they had cut the power to fix it. Thank goodness I didn’t have school or plans today o_o;
Today was fairly uneventful. I did, however, slam a knife into my finger and only get a papercut. That was lucky (or the knife is extremely dull, which is what I’m thinking), as I was cutting a carrot and there is no cutting board…And as I typed that, I realized that there IS one, I just hadn’t seen my tica mom use it so I assumed there wasn’t. Recently it’s been hanging out behind the handles of the sink and keeps falling into my hands when I wash things. Hurrah, no more awkward putting things on plates and trying to have the least knife-plate contact possible!
Tomorrow I am going on a fieldtrip with my Organic Agriculture class. It seems that there are no students my age going, as everyone in my work group said they couldn't make it, but we'll see. Almost all of the automayores will be there, from the hand-count that was taken, and we will in fact be working, but I don't really know on what. Yup, this is planning Costa Rica style.
Friday, April 23, 2010
Carne y compañeros
Oh boy, here we go.
Monday:
Ugh, Mondays have been rough for me lately. Sunday night I found hamburger in my food, but figured it was a one-time accidental thing (possibly frying my food in the same pan after someone else made hamburgers?). Then, on Monday for lunch, I found a sausage. I had to toss out most of my dinner from the night before, as the sauce was obviously meaty, and then had to do the same when I found the sausage in the sausage sauce. I hadn’t had problems with this before, so I brought it up to my tica mom. First she told me it wasn’t meat, then she ate it and told me it wasn’t THAT much meat. She couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to eat it, because there was only some meat by mistake, and she brushed me off when I explained I didn’t eat anything with meat in it, and the sauce obviously had been cooked with meat. She figured it was okay, because she had made it for her granddaughter who stayed the night.
I wouldn’t have been so annoyed, granted there was a new student moving in that day and I knew she was distracted, but that morning I discovered why I magically was sleeping through my alarm the last four or five days. The snooze button on the top was completely smashed in, meaning the alarm wasn’t going off. I was able to fix the alarm, but I have no idea what happened to it. I asked my tica mom, and she told me that the electricity must have gone out. I explained it to her better, and she said she had no idea. I wouldn't have been angry if she had accidentally done it and told me, but not telling me and therefore facilitating a non-functioning alarm is quite a pain for a student. This is mostly hypothetical, because I will never really know what happened, but things rarely implode…
Yoga that night was freaky stuff. It was the Mayan calendar day for digestion, which focuses on how what we put into our bodies affects us (including emotions). That’s two Mondays in a row now that the yoga lesson has honed in on exactly what was bothering me. Which is good, but I almost started laughing when the instructor announced the focus of the class, as it was absurd how accurately it fit my mood.
Tuesday:
Next week is Semana U! Which means there will be concerts, food, T-shirts for sale, possibly more, and some professors don’t give class or homework. This is what I learned during my popular dance class :) I am going to grab some ticos to help me figure things out, it sounds fun!
My Organic Agriculture class was cancelled (surprise, surprise), and this time the reasoning made even less sense. The professor said he’d give class if four students showed up. We had three students waiting, and were hoping for a fourth, when the class assistant told us class was cancelled and she had sent out an e-mail to tell us. Except…no one got e-mails? She told me she sent me one at a little before 8 AM, but it turns out it didn’t come until almost 11 (hm, makes me wonder when she actually sent it). The other two students with whom I was waiting didn’t get e-mails, and she said that I had only received one because I had sent her an e-mail. I sent her an e-mail over two weeks ago, and then another one…Aaaanyways, everything is chaos, even the professor didn’t know what was happening, as he still thought there was class. Her wonderful news: class is now at 7 AM. This means I have classes, separated by two hour blocks, from 7 in the morning to 7 at night every Tuesday. The only thing that kept me sane is the discovery of a computer lab, thank you Organic Agriculture buddy. Now I have somewhere to wait between classes, at least, and I can actually start having an academic component to that class.
We got our study guide for our test in my Natural History class, and the professor told us we should work in study groups to complete it. Um…too bad I don’t know anyone in that class. I talked to him, and he told me he could make the announcement that the fluent English-speaker wanted to be part of a study group, but he ended up forgetting so I got up the courage to blurt it out at the end of class. Because all of the reading is in English, the other students were more than happy to let me into their study plans, and I finally talked to them. I told one student that I was shy, and he told me that everything would change on our field trip (coming up early May), and that everyone would become friends. That was my plan, good thing it'll work! Another student invited me to a talk a human development, but as an ecology-focused person who just wanted to make the bus before it left (and I had to wait another hour), I politely declined. We ended up talking for a while afterwards, he in English and I in Spanish, and I had to run to just baaarely catch the bus as it was pulling out of the stop. I love having good bus luck, and I’m so excited for the chance to get to know my classmates!
Monday:
Ugh, Mondays have been rough for me lately. Sunday night I found hamburger in my food, but figured it was a one-time accidental thing (possibly frying my food in the same pan after someone else made hamburgers?). Then, on Monday for lunch, I found a sausage. I had to toss out most of my dinner from the night before, as the sauce was obviously meaty, and then had to do the same when I found the sausage in the sausage sauce. I hadn’t had problems with this before, so I brought it up to my tica mom. First she told me it wasn’t meat, then she ate it and told me it wasn’t THAT much meat. She couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to eat it, because there was only some meat by mistake, and she brushed me off when I explained I didn’t eat anything with meat in it, and the sauce obviously had been cooked with meat. She figured it was okay, because she had made it for her granddaughter who stayed the night.
I wouldn’t have been so annoyed, granted there was a new student moving in that day and I knew she was distracted, but that morning I discovered why I magically was sleeping through my alarm the last four or five days. The snooze button on the top was completely smashed in, meaning the alarm wasn’t going off. I was able to fix the alarm, but I have no idea what happened to it. I asked my tica mom, and she told me that the electricity must have gone out. I explained it to her better, and she said she had no idea. I wouldn't have been angry if she had accidentally done it and told me, but not telling me and therefore facilitating a non-functioning alarm is quite a pain for a student. This is mostly hypothetical, because I will never really know what happened, but things rarely implode…
Yoga that night was freaky stuff. It was the Mayan calendar day for digestion, which focuses on how what we put into our bodies affects us (including emotions). That’s two Mondays in a row now that the yoga lesson has honed in on exactly what was bothering me. Which is good, but I almost started laughing when the instructor announced the focus of the class, as it was absurd how accurately it fit my mood.
Tuesday:
Next week is Semana U! Which means there will be concerts, food, T-shirts for sale, possibly more, and some professors don’t give class or homework. This is what I learned during my popular dance class :) I am going to grab some ticos to help me figure things out, it sounds fun!
My Organic Agriculture class was cancelled (surprise, surprise), and this time the reasoning made even less sense. The professor said he’d give class if four students showed up. We had three students waiting, and were hoping for a fourth, when the class assistant told us class was cancelled and she had sent out an e-mail to tell us. Except…no one got e-mails? She told me she sent me one at a little before 8 AM, but it turns out it didn’t come until almost 11 (hm, makes me wonder when she actually sent it). The other two students with whom I was waiting didn’t get e-mails, and she said that I had only received one because I had sent her an e-mail. I sent her an e-mail over two weeks ago, and then another one…Aaaanyways, everything is chaos, even the professor didn’t know what was happening, as he still thought there was class. Her wonderful news: class is now at 7 AM. This means I have classes, separated by two hour blocks, from 7 in the morning to 7 at night every Tuesday. The only thing that kept me sane is the discovery of a computer lab, thank you Organic Agriculture buddy. Now I have somewhere to wait between classes, at least, and I can actually start having an academic component to that class.
We got our study guide for our test in my Natural History class, and the professor told us we should work in study groups to complete it. Um…too bad I don’t know anyone in that class. I talked to him, and he told me he could make the announcement that the fluent English-speaker wanted to be part of a study group, but he ended up forgetting so I got up the courage to blurt it out at the end of class. Because all of the reading is in English, the other students were more than happy to let me into their study plans, and I finally talked to them. I told one student that I was shy, and he told me that everything would change on our field trip (coming up early May), and that everyone would become friends. That was my plan, good thing it'll work! Another student invited me to a talk a human development, but as an ecology-focused person who just wanted to make the bus before it left (and I had to wait another hour), I politely declined. We ended up talking for a while afterwards, he in English and I in Spanish, and I had to run to just baaarely catch the bus as it was pulling out of the stop. I love having good bus luck, and I’m so excited for the chance to get to know my classmates!
Monday, April 19, 2010
Los demonios de no entender películas
Sunday started off super slowly, as I was up really late the night before talking to friends from college ( ^_^ ) and completely crashed in the morning. I went to lie down and drifted in and out of sleep, and my tica mom was nice enough to buy my weekly fruit supply on my behalf so I didn’t have to accompany her to the feria agricultor. I’m always super careful not to get plastic bags when I go, because they are so wasteful about packaging fruit, so now I have a two-fold increase in my plastic bag collection as my tica mom has a strange love of them. She tells me she needs them, but she just throws most of them away once we get home so I don’t really understand. I’m hoping she’ll learn by my example, and although that hasn’t happened yet, I still have hope. Someday, she, too, may feel comfortable putting carrots with potatoes, and mangoes with passion fruits in the same bag.
We had a cafecito together before I went to meet my friend to go to the mall, and she told me about how stressed she gets from having to take care of her grandchildren all the time. She loves the idea of kids moving out of their parents’ houses more or less once they went to college, and as she’s telling me this I’m thinking about how much I love the idea of family staying close. I don’t think it’s fair to dump all responsibility on mom, but I don’t think she realizes how lucky she is to be a part of her children’s and grandchildren’s lives. Or maybe she does, but just not yesterday. She says she loves them, but she just needs quiet time, and I can understand that, but I have the personal opinion that she’d drive herself insane being in a house alone and would end up going over to see them semi-constantly. I’d really have loved to see my grandparents more, as well many others from my extended family, growing up. I think that my parents did a better job with that than most people do for their children with visits, but it’s hard being far away. Her two daughters that live with her still are best friends, and all four children get together every Saturday. I know I’ll never have that sort of set-up in my life, and that it’ll only get harder to visit as I start to establish my own life, so I can’t help but be a little jealous of latino-style families. I guess there are always good things and bad things about these types of situations, and that it’s only human nature to want what we don’t have.
Fearing I would be late, as the cafecito threw off my timing, I ran to catch the bus to meet up with my friend. I love that the two friends I’ve made one-on-one plans with have been on time :) I’ve been warned that I may be waiting for hours… I was on time, we caught the bus, and literally went back exactly to where I had caught the bus near my house! So, I could have just met her at the bus stop, but we didn’t want things to get mixed up. The mall we went to is one of the biggest in Costa Rica, which is why we had to check it out, but she accurately told me that the malls in the US are probably bigger.
There was a really nice view on the top level and an open courtyard, so we bought green mangoes with chilies and lime and looked out at the mountains while eating and talking. It’s official, I’ve finally tried green mangoes the tico way! They were pretty good, though my sweet tooth might prefer ripe mangoes. (By the way, we visited a pet shop, and they sell hedgehogs as pets! This was strange for me, but I feel like maybe people on the east coast have them?). Afterwards we decided to see a movie, and the movie we chose was a movie from Costa Rica based on the book by Gabriel Garcia Marquez called “Del amor y otros demonios” (Of Love and Other Demons). My friend told me that it was directed by someone from Costa Rica, and that many of the actors were Colombian.
I love the title ever so much, but the movie didn’t really do it for me. Halfway through the movie, my friend made sure I wasn’t bored, and I told her that I wasn’t because I could understand what was happening. But then, the movie ended. And…well, I wasn’t really sure what happened. Feeling mildly like a failure for watching my second movie in Spanish without ‘getting it’ (the first was ‘Alicia en el país de las maravillas’ (Alice in Wonderland)), I turn to my friend and she says, ‘no entendí’. AHA! And when we went to the bathroom, everyone was discussing the movie and trying to make sense of it. Turns out, just like Alice in Wonderland, I understood the plot but not whatever deeper meaning was hiding in it. But for this movie, not even native speakers understood what the heck was going on. I must find a straightforward movie to watch in Spanish, without weird accents (which were in both movies) or the use of vosotros. Even people here barely understand vosotros, that’s mostly just a Spain and old-timey way of speaking.
She was a really fun person with whom to spend my Sunday, so I’m hoping we can get together again soon. We might watch the movie we aaaalmost went to see before we decided to see the one in Spanish at some point in the future, and I wouldn’t mind using that as an excuse for another outing.
We had a cafecito together before I went to meet my friend to go to the mall, and she told me about how stressed she gets from having to take care of her grandchildren all the time. She loves the idea of kids moving out of their parents’ houses more or less once they went to college, and as she’s telling me this I’m thinking about how much I love the idea of family staying close. I don’t think it’s fair to dump all responsibility on mom, but I don’t think she realizes how lucky she is to be a part of her children’s and grandchildren’s lives. Or maybe she does, but just not yesterday. She says she loves them, but she just needs quiet time, and I can understand that, but I have the personal opinion that she’d drive herself insane being in a house alone and would end up going over to see them semi-constantly. I’d really have loved to see my grandparents more, as well many others from my extended family, growing up. I think that my parents did a better job with that than most people do for their children with visits, but it’s hard being far away. Her two daughters that live with her still are best friends, and all four children get together every Saturday. I know I’ll never have that sort of set-up in my life, and that it’ll only get harder to visit as I start to establish my own life, so I can’t help but be a little jealous of latino-style families. I guess there are always good things and bad things about these types of situations, and that it’s only human nature to want what we don’t have.
Fearing I would be late, as the cafecito threw off my timing, I ran to catch the bus to meet up with my friend. I love that the two friends I’ve made one-on-one plans with have been on time :) I’ve been warned that I may be waiting for hours… I was on time, we caught the bus, and literally went back exactly to where I had caught the bus near my house! So, I could have just met her at the bus stop, but we didn’t want things to get mixed up. The mall we went to is one of the biggest in Costa Rica, which is why we had to check it out, but she accurately told me that the malls in the US are probably bigger.
There was a really nice view on the top level and an open courtyard, so we bought green mangoes with chilies and lime and looked out at the mountains while eating and talking. It’s official, I’ve finally tried green mangoes the tico way! They were pretty good, though my sweet tooth might prefer ripe mangoes. (By the way, we visited a pet shop, and they sell hedgehogs as pets! This was strange for me, but I feel like maybe people on the east coast have them?). Afterwards we decided to see a movie, and the movie we chose was a movie from Costa Rica based on the book by Gabriel Garcia Marquez called “Del amor y otros demonios” (Of Love and Other Demons). My friend told me that it was directed by someone from Costa Rica, and that many of the actors were Colombian.
I love the title ever so much, but the movie didn’t really do it for me. Halfway through the movie, my friend made sure I wasn’t bored, and I told her that I wasn’t because I could understand what was happening. But then, the movie ended. And…well, I wasn’t really sure what happened. Feeling mildly like a failure for watching my second movie in Spanish without ‘getting it’ (the first was ‘Alicia en el país de las maravillas’ (Alice in Wonderland)), I turn to my friend and she says, ‘no entendí’. AHA! And when we went to the bathroom, everyone was discussing the movie and trying to make sense of it. Turns out, just like Alice in Wonderland, I understood the plot but not whatever deeper meaning was hiding in it. But for this movie, not even native speakers understood what the heck was going on. I must find a straightforward movie to watch in Spanish, without weird accents (which were in both movies) or the use of vosotros. Even people here barely understand vosotros, that’s mostly just a Spain and old-timey way of speaking.
She was a really fun person with whom to spend my Sunday, so I’m hoping we can get together again soon. We might watch the movie we aaaalmost went to see before we decided to see the one in Spanish at some point in the future, and I wouldn’t mind using that as an excuse for another outing.
INBio Parque y la Iglesia de Zapote
So, Saturday I was robbed. The bad thing was that I was most definitely watching my back. And I KNOW that a backpack becomes a frontpack while in downtown San Jose, but I had a backpack because I was planning to go on a hike and I was not entirely prepared because we walked through the sketchy part of town on the way back, not the way there, due to the arrangement of bus stops. But the good thing was, all they took was my sunglasses holder! Somehow they had gotten into the two smallest pockets on my backpack, and I never put anything in the outermost pocket due to paranoia (which has now been justified), but my camera was in the second smallest pocket. I was prepared for tricky pick-pockets, as I put it inside an inner zip pocket inside the pocket they got into, so I could just imagine their disappointment when they could see the camera through the mesh but couldn’t get to it quite in time. I did, though, as I got a weird feeling and immediately checked to see if anyone had been getting into my bag. I just know that I was really lucky, or maybe a mix of smart and lucky, and that if I ever want to bring my backpack anywhere I need to tie the zippers and be even more vigilant. Hopefully we won’t end up in the bad part of town the next adventure we take.
My adventure earlier in the day was amazing :) Karen and I went to INBio Parque, which I thought would entail some intense hiking, but it instead turned out to be a smaller area with little educational activities. We went on a guided tour to start out, and I just have to say that the tour guides here are amazing. I feel like they’re always really fun, friendly guys, and I haven’t had a problem dragging interesting facts out of them. There was a boy/girl scout troop (they are mixed-gendered here, which would have been awesome for the states as we could have maybe had a better mix of camping and domestic activities) and a family from Florida with us on the tour. The family from Florida spoke Spanish with the exception of their mischievous 7 or 8-year-old son, who was pestering the ever-patient guides in English throughout the tour. He was completely shocked to learn that I spoke English when I spoke to him, which highly amused me. The guides taught us about such things as the ‘ave feminista’, which is a bird who drops her eggs off with a male and runs. I told the guide I thought it was a good idea, to which he responded that he thought it should be 50-50. Heehee, sure.
The concept of the park was that there was a tropical dry forest right next to a tropical rain forest, and the pathways led us through these different ecosystems. Along the way, there were little rooms with terrariums that held snakes, frogs or bugs so that we could see a representation of what lives in the forest. To me, this was pretty much a cruelty-free park because there were no captured birds or animals stuck in cages for us to gawk at, though I do sometimes feel badly for the flying bugs or the really big snakes. There were captured mammals at one point, but they were in a barn and petting zoo as part of the ‘sustainable house’ on the property and definitely had room to move around. It seems they only keep the baby animals (sheep, goats and bunnies) around for people to hold/pet, which is probably for safety reasons and because they haven’t yet learned to RUN from the grabby little kids. Okay, well, I guess the park wasn’t cruelty-free when it came to the bunnies, but I’m hoping that because young children are short they don’t have that far to fall…It seemed that the older rabbits picked on them more than the kids, as they liked to bite off parts of their ears o_0 That was a new concept for me and bunnies.
The coolest part of the sustainable house was the bio-digester, which uses decomposing food waste for energy in the form of gas. Although I want a worm box, which they also had, for food waste, I wouldn’t mind getting energy as opposed to soil from that food waste. Karen and I both decided we had learned a lot from the tour, and I got my animal fix by hanging out with the baby bunnies. They were so interested in my backpack when I put it down, and they didn’t try eating the straps like the goats, so I got lots of bunny attention (even the skittish adults) :D My tica mom says she likes animals, just as long as they stay away from her and aren’t in her house. She’s a big butterfly fan.
One of the best parts of the park was the feria gastronomía that just happened to be there that day as an event. I was in food heaven, and had some amazing chocolate mousse (though it didn’t rival dad’s family recipe that Eva made over summer ;) ). Karen and I bought all sorts of food and then split it, and the countries we ate from included Lebanon, Thailand, the Netherlands somewhere (fail on my part), Argentina, France and Greece. I have to take my hat off to France, which is a rare occurrence for me, because they were the ones with the mousse. They also had a fabulous butter cake…I don’t know what it was, but it was at least 50% butter. The US had a table as well, and we had barbecued chicken, pork rice (?) and apple pie. There was also some dessert that looked similar to a brownie, maybe, but I had no idea what it was. I guess that’s what we eat. Yay home country!
That night I went to see the choir I’m in perform at the Zapote church. Technically, I could have also performed, but I don’t have any formal black or white clothing (the uniform) and once I went I discovered they knew two songs I had never heard before. The truth is, I probably wouldn’t have gone, but I live so close to Zapote that I’m practically in it, so not going felt silly. Therefore, I was there as support, and maybe to get one of those six choir performance reviews out of the way…probably more the second reason ^_^;
They sing so beautifully! I was really impressed, everything sounded good. The one ‘off’ bit was that there was a soprano who, just by herself, sang way louder than any of the other sections, but her voice is so clear and wonderful that it wasn’t such a bad thing. That is hard to do hitting all those high notes, but she is just incredibly impressive and did it without any sign of strain.
I sat with a person who used to be in the choir and was now there just to watch his friends, and had no problem chatting with him for a while (though I still couldn’t click with the choir, which I tried to do again before the performance…hmm). The man on the other side of me started to talk to me near the end to tell me that they sang a song about the national flower of Costa Rica, then to tell me that they sang a bolero that is traditionally sung by three people and accompanied by guitars, and lastly to tell me that the performance was wonderful and to wish me a good night. I love little interactions like those.
After the performance, I went to tell them how much I enjoyed it, but sorta just ended up standing awkwardly and watching them be best friends. Then I went to the bus stop, asked a man if I was in the right place, and instantly struck up a conversation with him. Phew, it’s not me after all, it’s just choir dynamics. I love reminders that I’m not socially hopeless after being with the choir! He and I chatted on the bus as well, and for a moment I was nervous that he was a little TOO curious about where I was and what I was doing, but he was just a nice guy coming from studies at a nearby church. He’s an Anglican, and the first non-Catholic I’ve met here.
Once I got home, I wanted to see what the bus driver had given me for change. My change should have been 15 colones, meaning a 10 cent coin and a 5 cent coin, but he only handed me one coin. I figured it wasn’t that important if he shortchanged me, but when I pulled it out of my pocket, boy was I surprised. He had given me a quarter! Thinking about it now, American currency is used here fairly regularly, but I just hadn’t seen it in so long. He shortchanged himself, as there are 510 colones in a dollar (yes, the exchange rate has changed drastically since I’ve been here, and it wasn’t in my favor). I guess my gringa-ness was overwhelming for him, although I was told once again today that I don’t have an American accent when I speak Spanish. The tour guide told me I sounded like I was from another Spanish-speaking country, not from the US, so I took that as a major compliment :)
My adventure earlier in the day was amazing :) Karen and I went to INBio Parque, which I thought would entail some intense hiking, but it instead turned out to be a smaller area with little educational activities. We went on a guided tour to start out, and I just have to say that the tour guides here are amazing. I feel like they’re always really fun, friendly guys, and I haven’t had a problem dragging interesting facts out of them. There was a boy/girl scout troop (they are mixed-gendered here, which would have been awesome for the states as we could have maybe had a better mix of camping and domestic activities) and a family from Florida with us on the tour. The family from Florida spoke Spanish with the exception of their mischievous 7 or 8-year-old son, who was pestering the ever-patient guides in English throughout the tour. He was completely shocked to learn that I spoke English when I spoke to him, which highly amused me. The guides taught us about such things as the ‘ave feminista’, which is a bird who drops her eggs off with a male and runs. I told the guide I thought it was a good idea, to which he responded that he thought it should be 50-50. Heehee, sure.
The concept of the park was that there was a tropical dry forest right next to a tropical rain forest, and the pathways led us through these different ecosystems. Along the way, there were little rooms with terrariums that held snakes, frogs or bugs so that we could see a representation of what lives in the forest. To me, this was pretty much a cruelty-free park because there were no captured birds or animals stuck in cages for us to gawk at, though I do sometimes feel badly for the flying bugs or the really big snakes. There were captured mammals at one point, but they were in a barn and petting zoo as part of the ‘sustainable house’ on the property and definitely had room to move around. It seems they only keep the baby animals (sheep, goats and bunnies) around for people to hold/pet, which is probably for safety reasons and because they haven’t yet learned to RUN from the grabby little kids. Okay, well, I guess the park wasn’t cruelty-free when it came to the bunnies, but I’m hoping that because young children are short they don’t have that far to fall…It seemed that the older rabbits picked on them more than the kids, as they liked to bite off parts of their ears o_0 That was a new concept for me and bunnies.
The coolest part of the sustainable house was the bio-digester, which uses decomposing food waste for energy in the form of gas. Although I want a worm box, which they also had, for food waste, I wouldn’t mind getting energy as opposed to soil from that food waste. Karen and I both decided we had learned a lot from the tour, and I got my animal fix by hanging out with the baby bunnies. They were so interested in my backpack when I put it down, and they didn’t try eating the straps like the goats, so I got lots of bunny attention (even the skittish adults) :D My tica mom says she likes animals, just as long as they stay away from her and aren’t in her house. She’s a big butterfly fan.
One of the best parts of the park was the feria gastronomía that just happened to be there that day as an event. I was in food heaven, and had some amazing chocolate mousse (though it didn’t rival dad’s family recipe that Eva made over summer ;) ). Karen and I bought all sorts of food and then split it, and the countries we ate from included Lebanon, Thailand, the Netherlands somewhere (fail on my part), Argentina, France and Greece. I have to take my hat off to France, which is a rare occurrence for me, because they were the ones with the mousse. They also had a fabulous butter cake…I don’t know what it was, but it was at least 50% butter. The US had a table as well, and we had barbecued chicken, pork rice (?) and apple pie. There was also some dessert that looked similar to a brownie, maybe, but I had no idea what it was. I guess that’s what we eat. Yay home country!
That night I went to see the choir I’m in perform at the Zapote church. Technically, I could have also performed, but I don’t have any formal black or white clothing (the uniform) and once I went I discovered they knew two songs I had never heard before. The truth is, I probably wouldn’t have gone, but I live so close to Zapote that I’m practically in it, so not going felt silly. Therefore, I was there as support, and maybe to get one of those six choir performance reviews out of the way…probably more the second reason ^_^;
They sing so beautifully! I was really impressed, everything sounded good. The one ‘off’ bit was that there was a soprano who, just by herself, sang way louder than any of the other sections, but her voice is so clear and wonderful that it wasn’t such a bad thing. That is hard to do hitting all those high notes, but she is just incredibly impressive and did it without any sign of strain.
I sat with a person who used to be in the choir and was now there just to watch his friends, and had no problem chatting with him for a while (though I still couldn’t click with the choir, which I tried to do again before the performance…hmm). The man on the other side of me started to talk to me near the end to tell me that they sang a song about the national flower of Costa Rica, then to tell me that they sang a bolero that is traditionally sung by three people and accompanied by guitars, and lastly to tell me that the performance was wonderful and to wish me a good night. I love little interactions like those.
After the performance, I went to tell them how much I enjoyed it, but sorta just ended up standing awkwardly and watching them be best friends. Then I went to the bus stop, asked a man if I was in the right place, and instantly struck up a conversation with him. Phew, it’s not me after all, it’s just choir dynamics. I love reminders that I’m not socially hopeless after being with the choir! He and I chatted on the bus as well, and for a moment I was nervous that he was a little TOO curious about where I was and what I was doing, but he was just a nice guy coming from studies at a nearby church. He’s an Anglican, and the first non-Catholic I’ve met here.
Once I got home, I wanted to see what the bus driver had given me for change. My change should have been 15 colones, meaning a 10 cent coin and a 5 cent coin, but he only handed me one coin. I figured it wasn’t that important if he shortchanged me, but when I pulled it out of my pocket, boy was I surprised. He had given me a quarter! Thinking about it now, American currency is used here fairly regularly, but I just hadn’t seen it in so long. He shortchanged himself, as there are 510 colones in a dollar (yes, the exchange rate has changed drastically since I’ve been here, and it wasn’t in my favor). I guess my gringa-ness was overwhelming for him, although I was told once again today that I don’t have an American accent when I speak Spanish. The tour guide told me I sounded like I was from another Spanish-speaking country, not from the US, so I took that as a major compliment :)
Friday, April 16, 2010
¿A dónde voy de aquí?
Which brings me to today, hurrah! I went to yoga, went searching (unsuccessfully) for exercise pants and finally tried the popular brand of Costa Rica chocolate.
Yoga was intense. I can say now with certainty that the profuse sweating is due to the climate, because today the air was like a sauna. Right after I got home it poured, and then soon after cleared up and became sunny. I like how confused the weather is, just as long as I make it inside before it rains when I have electronics with me.
The exercise pants were interesting. I have never been a fan of white pants, but white pants specifically meant for exercising? Yeah, no thank you. I noted today during yoga that one of the participants had chosen white pants, and had also chosen to wear a thong because of how see-through they were. Ouch >.>; Even though I only have two pair of yoga pants, and one pair now has a hole in the butt, I think I can wait a little longer.
Shopping is pretty much the same here as it is at home, but I feel like there are more bag-checkers and bag check-in stations to prevent theft. The price tags were in dollars in one of the stores I visited, but the prices were indicated in colones (the currency here) on stickers and were about a third the price (which is strange, because I think many other shops are just the opposite with US vs. Costa Rica pricing). The shoe sizes only go up to size 9, and there are baaarely any there. The mannequins all have extravagant poses, huge breasts, erect nipples and junk in their trunks. Okay, now I see more differences.
The Costa Rican brand of chocolate is Gallito, and I think it’s like their version of Hershey’s. It’s what is popular, and what people eat. They make a ton of other candies, too, and I knew I liked those, so I decided it was only fair to give their chocolate a shot. Let’s just say, thankfully I found Lindt dark chocolate today at the store. It reminded me of those tiny, tin-foil wrapped balls of chocolate I would sometimes get on Halloween. I used it to make myself a mocha after trying it plain, but even then it could not be redeemed.
My tica mom has been trying really hard with my food lately, and I really appreciate it. Part of why I decided to buy the chocolate was because they were tiny, individually wrapped bars and I wanted to leave her a little present. I left it for her on her spot at the table to show my appreciation, and she later asked what it was and I told her it was for her. She then showed her appreciation by literally showing me the dinner she had left for me on the table, and I made sure to voice my approval. I think we’re starting to ‘get’ each other a little better now.
And now, a word from my pensive side.
I’m always learning here, whether it’s about my culture, their culture or myself and how I handle situations. Lately I’ve experienced moments of absolute clarity, of where I’m going, what I’m doing, my plan of action, and without a moment’s notice been thrust into a place either inside or outside of myself that is unbearably uncomfortable. It’s just like the love/hate relationship I have with the city, nothing can go too well, or too badly, for too long. This creates an interesting mindset, and I’ve caught myself in moments where all I can think of is home, and how this ‘life’ I have here is only temporary. I tell myself just to push through, and it will all be over soon and I can go back to my accustomed comforts. In this case, I just have to stop my train of thought and remember all the different things here that are good, and remind myself to take full advantage of the opportunities I have studying abroad (because I am extremely lucky to be here, and I will never have another chance to do what I am doing now). I have also caught myself feeling like a completely new person, either without any memories of friends and family, or with memories from a few years ago. This is always tricky, and I’m not sure why it happens, but it’s by far the strangest when I have teleported to the past and am unconsciously thinking about people who are no longer the same and feeling, to a certain degree, the same feelings I felt about them from that snapshot in time. I don’t know how I notice I’m doing it, but when I do I quickly regain all the memories between then and now and put myself back into college where I belong. I wonder if this is a side-effect of feeling dissociated from the world in which I’m living for a large part of the day, or if I’m just adjusting to a new way of thinking and feeling and somehow memories are getting mixed around.
My languages are definitely getting mixed around. I think in Spanglish, and end up conjugating Spanish verbs by only adding –ing or conjugating helping verbs and then finishing the thought in English. I’m tending to think in Spanish nouns, especially when it’s about something I have been mainly doing in Spanish (eating, classwork, planning), but it’s honestly a toss-up at this point. Sometimes I start to respond in English, even though I’ve been thinking in Spanish, and other times I drop in English words without noticing, such as ‘like’, ‘see’ and ‘well’. I just use ‘okay’ as a word because people get what it means, and I don’t feel that ‘está bien’ really has the same connotation as the form of ‘okay’ for ‘I’m listening and I understand’. I can tell my Spanish is worse after chatting with friends or sending e-mails in English, but I’m okay with that. I just need to find a TV show in Spanish and I could easily counter-balance the negative effects…if only entertainment was in Spanish here, and not just subtitled ;)
A strange decision with which I am faced is how hard I should push myself. After the crummiest day, when all I want to do is collapse and never speak Spanish again, one friendly conversation perks me back up. And, just when I feel my muscles are going to give out in yoga because I have gone past my physical capability, we switch positions and I can push on. I have never been the kind of person who could set up a schedule or set boundaries for myself (just ask my parents, it drove them crazy), yet somehow I always made it through. Now I figure it’s about time, but I don’t know where to start. What I DO know, though, is that this isn’t the place to do it. Ticos don’t seem to really have schedules, as you may have picked up by now, and stress as we know it in the US doesn’t exist here. People keep telling me ‘tranquila’ after I ask a question, or apologize for awkwardly getting in the way, or say thank you, and at first it really bothered me. I felt like they kept telling me to calm down, chill out, as if I were incredibly stressed. I realize now that even though I feel very calm here, I have still been nervous enough to be classified as stressed out for this culture. I can’t imagine throwing a tico into my high school during junior year, they could die just from overexposure to stress. I kid…mostly. The school pressure here just has a softer effect, and when my friends tell me that they were doing homework all night or all weekend, they look more sheepish and resigned to that fate than panicked. I might just be meeting the strange ticos, but I get the feeling that isn’t the case from the ‘pura vida’ vibe of Costa Rica. Even thinking that people were telling me to calm down was a result of my stress, I now realize. They were just telling me ‘don’t worry, be happy’.
I like those boundaries.
Yoga was intense. I can say now with certainty that the profuse sweating is due to the climate, because today the air was like a sauna. Right after I got home it poured, and then soon after cleared up and became sunny. I like how confused the weather is, just as long as I make it inside before it rains when I have electronics with me.
The exercise pants were interesting. I have never been a fan of white pants, but white pants specifically meant for exercising? Yeah, no thank you. I noted today during yoga that one of the participants had chosen white pants, and had also chosen to wear a thong because of how see-through they were. Ouch >.>; Even though I only have two pair of yoga pants, and one pair now has a hole in the butt, I think I can wait a little longer.
Shopping is pretty much the same here as it is at home, but I feel like there are more bag-checkers and bag check-in stations to prevent theft. The price tags were in dollars in one of the stores I visited, but the prices were indicated in colones (the currency here) on stickers and were about a third the price (which is strange, because I think many other shops are just the opposite with US vs. Costa Rica pricing). The shoe sizes only go up to size 9, and there are baaarely any there. The mannequins all have extravagant poses, huge breasts, erect nipples and junk in their trunks. Okay, now I see more differences.
The Costa Rican brand of chocolate is Gallito, and I think it’s like their version of Hershey’s. It’s what is popular, and what people eat. They make a ton of other candies, too, and I knew I liked those, so I decided it was only fair to give their chocolate a shot. Let’s just say, thankfully I found Lindt dark chocolate today at the store. It reminded me of those tiny, tin-foil wrapped balls of chocolate I would sometimes get on Halloween. I used it to make myself a mocha after trying it plain, but even then it could not be redeemed.
My tica mom has been trying really hard with my food lately, and I really appreciate it. Part of why I decided to buy the chocolate was because they were tiny, individually wrapped bars and I wanted to leave her a little present. I left it for her on her spot at the table to show my appreciation, and she later asked what it was and I told her it was for her. She then showed her appreciation by literally showing me the dinner she had left for me on the table, and I made sure to voice my approval. I think we’re starting to ‘get’ each other a little better now.
And now, a word from my pensive side.
I’m always learning here, whether it’s about my culture, their culture or myself and how I handle situations. Lately I’ve experienced moments of absolute clarity, of where I’m going, what I’m doing, my plan of action, and without a moment’s notice been thrust into a place either inside or outside of myself that is unbearably uncomfortable. It’s just like the love/hate relationship I have with the city, nothing can go too well, or too badly, for too long. This creates an interesting mindset, and I’ve caught myself in moments where all I can think of is home, and how this ‘life’ I have here is only temporary. I tell myself just to push through, and it will all be over soon and I can go back to my accustomed comforts. In this case, I just have to stop my train of thought and remember all the different things here that are good, and remind myself to take full advantage of the opportunities I have studying abroad (because I am extremely lucky to be here, and I will never have another chance to do what I am doing now). I have also caught myself feeling like a completely new person, either without any memories of friends and family, or with memories from a few years ago. This is always tricky, and I’m not sure why it happens, but it’s by far the strangest when I have teleported to the past and am unconsciously thinking about people who are no longer the same and feeling, to a certain degree, the same feelings I felt about them from that snapshot in time. I don’t know how I notice I’m doing it, but when I do I quickly regain all the memories between then and now and put myself back into college where I belong. I wonder if this is a side-effect of feeling dissociated from the world in which I’m living for a large part of the day, or if I’m just adjusting to a new way of thinking and feeling and somehow memories are getting mixed around.
My languages are definitely getting mixed around. I think in Spanglish, and end up conjugating Spanish verbs by only adding –ing or conjugating helping verbs and then finishing the thought in English. I’m tending to think in Spanish nouns, especially when it’s about something I have been mainly doing in Spanish (eating, classwork, planning), but it’s honestly a toss-up at this point. Sometimes I start to respond in English, even though I’ve been thinking in Spanish, and other times I drop in English words without noticing, such as ‘like’, ‘see’ and ‘well’. I just use ‘okay’ as a word because people get what it means, and I don’t feel that ‘está bien’ really has the same connotation as the form of ‘okay’ for ‘I’m listening and I understand’. I can tell my Spanish is worse after chatting with friends or sending e-mails in English, but I’m okay with that. I just need to find a TV show in Spanish and I could easily counter-balance the negative effects…if only entertainment was in Spanish here, and not just subtitled ;)
A strange decision with which I am faced is how hard I should push myself. After the crummiest day, when all I want to do is collapse and never speak Spanish again, one friendly conversation perks me back up. And, just when I feel my muscles are going to give out in yoga because I have gone past my physical capability, we switch positions and I can push on. I have never been the kind of person who could set up a schedule or set boundaries for myself (just ask my parents, it drove them crazy), yet somehow I always made it through. Now I figure it’s about time, but I don’t know where to start. What I DO know, though, is that this isn’t the place to do it. Ticos don’t seem to really have schedules, as you may have picked up by now, and stress as we know it in the US doesn’t exist here. People keep telling me ‘tranquila’ after I ask a question, or apologize for awkwardly getting in the way, or say thank you, and at first it really bothered me. I felt like they kept telling me to calm down, chill out, as if I were incredibly stressed. I realize now that even though I feel very calm here, I have still been nervous enough to be classified as stressed out for this culture. I can’t imagine throwing a tico into my high school during junior year, they could die just from overexposure to stress. I kid…mostly. The school pressure here just has a softer effect, and when my friends tell me that they were doing homework all night or all weekend, they look more sheepish and resigned to that fate than panicked. I might just be meeting the strange ticos, but I get the feeling that isn’t the case from the ‘pura vida’ vibe of Costa Rica. Even thinking that people were telling me to calm down was a result of my stress, I now realize. They were just telling me ‘don’t worry, be happy’.
I like those boundaries.
Y todo lo demás
Tuesday:
For some reason, all the beginning yoga classes perfectly coincide with my classes, so I had to run out ten minutes early from yoga on Tuesday to catch the bus. The instructor wasn’t too happy, but there wasn’t really time before class for me to warn her I had to go…
I made it just in time for the bus, and then my dance class. We’re starting to learn Bolero, which is fairly similar to Salsa in the hips and the steps so I don’t feel as lost. I think it’s a regular thing for me to eat snack with my dance friend, and we’re trying to get together sometime this weekend. We’re both mellow in the sense that we prefer other activities to bar-hopping, so I’m thrilled to spend time with her.
My professor for my Natural History class is really nice…I brought my USB drive to get the reading for the class (I can’t access it online, my Internet is too slow), but I realized only as I was sitting in class that I had a friend’s pictures from Panama taking up all the space. We tried it anyways, just in case, and confirmed that the PDFs I needed wouldn’t fit. So, what does he do? He lends me his, and tells me to drop it off in his mailbox. He also re-explained the project we need to start, and told me that I was the only other person without a partner so I’d have to do it on my own (but he’d help me refine the theme). I’m not sure if working alone is better or worse, but I don’t really have a choice. (Jeanina, our program director, said it's better because Ticos like to work on the weekends, so I'll have to take her word for it).
Wednesday:
Well, Wednesday felt like two days. After morning yoga, I was so tired that I decided to relax for a while. You know, listen to music and read. That made me more tired, so I decided to skip my dance class and just take a nap. Five hours later, I was dragging myself to a very late lunch. I guess that’s just what I needed, though, because I felt fine and went to a yoga class that night. It was my first class of hot yoga! That just means that the room is heated, so that our bodies warm up faster and we’re able to gain more flexibility and attempt harder poses sooner in the class.
While I was signing my name on the sign-in sheet, I heard a knock at the door. When I opened it, I heard a girl about my age speaking some unknown language. She repeated her question: “Has it already started?”. Oh, so that was English, gottcha. It was so bizarre to me that someone would just speak English, and it felt presumptuous to do so, but she and her friend apparently don’t speak Spanish. This doesn’t make sense to me, because one girl is studying at a different Costa Rican university and the other lives there. Go figure, I guess enough people here speak English that they won’t ‘trouble’ themselves to learn Spanish.
On an awesome side note, a yoga class compañera was friendly with me, and later asked where I got my shirt. It’s the shirt that Chris gave me with a bicycle, a gas pump and the symbol for infinity MPG, and she was curious because she bikes a lot and likes the shirt’s message. (I have so much respect for the bikers here, because the people who drive are maniacs and I almost get hit all the time as a very cautious pedestrian.) She realized after she asked that it was likely I got it in the US, but I told her it was online and I could find out how she could get one. We were both really happy about that.
Thursday:
Thursdays are farm days! This time, the microbus took a detour, first to exchange it for a smaller one, and then to pick up three huge bags of plant cuttings with hundreds of swarming creepy-crawlies. Then we all crammed back into the smaller bus. The other students told us (the other gringa and me) that the bus driver was a ‘grosero’ (rude), and as we sat buddied up to the bags and the bugs, we could see why. I had previously admired the most prevalent bug on the bags when I was in Puntarenas in February. It crawled across the ground, and thought it was nifty. Then, I felt a prick on my thigh and shook that very same bug out of my pants. I no longer think that bug is nifty, so I was mildly creeped out on the ride to the farm. I asked a student if those bugs bit, and he told me that they didn’t, they just peed when they were scared and it burned a little. I’m pretty sure it bit me, but who knows, acidic pee might feel similar to a bite?
I worked with the other girl from the program and the girl who is helping to head the project on the compost. The pile wasn’t high enough last time, so it wasn’t heating up. The work was leisurely, and while we were working the other two girls brought up biodynamics. This is a practice that neither of them knew too well, but the gist is that lunar cycles and energy balancing is brought into the practice of farming. We’re going to have a speaker on the topic in class (heh, if we ever manage to have class) so that we can learn more.
The girl from the program brought both great happiness and great sadness (though not really) into my life that day. She made and shared 'torta de yucca', and she told me about other yoga classes that the university offered that were way cheaper than the ones I’m taking. But, that isn’t TOO sad, because I like the yoga instructors at my studio and the location is good for me (though a student discount WOULD be extremely awesome, as would the option of a partial matriculation fee…). The tortas de yucca are what we made together for our culture class as a ‘comida típica de Costa Rica’, but she spiced them up and made them amazing.
Usually they are made from mashed yucca, egg, finely ground bread crumbs and possibly something else I’m forgetting, and they are shaped into pancakes and fried. She added ripe banana, bell peppers, onions, cilantro, garlic and possibly something else, and didn’t have any bread crumbs. I would have never thought to put banana into the mix, but it was really good! When I came home to lunch, my tica mom had made ‘enyucados’ (same idea as yucca torte but in the shape of little potatoes and with cheese inside), so I mashed up a banana and ate it alongside them. I aspire someday to be a creative chef like she is in my wildest dreams. She made killer mango salsa when I visited her to make the torta de yucca for class, and I never thought I’d eat mangos with onions, hot chilies, and cilantro, but I did and I loved it.
I hope you all take note that I am eating cilantro and no longer gagging, as this is a big change for me. Emily gave me the link to an article that explains the change, and even why raw cilantro still makes me cringe: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/14/dining/14curious.html?emc=eta1. Emily is awesome.
Later that night I had choir, which I ‘accidentally’ missed. It was raining, I was in the middle of a conversation, and I would have had to take the bus and then wait an hour and a half before it even started. Sometimes getting home at 9:30 is just too much of a pain, too. So, that’s 0 for 2 this week for choir, which is especially bad because I found out today (Friday) that we are performing tomorrow (Saturday). But, then again, it isn’t so bad because I have to watch choir performances for my Choral Technique class, and I’ll just go to get that assignment out of the way. It will be me showing support, despite my truancy.
For some reason, all the beginning yoga classes perfectly coincide with my classes, so I had to run out ten minutes early from yoga on Tuesday to catch the bus. The instructor wasn’t too happy, but there wasn’t really time before class for me to warn her I had to go…
I made it just in time for the bus, and then my dance class. We’re starting to learn Bolero, which is fairly similar to Salsa in the hips and the steps so I don’t feel as lost. I think it’s a regular thing for me to eat snack with my dance friend, and we’re trying to get together sometime this weekend. We’re both mellow in the sense that we prefer other activities to bar-hopping, so I’m thrilled to spend time with her.
My professor for my Natural History class is really nice…I brought my USB drive to get the reading for the class (I can’t access it online, my Internet is too slow), but I realized only as I was sitting in class that I had a friend’s pictures from Panama taking up all the space. We tried it anyways, just in case, and confirmed that the PDFs I needed wouldn’t fit. So, what does he do? He lends me his, and tells me to drop it off in his mailbox. He also re-explained the project we need to start, and told me that I was the only other person without a partner so I’d have to do it on my own (but he’d help me refine the theme). I’m not sure if working alone is better or worse, but I don’t really have a choice. (Jeanina, our program director, said it's better because Ticos like to work on the weekends, so I'll have to take her word for it).
Wednesday:
Well, Wednesday felt like two days. After morning yoga, I was so tired that I decided to relax for a while. You know, listen to music and read. That made me more tired, so I decided to skip my dance class and just take a nap. Five hours later, I was dragging myself to a very late lunch. I guess that’s just what I needed, though, because I felt fine and went to a yoga class that night. It was my first class of hot yoga! That just means that the room is heated, so that our bodies warm up faster and we’re able to gain more flexibility and attempt harder poses sooner in the class.
While I was signing my name on the sign-in sheet, I heard a knock at the door. When I opened it, I heard a girl about my age speaking some unknown language. She repeated her question: “Has it already started?”. Oh, so that was English, gottcha. It was so bizarre to me that someone would just speak English, and it felt presumptuous to do so, but she and her friend apparently don’t speak Spanish. This doesn’t make sense to me, because one girl is studying at a different Costa Rican university and the other lives there. Go figure, I guess enough people here speak English that they won’t ‘trouble’ themselves to learn Spanish.
On an awesome side note, a yoga class compañera was friendly with me, and later asked where I got my shirt. It’s the shirt that Chris gave me with a bicycle, a gas pump and the symbol for infinity MPG, and she was curious because she bikes a lot and likes the shirt’s message. (I have so much respect for the bikers here, because the people who drive are maniacs and I almost get hit all the time as a very cautious pedestrian.) She realized after she asked that it was likely I got it in the US, but I told her it was online and I could find out how she could get one. We were both really happy about that.
Thursday:
Thursdays are farm days! This time, the microbus took a detour, first to exchange it for a smaller one, and then to pick up three huge bags of plant cuttings with hundreds of swarming creepy-crawlies. Then we all crammed back into the smaller bus. The other students told us (the other gringa and me) that the bus driver was a ‘grosero’ (rude), and as we sat buddied up to the bags and the bugs, we could see why. I had previously admired the most prevalent bug on the bags when I was in Puntarenas in February. It crawled across the ground, and thought it was nifty. Then, I felt a prick on my thigh and shook that very same bug out of my pants. I no longer think that bug is nifty, so I was mildly creeped out on the ride to the farm. I asked a student if those bugs bit, and he told me that they didn’t, they just peed when they were scared and it burned a little. I’m pretty sure it bit me, but who knows, acidic pee might feel similar to a bite?
I worked with the other girl from the program and the girl who is helping to head the project on the compost. The pile wasn’t high enough last time, so it wasn’t heating up. The work was leisurely, and while we were working the other two girls brought up biodynamics. This is a practice that neither of them knew too well, but the gist is that lunar cycles and energy balancing is brought into the practice of farming. We’re going to have a speaker on the topic in class (heh, if we ever manage to have class) so that we can learn more.
The girl from the program brought both great happiness and great sadness (though not really) into my life that day. She made and shared 'torta de yucca', and she told me about other yoga classes that the university offered that were way cheaper than the ones I’m taking. But, that isn’t TOO sad, because I like the yoga instructors at my studio and the location is good for me (though a student discount WOULD be extremely awesome, as would the option of a partial matriculation fee…). The tortas de yucca are what we made together for our culture class as a ‘comida típica de Costa Rica’, but she spiced them up and made them amazing.
Usually they are made from mashed yucca, egg, finely ground bread crumbs and possibly something else I’m forgetting, and they are shaped into pancakes and fried. She added ripe banana, bell peppers, onions, cilantro, garlic and possibly something else, and didn’t have any bread crumbs. I would have never thought to put banana into the mix, but it was really good! When I came home to lunch, my tica mom had made ‘enyucados’ (same idea as yucca torte but in the shape of little potatoes and with cheese inside), so I mashed up a banana and ate it alongside them. I aspire someday to be a creative chef like she is in my wildest dreams. She made killer mango salsa when I visited her to make the torta de yucca for class, and I never thought I’d eat mangos with onions, hot chilies, and cilantro, but I did and I loved it.
I hope you all take note that I am eating cilantro and no longer gagging, as this is a big change for me. Emily gave me the link to an article that explains the change, and even why raw cilantro still makes me cringe: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/14/dining/14curious.html?emc=eta1. Emily is awesome.
Later that night I had choir, which I ‘accidentally’ missed. It was raining, I was in the middle of a conversation, and I would have had to take the bus and then wait an hour and a half before it even started. Sometimes getting home at 9:30 is just too much of a pain, too. So, that’s 0 for 2 this week for choir, which is especially bad because I found out today (Friday) that we are performing tomorrow (Saturday). But, then again, it isn’t so bad because I have to watch choir performances for my Choral Technique class, and I’ll just go to get that assignment out of the way. It will be me showing support, despite my truancy.
Thursday, April 15, 2010
Feliz fin de semana
Well, for me, at least.
I'm working really hard to catch up on e-mails and blog posts that were ignored through my antisocial phase, and hopefully I can post some more pictures soon. Thankfully, the rest of the week was fairly uneventful, as there are some broader topics I would like to mull over through posting that pertain to the culture in general and how I'm feeling about my study abroad experience.
Life is good. Life is surprising, it's frustrating, it's enlightening, it's a tease and it's euphoria. It is really rather confusing, when I think about it, but it is still good. As I sit on the bus each day, and look out the window at the buildings upon buildings, the traffic jams and the daring pedestrians, the black spew from the other vehicles and the littered roads, I sometimes get jarred into looking at the sky by the ever-common honking, and I smile. The clouds are so beautiful here.
I'm working really hard to catch up on e-mails and blog posts that were ignored through my antisocial phase, and hopefully I can post some more pictures soon. Thankfully, the rest of the week was fairly uneventful, as there are some broader topics I would like to mull over through posting that pertain to the culture in general and how I'm feeling about my study abroad experience.
Life is good. Life is surprising, it's frustrating, it's enlightening, it's a tease and it's euphoria. It is really rather confusing, when I think about it, but it is still good. As I sit on the bus each day, and look out the window at the buildings upon buildings, the traffic jams and the daring pedestrians, the black spew from the other vehicles and the littered roads, I sometimes get jarred into looking at the sky by the ever-common honking, and I smile. The clouds are so beautiful here.
Más comida tica
4/10-4/12
Saturday:
Saturday was a basic day. Once again, I spent quality time with my computer, but this time I had an assortment of nuts to stave off both my hunger and my protein cravings! I went to PriceSmart with my tica mom to get nuts at a better price. We have those, right? It was just like Costco, but, sadly, no Kirkland (or Kir lan, the fancier version of the same product all thanks to Sharpies) in sight. *I* thought that the nuts were really expensive, though wasn’t surprised, and my tica mom was surprised that there were even that many nuts, and that I knew their names. Apparently, I’ve just been missing the big picture about how expensive nuts actually are, and I didn’t pay all that much more than is normal in California. Darn I have an expensive habit, but I guess it’s still cheaper than alcohol ;)
Anywho, good stuff. Nuts here are not ‘nueces’, as I learned in school, but generally grouped under the title ‘semillas’, seeds. ‘Nueces’ is ‘walnuts’. Cranberries are ‘arándanos’, but so are blueberries. And there is no general term for ‘berry’ that I can pry out of the locals. There was a newspaper article on the benefits of the antioxidants in arándanos earlier in the year, and I asked my tica mom what that word meant only to have her look at me as if I were nuts (hah, couldn’t help it). Later, the article clarified it as blueberries, but here is a package of cranberries that is also calling itself arándanos… Whatever, they taste wonderful with walnuts, and now my tica mom can say she tried arándanos after all.
Sunday:
On Sunday, I learned two things about computer systems in Costa Rica. 1.) my Internet works after 11 PM, probably because everyone has gone to bed by then, and 2.) it is entirely normal for the banks to shut down and/or run out of money.
I was not so pleased to learn about the banks, as I had been misinformed and gotten up suuuuper early for the feria (so early that my tica mom got up to tell me when she heard me up, then when back to bed), and then learned by going to every nearby bank on the way as her son tried to take out money. I think two ATM machines were just out of money, and the rest were all undergoing some sort of system shutdown/update. They finally decided just to drop him back home (though I offered to lend him money, I knew he could pay me back and it seemed silly just to give up after all that time…) and have him go later with one of my tica sisters. Yup, family dynamics and banks confuse me.
I bought a ‘guaba’ just so I could take a picture of it, it’s pretty awesome. I also bought way too much fruit, but buying it anywhere else is too expensive to take the risk of NOT buying it, right?
That night, I got very, very sick, and I’d like to blame it on too much salt and oil in my food, but deep down I know it was that mango I ate, skin and all.
Monday:
I was still nauseated on Monday morning, and I had barely gotten to sleep around 2 am. While that was once a normal bedtime for me here, it certainly is not anymore. This was the first day I got truly borderline snappy with my tica mom, as my pent-up anger about eating salty and greasy foods was released. I have been drinking water like a fish and still feeling dehydrated, and I’m guessing it’s the salt, but that wasn’t concrete enough for my tica mom to listen to my pleas for less oil and salt. She has a hard time understanding that I do like the taste of some things, such as salt, oil, or butter, but don’t always want to eat it. My asking her to use less butter and oil the first time resulted in her telling me she uses margarine, and then with further explanation deciding that I hate margarine. I figured I had some solid proof (my stomach rejecting food) that I could just use less of such substances, but she brushed me off during this conversation as well, telling me that she barely used any.
Anyone I talked to that day must have picked up the vibe that I was ticked, and I definitely know my poor real mother got an earful (sorry about that, thank you for always letting me flavor my own food!!!!), but sometimes such things happen when a person is sick, tired and fighting pent-up feelings.
Thankfully, that night I made a wonderful decision. I decided that I wouldn’t go to choir (a pretty rational decision, considering) and that I would go to the beginning yoga class that night. That night was the day of ‘perdón’ on the Mayan calendar, so we focused the whole lesson on compassion and forgiveness. Right when the instructor said that, I felt a ripple of shock and an instant change in my attitude.
Yes, I was miserable and tired all day, and I have been frustrated off and on for the last two and a half months about the lack of control over what I eat, but that wasn’t something my tica mom was trying to DO to me, it was something I was letting her make me feel. I KNOW that she isn’t out to get me, and that she means well, and that on top of all that I’m a peculiar eater (I’ll eat only salads all day but then still eat horrible, packaged cookies and chocolate…I just like my food to be honest with me, and have my vegetables be healthy and my desserts unhealthy). So, I took a breath, and I did some yoga, and I sweat it out.
Funny thing is, I was really at peace with things when my tica mom really started to make an effort. She explained to me how she hadn’t put salt in my sauce at lunch, and how the salad only had salt on it because she had made it that morning. She laughed at me eating my salad without anything for dressing and I thanked her for leaving it neutral for me. We both think the other is a bit of a kook, but I think we’re both gaining something out of the experience.
Oh, and happy Juan Santamaría day! April 11th, 1856 was the day that a brave young man, Juan Santamaría, lit fire to an enemy building to secure a victory in battle against William Walker’s troops (he was the crazy guy from the US who named himself as ruler of Nicaragua and attempted to conquer the rest of Central America). He died in battle, yet was, and still is, honored as Costa Rica’s very own hero (working class, modest kind of guy, perfect to be an inspiring hero for the majority of Costa Rica). Strangely enough, Nicaragua claims he is from Nicaragua just as much as Costa Rica claims he is from Costa Rica. Many of the high schoolers got Monday off, since the national holiday fell on a weekend. Thankfully, we learned about this in the immersion program’s history class, as my tica mom tried to explain it but didn’t quite make the cut (since she knows about as much of Costa Rica’s history as I know of the United State’s history, but I CERTAINLY wasn’t going to try to help her out or correct her there…her grandson (the 12-year-old) didn’t try, either, but I had the feeling he knew). And know you, too, know the story.
Saturday:
Saturday was a basic day. Once again, I spent quality time with my computer, but this time I had an assortment of nuts to stave off both my hunger and my protein cravings! I went to PriceSmart with my tica mom to get nuts at a better price. We have those, right? It was just like Costco, but, sadly, no Kirkland (or Kir lan, the fancier version of the same product all thanks to Sharpies) in sight. *I* thought that the nuts were really expensive, though wasn’t surprised, and my tica mom was surprised that there were even that many nuts, and that I knew their names. Apparently, I’ve just been missing the big picture about how expensive nuts actually are, and I didn’t pay all that much more than is normal in California. Darn I have an expensive habit, but I guess it’s still cheaper than alcohol ;)
Anywho, good stuff. Nuts here are not ‘nueces’, as I learned in school, but generally grouped under the title ‘semillas’, seeds. ‘Nueces’ is ‘walnuts’. Cranberries are ‘arándanos’, but so are blueberries. And there is no general term for ‘berry’ that I can pry out of the locals. There was a newspaper article on the benefits of the antioxidants in arándanos earlier in the year, and I asked my tica mom what that word meant only to have her look at me as if I were nuts (hah, couldn’t help it). Later, the article clarified it as blueberries, but here is a package of cranberries that is also calling itself arándanos… Whatever, they taste wonderful with walnuts, and now my tica mom can say she tried arándanos after all.
Sunday:
On Sunday, I learned two things about computer systems in Costa Rica. 1.) my Internet works after 11 PM, probably because everyone has gone to bed by then, and 2.) it is entirely normal for the banks to shut down and/or run out of money.
I was not so pleased to learn about the banks, as I had been misinformed and gotten up suuuuper early for the feria (so early that my tica mom got up to tell me when she heard me up, then when back to bed), and then learned by going to every nearby bank on the way as her son tried to take out money. I think two ATM machines were just out of money, and the rest were all undergoing some sort of system shutdown/update. They finally decided just to drop him back home (though I offered to lend him money, I knew he could pay me back and it seemed silly just to give up after all that time…) and have him go later with one of my tica sisters. Yup, family dynamics and banks confuse me.
I bought a ‘guaba’ just so I could take a picture of it, it’s pretty awesome. I also bought way too much fruit, but buying it anywhere else is too expensive to take the risk of NOT buying it, right?
That night, I got very, very sick, and I’d like to blame it on too much salt and oil in my food, but deep down I know it was that mango I ate, skin and all.
Monday:
I was still nauseated on Monday morning, and I had barely gotten to sleep around 2 am. While that was once a normal bedtime for me here, it certainly is not anymore. This was the first day I got truly borderline snappy with my tica mom, as my pent-up anger about eating salty and greasy foods was released. I have been drinking water like a fish and still feeling dehydrated, and I’m guessing it’s the salt, but that wasn’t concrete enough for my tica mom to listen to my pleas for less oil and salt. She has a hard time understanding that I do like the taste of some things, such as salt, oil, or butter, but don’t always want to eat it. My asking her to use less butter and oil the first time resulted in her telling me she uses margarine, and then with further explanation deciding that I hate margarine. I figured I had some solid proof (my stomach rejecting food) that I could just use less of such substances, but she brushed me off during this conversation as well, telling me that she barely used any.
Anyone I talked to that day must have picked up the vibe that I was ticked, and I definitely know my poor real mother got an earful (sorry about that, thank you for always letting me flavor my own food!!!!), but sometimes such things happen when a person is sick, tired and fighting pent-up feelings.
Thankfully, that night I made a wonderful decision. I decided that I wouldn’t go to choir (a pretty rational decision, considering) and that I would go to the beginning yoga class that night. That night was the day of ‘perdón’ on the Mayan calendar, so we focused the whole lesson on compassion and forgiveness. Right when the instructor said that, I felt a ripple of shock and an instant change in my attitude.
Yes, I was miserable and tired all day, and I have been frustrated off and on for the last two and a half months about the lack of control over what I eat, but that wasn’t something my tica mom was trying to DO to me, it was something I was letting her make me feel. I KNOW that she isn’t out to get me, and that she means well, and that on top of all that I’m a peculiar eater (I’ll eat only salads all day but then still eat horrible, packaged cookies and chocolate…I just like my food to be honest with me, and have my vegetables be healthy and my desserts unhealthy). So, I took a breath, and I did some yoga, and I sweat it out.
Funny thing is, I was really at peace with things when my tica mom really started to make an effort. She explained to me how she hadn’t put salt in my sauce at lunch, and how the salad only had salt on it because she had made it that morning. She laughed at me eating my salad without anything for dressing and I thanked her for leaving it neutral for me. We both think the other is a bit of a kook, but I think we’re both gaining something out of the experience.
Oh, and happy Juan Santamaría day! April 11th, 1856 was the day that a brave young man, Juan Santamaría, lit fire to an enemy building to secure a victory in battle against William Walker’s troops (he was the crazy guy from the US who named himself as ruler of Nicaragua and attempted to conquer the rest of Central America). He died in battle, yet was, and still is, honored as Costa Rica’s very own hero (working class, modest kind of guy, perfect to be an inspiring hero for the majority of Costa Rica). Strangely enough, Nicaragua claims he is from Nicaragua just as much as Costa Rica claims he is from Costa Rica. Many of the high schoolers got Monday off, since the national holiday fell on a weekend. Thankfully, we learned about this in the immersion program’s history class, as my tica mom tried to explain it but didn’t quite make the cut (since she knows about as much of Costa Rica’s history as I know of the United State’s history, but I CERTAINLY wasn’t going to try to help her out or correct her there…her grandson (the 12-year-old) didn’t try, either, but I had the feeling he knew). And know you, too, know the story.
El Milagro
4/9
Friday was fairly uneventful, and this is where I entered in an extremely antisocial period of time. I rationalize that spending time alone this weekend was okay, though, because I hadn’t really done that yet. The part I can’t rationalize as being something decent is that I spent a lot of time watching online tv… At least Castle is still awesome, right?
The hard part about Friday was my tica mom’s religious experience. Costa Rica is a Catholic state, which means that practically every person here considers himself or herself a Catholic, whether or not they are ‘practicante’, or a practicing Catholic. This is usually a non-problem for me, except when I get the big question: are you a Catholic?
I have been asked this question by Karen’s mom, and at least twice now by my tica mom, and I think it’s a question someone asks me after they have decided that they like me, and want to further test my worth as a person. The proper answer to this question for them is ‘yes’, but I am not the type of person that lies.
Anyone who knows me knows that I have a complicated religious background, which is hard for me to explain in English, let alone Spanish. The way I see things, I am a good person. I believe in morality, and that there is a ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ in most cases, I believe that the world is filled with many mysteries that we do not yet, and may never, understand, and I believe that humans, as all animals, are biological beings, and therefore there is something bigger than we are in the universe. I do not, however, believe in any one religion because I do not believe in religion at all. To me, it is just like communism in the sense that it sounds good in theory, but doesn’t quite play out in practice. I don’t believe anyone deserves to feel morally superior to anyone else due to their religious title alone, as horrendous things have happened within the church and wars have been started over religion, etc. etc., and therefore I feel almost insulted when my religion (more specifically, non-religion) is used as a judge of my moral character.
What I think sums it all up very well, and what I told Karen’s mom, is a quote from Gandhi: “I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”
The events leading to the question this time were a big stranger than in the past. My tica mom has chronic back pain, a side-effect from a surgery she had in which her three lower vertebra were removed (her coccyx). These three vertebra support the rest of the spine, so with them gone, it makes sense that she would have resulting problems. The last several weeks she had been complaining more and more persistently about her back, and I was steadily getting more and more annoyed because she didn’t want to do anything to try to fix it aside from schedule a doctor’s appointment. That means, she fervently refused to ever take a break during the day (as a person who is ‘muy activa’, she absolutely couldn’t lie down and instead had to run around the house cleaning things and rearranging my stuff), insisted on carrying heavy bags at the feria agricultor, and only commented on my statement that acupuncture could help as she waited until her appointment in September (the ticos have a great health care system, just not at times like these) with ‘los chinos son muy inteligentes’. Yes, she believes that Asian people are smart, so apparently the stereotype persists in many places. (Here, chino/a refers to anyone of Asian descent).
Talking to her more, and telling her my story of going to the chiropractor, I realized that she really did believe in Chinese medicine, as her daughter had been treated by an acupuncturist, but the acupuncturist she knew was out of town so she just stopped there. I definitely got the impression that unless she was dragged to get help (I offered to go with her, and told her I was very interested in seeing what the process was like here), she wouldn’t do anything and continue to suffer and complain. Heck, I STILL don’t know if I believe in Chinese medicine fully, but what I do know is after one session my shoulder injury of four years, two of which were spent going to the chiropractor regularly, dulled its constant, throbbing pain. After two or three, it was barely noticeable. I talked with my acupuncturist about this phenomenon and not being a true believer, and he asked me if I was willing to pay for the possible placebo effect I had just received. My answer? I would have paid him many times over! I finally went a day without pain. So, was it worth the risk for her to try to get some form of pain relief during her long wait? I’d say yes, even for my sake alone. I had a hard time not ordering her to go lie down and just take a break for a little bit, as it seemed the logical thing to do :/
At any rate, on Friday, she had a miracle of another sort: her back pain was completely cured. She told me in the morning that as she was getting her hair cut, the woman who cuts her hair (who is some form of Protestant, but still a good person, she assured me) was listening to a preacher on the radio. My tica mom told me that they were chatting while the radio was on in the background, and she told her hairdresser about the pain she had in her spine. She described it as a burning pain, and said that it was very strong. A little while later, my tica mom heard the preacher sending out a prayer, and since it was a beautiful prayer, she stopped to listen. She said that he was praying for all those people out there in pain, and that they may get relief. He then said, more specifically, for those people suffering strong back pains. He wanted God to help them feel better, and to alleviate their pain. She told me that she looked at her hairdresser, pointed out that they were talking about her, and got excited. She showed me how her hairdresser nodded to her, in a very serene, knowing way.
I can’t remember how that conversation ended, but I think she was distracted by her grandson and I was able to escape up to my room, happy to escape awkward follow-up questions when I didn’t immediately praise the Lord for her recovery and happy that she was finally feeling better (again, selfishly, for both of our sakes). Unfortunately, that tentative euphoria didn’t last long. My tica mom tends to forget things, as I may have mentioned before, and that evening she had forgotten that she told me the story about her miraculous back-pain recovery.
This time, however, I could tell she had been telling the story to every person with whom she had spoken, and it therefore had several revisions. In this version, the hairdresser’s religion wasn’t mentioned, and the preacher started out his prayer by saying that there was someone who was suffering from a strong, burning back pain, and that they should all pray to help this person. The preacher said that this person, SHE needs our prayers to ask God to alleviate her pain. Once again, the story ended with my tica mom discovering in that moment the preacher was talking about her, her hairdresser agreeing, and her back pain vanishing the next morning.
Now I was really trapped. I had it written all over my face that I didn’t believe one bit of what she just said, mainly because the story had changed *just* so, and that’s when the question came. She wanted to know if I was a Catholic. And then, if I believed in God (because then I could still be a good person, since it’s ‘la única cosa que es importante’). Oh boy, was I not in the mood to deal with that, but I gave it my best shot.
When I explained that I didn’t have a religion, and that I didn’t believe in the god from the Bible who hated gays and wanted women to be stoned if they went outside during menstruation, I felt a little badly for being so brutally honest. Thankfully, she started to break the tension I was feeling. She told me that God wasn’t really like that, and that the men who wrote the Bible had revised it for their own needs. On my being irreligious, she happily took to the gossip of yet another pedophile in the Catholic church, and eventually drifted away from the subject of my religious beliefs.
I know she still thinks less of me for what I said, but maybe she’s forgotten once more by now. Or maybe my never actually confirming or denying anything, yet providing facts in which she believes has allowed her to construct her own vision of me of what she wants to believe.
Either way, her back pain is still gone (it’s been a week now), and I thank whatever or whomever helped her for having mercy on us both.
Friday was fairly uneventful, and this is where I entered in an extremely antisocial period of time. I rationalize that spending time alone this weekend was okay, though, because I hadn’t really done that yet. The part I can’t rationalize as being something decent is that I spent a lot of time watching online tv… At least Castle is still awesome, right?
The hard part about Friday was my tica mom’s religious experience. Costa Rica is a Catholic state, which means that practically every person here considers himself or herself a Catholic, whether or not they are ‘practicante’, or a practicing Catholic. This is usually a non-problem for me, except when I get the big question: are you a Catholic?
I have been asked this question by Karen’s mom, and at least twice now by my tica mom, and I think it’s a question someone asks me after they have decided that they like me, and want to further test my worth as a person. The proper answer to this question for them is ‘yes’, but I am not the type of person that lies.
Anyone who knows me knows that I have a complicated religious background, which is hard for me to explain in English, let alone Spanish. The way I see things, I am a good person. I believe in morality, and that there is a ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ in most cases, I believe that the world is filled with many mysteries that we do not yet, and may never, understand, and I believe that humans, as all animals, are biological beings, and therefore there is something bigger than we are in the universe. I do not, however, believe in any one religion because I do not believe in religion at all. To me, it is just like communism in the sense that it sounds good in theory, but doesn’t quite play out in practice. I don’t believe anyone deserves to feel morally superior to anyone else due to their religious title alone, as horrendous things have happened within the church and wars have been started over religion, etc. etc., and therefore I feel almost insulted when my religion (more specifically, non-religion) is used as a judge of my moral character.
What I think sums it all up very well, and what I told Karen’s mom, is a quote from Gandhi: “I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”
The events leading to the question this time were a big stranger than in the past. My tica mom has chronic back pain, a side-effect from a surgery she had in which her three lower vertebra were removed (her coccyx). These three vertebra support the rest of the spine, so with them gone, it makes sense that she would have resulting problems. The last several weeks she had been complaining more and more persistently about her back, and I was steadily getting more and more annoyed because she didn’t want to do anything to try to fix it aside from schedule a doctor’s appointment. That means, she fervently refused to ever take a break during the day (as a person who is ‘muy activa’, she absolutely couldn’t lie down and instead had to run around the house cleaning things and rearranging my stuff), insisted on carrying heavy bags at the feria agricultor, and only commented on my statement that acupuncture could help as she waited until her appointment in September (the ticos have a great health care system, just not at times like these) with ‘los chinos son muy inteligentes’. Yes, she believes that Asian people are smart, so apparently the stereotype persists in many places. (Here, chino/a refers to anyone of Asian descent).
Talking to her more, and telling her my story of going to the chiropractor, I realized that she really did believe in Chinese medicine, as her daughter had been treated by an acupuncturist, but the acupuncturist she knew was out of town so she just stopped there. I definitely got the impression that unless she was dragged to get help (I offered to go with her, and told her I was very interested in seeing what the process was like here), she wouldn’t do anything and continue to suffer and complain. Heck, I STILL don’t know if I believe in Chinese medicine fully, but what I do know is after one session my shoulder injury of four years, two of which were spent going to the chiropractor regularly, dulled its constant, throbbing pain. After two or three, it was barely noticeable. I talked with my acupuncturist about this phenomenon and not being a true believer, and he asked me if I was willing to pay for the possible placebo effect I had just received. My answer? I would have paid him many times over! I finally went a day without pain. So, was it worth the risk for her to try to get some form of pain relief during her long wait? I’d say yes, even for my sake alone. I had a hard time not ordering her to go lie down and just take a break for a little bit, as it seemed the logical thing to do :/
At any rate, on Friday, she had a miracle of another sort: her back pain was completely cured. She told me in the morning that as she was getting her hair cut, the woman who cuts her hair (who is some form of Protestant, but still a good person, she assured me) was listening to a preacher on the radio. My tica mom told me that they were chatting while the radio was on in the background, and she told her hairdresser about the pain she had in her spine. She described it as a burning pain, and said that it was very strong. A little while later, my tica mom heard the preacher sending out a prayer, and since it was a beautiful prayer, she stopped to listen. She said that he was praying for all those people out there in pain, and that they may get relief. He then said, more specifically, for those people suffering strong back pains. He wanted God to help them feel better, and to alleviate their pain. She told me that she looked at her hairdresser, pointed out that they were talking about her, and got excited. She showed me how her hairdresser nodded to her, in a very serene, knowing way.
I can’t remember how that conversation ended, but I think she was distracted by her grandson and I was able to escape up to my room, happy to escape awkward follow-up questions when I didn’t immediately praise the Lord for her recovery and happy that she was finally feeling better (again, selfishly, for both of our sakes). Unfortunately, that tentative euphoria didn’t last long. My tica mom tends to forget things, as I may have mentioned before, and that evening she had forgotten that she told me the story about her miraculous back-pain recovery.
This time, however, I could tell she had been telling the story to every person with whom she had spoken, and it therefore had several revisions. In this version, the hairdresser’s religion wasn’t mentioned, and the preacher started out his prayer by saying that there was someone who was suffering from a strong, burning back pain, and that they should all pray to help this person. The preacher said that this person, SHE needs our prayers to ask God to alleviate her pain. Once again, the story ended with my tica mom discovering in that moment the preacher was talking about her, her hairdresser agreeing, and her back pain vanishing the next morning.
Now I was really trapped. I had it written all over my face that I didn’t believe one bit of what she just said, mainly because the story had changed *just* so, and that’s when the question came. She wanted to know if I was a Catholic. And then, if I believed in God (because then I could still be a good person, since it’s ‘la única cosa que es importante’). Oh boy, was I not in the mood to deal with that, but I gave it my best shot.
When I explained that I didn’t have a religion, and that I didn’t believe in the god from the Bible who hated gays and wanted women to be stoned if they went outside during menstruation, I felt a little badly for being so brutally honest. Thankfully, she started to break the tension I was feeling. She told me that God wasn’t really like that, and that the men who wrote the Bible had revised it for their own needs. On my being irreligious, she happily took to the gossip of yet another pedophile in the Catholic church, and eventually drifted away from the subject of my religious beliefs.
I know she still thinks less of me for what I said, but maybe she’s forgotten once more by now. Or maybe my never actually confirming or denying anything, yet providing facts in which she believes has allowed her to construct her own vision of me of what she wants to believe.
Either way, her back pain is still gone (it’s been a week now), and I thank whatever or whomever helped her for having mercy on us both.
Sunday, April 11, 2010
Práctico en el campo
Highlights of the schoolweek continued.
Wednesday:
After tracking down my Organic Agriculture professor, I learned that the automayores were going on their first fieldtrip the next day. We visited Heredia to make natural bug repellant, and did so at the house of a friend or family member of one of the students. I felt awkward, as if I were invading, and ended up falling asleep on the bus and not meeting anyone. I was hoping that no one had noticed, but that was the first topic of conversation when I did start meeting people…whoops. They all turned out to be extremely nice, and kept including me in whatever was going on when I was hanging back. By the end of the day I felt awful for ever being annoyed with them, as their class really is more social than academic. The professor had a slideshow of pictures from last year’s class, which was mainly comprised of the same people, and we had two breaks for cafecitos and snacks. At the end of the trip, we really hadn’t done much work, but everyone had a lot of fun. I helped to strip oregano and peel garlic, and others worked on chiles and aloe. The ingredients were mixed, molasses or water were added, and the buckets were sealed up to be opened two weeks later. Bugs really don’t like smelly or spicy things, so we were told pretty much any mix would do, and that using molasses instead of water just gives the plants more nutrients when they are bug-proofed. The aloe was just to make it thicker…or something. As everyone was getting off the bus, one of the students told me to tell my tica mom not to worry, because they took good care of me. I’m looking forward to the next trip :)
That night I went to a belly dancing class, liked it and then decided to up my weekly amount of classes to ‘unlimited’. Unfortunately, as I was doing so I found out that belly dancing is a separate enrollment fee, but no harm was done as the first class is free. I decided to go ahead and pay for unlimited yoga classes anyways, and plan to go five or six times a week (we’ll see how long it takes for my body to adjust to the new level of exercise). The teacher that night was incredibly nice, and the class was both an easier level and smaller, so I enjoyed myself.
Bonus: Starting after that night, I had energy! I could tell my muscles were sore and tired, but I could walk and breathe and think again.
Thursday:
I went back to the farm to keep working, and found out that now the entire class will be working together instead of splitting off into smaller groups. Luckily for me, the girl with whom I’d spoken the most in the previous work trip, and who was both extremely nice and willing to help (she spoke English to me and the other student to introduce herself after hearing us speaking English, and keeps making sure I understand what is going on) has the most experience with our type of project and has become the project head. Although I feel like I know nothing about our work, I know I’m still helping and I make sure to keep busy, and I don’t feel as badly after learning that most students in the class haven’t done practical work yet either.
Our task was to set up the compost piles. The problem with this was that there is a certain proportion of carbon and nitrogen needed for the piles to decompose quickly/well, and that requires a certain proportion of green material to dry material. Two weeks ago, we chopped down everything in our patch, and so this week we were left with a ton of dry material and no green material. Most of the time working was spent chopping down more plants to get some green material, which was unfortunate, and the remaining time was spent building the compost heap. We used a layered technique in which green material, dry material, dirt and water were used, and then a little roof was built over the pile.
The best part of my day by far was when I felt a strange sensation on my hand, had the instant fear reaction to shake it off, then stopped myself and looked, saw a huge, green bug, almost shook it off just from surprise, and then realized it was a stick bug! I had NEVER seen one in the wild before, it was awesome! Somehow, it managed not to be machete-d while we were chopping green material, and ended up crawling on me when I was either chopping (my first time using a machete, and I don’t think it’s my tool of choice…I was pretty awful at it) or carrying the plants. It had these crazy, hooked feet that were sticky almost like Velcro, and was a little longer than the length of my palm. Everyone passed him around to take a look, and then I went with someone to put the bug faaaar away from where we were working, to make sure he was safe. Once I put him on the tree and looked away, I couldn’t find him again. Those are really neat bugs.
The rest of the day was spent on paperwork, so I didn’t get to go to yoga (probably a good thing, four hours of farmwork is hard) or change (well, I changed out of my dirt-filled farm clothes into my sweaty yoga clothes…). Later, I made it intact to choir, and then home. I am so glad I have Fridays off, I can’t imagine having days like these every day.
Wednesday:
After tracking down my Organic Agriculture professor, I learned that the automayores were going on their first fieldtrip the next day. We visited Heredia to make natural bug repellant, and did so at the house of a friend or family member of one of the students. I felt awkward, as if I were invading, and ended up falling asleep on the bus and not meeting anyone. I was hoping that no one had noticed, but that was the first topic of conversation when I did start meeting people…whoops. They all turned out to be extremely nice, and kept including me in whatever was going on when I was hanging back. By the end of the day I felt awful for ever being annoyed with them, as their class really is more social than academic. The professor had a slideshow of pictures from last year’s class, which was mainly comprised of the same people, and we had two breaks for cafecitos and snacks. At the end of the trip, we really hadn’t done much work, but everyone had a lot of fun. I helped to strip oregano and peel garlic, and others worked on chiles and aloe. The ingredients were mixed, molasses or water were added, and the buckets were sealed up to be opened two weeks later. Bugs really don’t like smelly or spicy things, so we were told pretty much any mix would do, and that using molasses instead of water just gives the plants more nutrients when they are bug-proofed. The aloe was just to make it thicker…or something. As everyone was getting off the bus, one of the students told me to tell my tica mom not to worry, because they took good care of me. I’m looking forward to the next trip :)
That night I went to a belly dancing class, liked it and then decided to up my weekly amount of classes to ‘unlimited’. Unfortunately, as I was doing so I found out that belly dancing is a separate enrollment fee, but no harm was done as the first class is free. I decided to go ahead and pay for unlimited yoga classes anyways, and plan to go five or six times a week (we’ll see how long it takes for my body to adjust to the new level of exercise). The teacher that night was incredibly nice, and the class was both an easier level and smaller, so I enjoyed myself.
Bonus: Starting after that night, I had energy! I could tell my muscles were sore and tired, but I could walk and breathe and think again.
Thursday:
I went back to the farm to keep working, and found out that now the entire class will be working together instead of splitting off into smaller groups. Luckily for me, the girl with whom I’d spoken the most in the previous work trip, and who was both extremely nice and willing to help (she spoke English to me and the other student to introduce herself after hearing us speaking English, and keeps making sure I understand what is going on) has the most experience with our type of project and has become the project head. Although I feel like I know nothing about our work, I know I’m still helping and I make sure to keep busy, and I don’t feel as badly after learning that most students in the class haven’t done practical work yet either.
Our task was to set up the compost piles. The problem with this was that there is a certain proportion of carbon and nitrogen needed for the piles to decompose quickly/well, and that requires a certain proportion of green material to dry material. Two weeks ago, we chopped down everything in our patch, and so this week we were left with a ton of dry material and no green material. Most of the time working was spent chopping down more plants to get some green material, which was unfortunate, and the remaining time was spent building the compost heap. We used a layered technique in which green material, dry material, dirt and water were used, and then a little roof was built over the pile.
The best part of my day by far was when I felt a strange sensation on my hand, had the instant fear reaction to shake it off, then stopped myself and looked, saw a huge, green bug, almost shook it off just from surprise, and then realized it was a stick bug! I had NEVER seen one in the wild before, it was awesome! Somehow, it managed not to be machete-d while we were chopping green material, and ended up crawling on me when I was either chopping (my first time using a machete, and I don’t think it’s my tool of choice…I was pretty awful at it) or carrying the plants. It had these crazy, hooked feet that were sticky almost like Velcro, and was a little longer than the length of my palm. Everyone passed him around to take a look, and then I went with someone to put the bug faaaar away from where we were working, to make sure he was safe. Once I put him on the tree and looked away, I couldn’t find him again. Those are really neat bugs.
The rest of the day was spent on paperwork, so I didn’t get to go to yoga (probably a good thing, four hours of farmwork is hard) or change (well, I changed out of my dirt-filled farm clothes into my sweaty yoga clothes…). Later, I made it intact to choir, and then home. I am so glad I have Fridays off, I can’t imagine having days like these every day.
Saturday, April 10, 2010
Yoga y chocolate
Highlights of the school week (4/5-4/6)
Monday:
I finally enrolled in the yoga studio! This was very exciting for me, as I figured I was finally forcing myself to regularly exercise, get out of the house and learn something I like. I was also excited to put to good use my organic yoga mat :)
The entire day was like walking through mud, I was so completely exhausted. At this point, there is nothing else I can do about my crummy sleeping situation. It’s loud outside, ALL the time, and therefore I know I’m not getting restful sleep. I started taking melatonin to get deeper sleep, going to bed earlier and drinking coffee, but I was counting on yoga more than anything else to both tire me out and clear my mind, both of which will help.
Anyways, I went to choir, and my chronically late professor was half an hour late, as usual, yet got upset about us ‘wasting time’ as a few people were quietly talking as he started warm-ups…yup. If he were on time, I might get home before 9:30 every choir night *sigh*. So, I left early that night, because I was falling asleep singing (a new sensation for me) and because buses only come every hour. I wanted to catch the 8:10 bus instead of waiting for choir to finish at 8:30ish and then waiting until 9:10 for the last bus of the night. While waiting, I ran into a friend I made on the bus earlier and perked right up. Sometimes all it takes to make my day is some socialization…Mondays are my hard days for being social, as I’m still having problems making choir friends (in both my choir class and in choir). At this point I have multiple friends in all my classes (well, not one, but I will soon as we will be going on a fieldtrip together at the end of the month), so I am resigning myself to not really making friends in choir. I don’t feel badly about this, though, because I’ve never really been able to make choir friends, even in English, and because we still say ‘hi’ and are friendly.
Tuesday:
I made new friends in my dance class, and went to get a smoothie even though I wasn’t hungry just to spend some time with them. Two things about that are nice: 1.) we didn’t go to a bar, which is what people often do between classes to get a beer and watch soccer, and 2.) the smoothies here are awesome because they have fun, tropical fruit. We talked about how both clothing and chocolate are more expensive in Costa Rica, and being a chocoholic and not a shopaholic, I lamented about the chocolate. I mentioned that I didn’t mind chocolate being expensive so much as not being able to find good chocolate, and I was told that Hershey’s is good chocolate. 0_0;; >.>;; x_x;;
I’ll admit, I’m a chocolate snob, but Hershey’s will never be ‘good chocolate’ in my book. It’s chocolate to make s’mores, and eat at Halloween, and eat when you’re just bored and don’t really care. The more I ask around, the more I find out that no one likes dark chocolate. I also realize that all things ‘chocolate’ are actually just ‘sabor a chocolate’, meaning the chocolate covered raisins and the cookies with the chocolate on top are really just colored milk fat with chocolate flavor…That was a sad day for me. I’m taking consolation in the fact that Costa Rica has Rittersport dark chocolate, and that I can buy Ghirardelli’s (for a price, of course) if I run out.
Tuesday was also the day of the professor mishap. It turns out, students often call and/or text their professors. Why is this important? Apparently they just change classrooms and times without telling their students, and the only way to find out when and where class is being held is calling them. This is exactly what happened with my Organic Agriculture teacher, and I have been told this is not a first. And how did I find this out? I was extremely lucky to have made a friend in the class, and he came and found me and told me that, because no one showed up to class (duh? He was there, and so were two other students, but it’s a mystery to me how they knew) the professor had cancelled it. Thank goodness he and I were in contact about the group project, and we said ‘see you in class tomorrow’, because that prompted him to come find me. What is even stranger to me is that I passed the professor in the hallway on the way to his class, and he didn’t say anything, and stranger still is that none of the other students showed up to the then-nonexistant old time and place for the class. Just me.
What really got me is that I still needed the professor’s signature to enroll, and I had decided to ask him just before or after class. So, I waited for him to pass by again, as I was in the direct pathway of both his office and the agronomy building, but he never did. Somehow, he got past me and the other student as we watched for him and even tried calling him. I was in absolute shock at the time of how the system worked, and mildly panicked because it was confirmed that he was impossible to locate outside of his office hours, which ended right when class was supposed to start. Just before my final class of the day started, I went to track him down, went from building to building and kept barely missing him, and finally ran into him on the way out. Good thing, too, because he doesn’t read e-mails from unknown people (aka: me), and won’t be on campus for the entire week next week. That means that out of five weeks of class, we will only have had one lecture. During the sixth week we are supposed to have a test, which I assume isn’t happening at this point. We have also missed one of our four fieldtrips due to a university bus being unavailable.
The long and short of it: I have no idea how people get an education here, things make no sense and everyone is ‘pura vida’ so they don’t seem to mind. When I told the program director about my crazy day, she told me that’s why it takes six years to graduate at UCR.
I had my first yoga class Tuesday! Man, it was certainly hard, and I didn’t really take it to heart when bringing a towel was suggested but I really could have used one. Either I was really lazy at previous yoga classes, the climate functions like a sauna, or both. Afterwards, I felt great, and talked with the instructor a little bit. She told me ‘tranquila’ (another favorite phrase here) about not understanding a lot of the instructions and that she had seen me watching others and following along. My wrists and my lower shins/ankles are extremely out of shape, who knew.
Monday:
I finally enrolled in the yoga studio! This was very exciting for me, as I figured I was finally forcing myself to regularly exercise, get out of the house and learn something I like. I was also excited to put to good use my organic yoga mat :)
The entire day was like walking through mud, I was so completely exhausted. At this point, there is nothing else I can do about my crummy sleeping situation. It’s loud outside, ALL the time, and therefore I know I’m not getting restful sleep. I started taking melatonin to get deeper sleep, going to bed earlier and drinking coffee, but I was counting on yoga more than anything else to both tire me out and clear my mind, both of which will help.
Anyways, I went to choir, and my chronically late professor was half an hour late, as usual, yet got upset about us ‘wasting time’ as a few people were quietly talking as he started warm-ups…yup. If he were on time, I might get home before 9:30 every choir night *sigh*. So, I left early that night, because I was falling asleep singing (a new sensation for me) and because buses only come every hour. I wanted to catch the 8:10 bus instead of waiting for choir to finish at 8:30ish and then waiting until 9:10 for the last bus of the night. While waiting, I ran into a friend I made on the bus earlier and perked right up. Sometimes all it takes to make my day is some socialization…Mondays are my hard days for being social, as I’m still having problems making choir friends (in both my choir class and in choir). At this point I have multiple friends in all my classes (well, not one, but I will soon as we will be going on a fieldtrip together at the end of the month), so I am resigning myself to not really making friends in choir. I don’t feel badly about this, though, because I’ve never really been able to make choir friends, even in English, and because we still say ‘hi’ and are friendly.
Tuesday:
I made new friends in my dance class, and went to get a smoothie even though I wasn’t hungry just to spend some time with them. Two things about that are nice: 1.) we didn’t go to a bar, which is what people often do between classes to get a beer and watch soccer, and 2.) the smoothies here are awesome because they have fun, tropical fruit. We talked about how both clothing and chocolate are more expensive in Costa Rica, and being a chocoholic and not a shopaholic, I lamented about the chocolate. I mentioned that I didn’t mind chocolate being expensive so much as not being able to find good chocolate, and I was told that Hershey’s is good chocolate. 0_0;; >.>;; x_x;;
I’ll admit, I’m a chocolate snob, but Hershey’s will never be ‘good chocolate’ in my book. It’s chocolate to make s’mores, and eat at Halloween, and eat when you’re just bored and don’t really care. The more I ask around, the more I find out that no one likes dark chocolate. I also realize that all things ‘chocolate’ are actually just ‘sabor a chocolate’, meaning the chocolate covered raisins and the cookies with the chocolate on top are really just colored milk fat with chocolate flavor…That was a sad day for me. I’m taking consolation in the fact that Costa Rica has Rittersport dark chocolate, and that I can buy Ghirardelli’s (for a price, of course) if I run out.
Tuesday was also the day of the professor mishap. It turns out, students often call and/or text their professors. Why is this important? Apparently they just change classrooms and times without telling their students, and the only way to find out when and where class is being held is calling them. This is exactly what happened with my Organic Agriculture teacher, and I have been told this is not a first. And how did I find this out? I was extremely lucky to have made a friend in the class, and he came and found me and told me that, because no one showed up to class (duh? He was there, and so were two other students, but it’s a mystery to me how they knew) the professor had cancelled it. Thank goodness he and I were in contact about the group project, and we said ‘see you in class tomorrow’, because that prompted him to come find me. What is even stranger to me is that I passed the professor in the hallway on the way to his class, and he didn’t say anything, and stranger still is that none of the other students showed up to the then-nonexistant old time and place for the class. Just me.
What really got me is that I still needed the professor’s signature to enroll, and I had decided to ask him just before or after class. So, I waited for him to pass by again, as I was in the direct pathway of both his office and the agronomy building, but he never did. Somehow, he got past me and the other student as we watched for him and even tried calling him. I was in absolute shock at the time of how the system worked, and mildly panicked because it was confirmed that he was impossible to locate outside of his office hours, which ended right when class was supposed to start. Just before my final class of the day started, I went to track him down, went from building to building and kept barely missing him, and finally ran into him on the way out. Good thing, too, because he doesn’t read e-mails from unknown people (aka: me), and won’t be on campus for the entire week next week. That means that out of five weeks of class, we will only have had one lecture. During the sixth week we are supposed to have a test, which I assume isn’t happening at this point. We have also missed one of our four fieldtrips due to a university bus being unavailable.
The long and short of it: I have no idea how people get an education here, things make no sense and everyone is ‘pura vida’ so they don’t seem to mind. When I told the program director about my crazy day, she told me that’s why it takes six years to graduate at UCR.
I had my first yoga class Tuesday! Man, it was certainly hard, and I didn’t really take it to heart when bringing a towel was suggested but I really could have used one. Either I was really lazy at previous yoga classes, the climate functions like a sauna, or both. Afterwards, I felt great, and talked with the instructor a little bit. She told me ‘tranquila’ (another favorite phrase here) about not understanding a lot of the instructions and that she had seen me watching others and following along. My wrists and my lower shins/ankles are extremely out of shape, who knew.
La finca
Here is a recap of 4/1-4/4:
I’ll admit, I didn’t post about my trip to the farm right away because I told myself I wanted to figure out how to describe my experience accurately. The truth is, the whole thing made me extremely uncomfortable, therefore thinking about it was uncomfortable, and after settling all leftover feelings I became too lazy to want to bring them up again. I’m still not really sure how to go about this…
The premise: I would join Karen and her family, along with another student from my group to go to her cousin’s farm/vacation house. There were maybe 20 people in total besides us three who went, and four of them were women (we were highly outnumbered, in other words). Other people came the next day, but I didn’t really meet them as they were friends of the cousins from the martial arts academy and we were leaving the next day. At first, I was upset to only be going from Thursday until Saturday, but by the end I was more than willing to leave earlier. Right off the bat, I was made extremely uncomfortable, and the trend continued on a lesser but still irritating level for me.
Spoiler alert: there were still some great things, and I will make sure to finish with those, but the discomfort I am certain is integral to the cultural experience I had.
To start off, something that was only physically uncomfortable! If you are someone who is extremely concerned about my safety and well being and will be upset with it being compromised, then the next paragraph might be a good one to skip. I'm still alive and well, see? I'm typing in complete, coherent sentences and everything :)
After getting off the bus, we had to take a taxi to the farm. Unfortunately, the taxi-truck had just been hailed by a different group. So, what did we do? Well, hopped on the back, of course! The other student from the program just looked at me and we exchanged sentiments that the program would DEFINTELY not approve, but everyone crammed into the truckbed, luggage and all. I was slightly nervous about going over bumps, as I was on the veeerrry back edge, but I survived, and was taken into the interior of the car as soon as the first group got out. Doing things the tico way, 100%.
And now, the farm experience.
As everyone is chatting, maybe an hour or two after we arrived, someone suddenly says, ‘alright, who wants to go kill a pig?’. I, as a long-time vegetarian, am used to being harassed about my eating habits, and as a gringa I am used to missing humor among ticos. This, however, was no joke, and all the guys got super excited about killing this pig. I realized that they were serious, and was horrified. Yes, I prefer the free-range lifestyle to factory farms, but that doesn’t mean I want to be involved. Karen was very good through this, and she sat with me and a few others as the rest went off, and I made peace with myself that there was nothing I could do and that the pig had had a good life, at the very least. As long as I didn’t have to deal with it, I would be fine. As I am keeping my mind on other things, I see the student from my group taking pictures of me. I soon realize it’s because Karen’s 50+-year-old uncle is standing behind me with the dead pig draped over his shoulders to try to get me to turn around and freak out. Hilarious, right? And no, there is no April Fool's Day here. I have no words, I was extremely upset yet remained calm (except for railing on the other student a bit for being supporting obviously unsolicited behavior). Typing this is getting me upset, I just can’t stand when people purposely try to hurt others (he knew EXACTLY what he was doing, this was no ‘culture barrier’).
(Note: Just after typing this, Karen brought up the incident while we were talking online and apologized for her uncle’s behavior. She also told me that her mother, who practically raised her siblings, heard about it and felt embarrassed on behalf of her brother. We both agreed that we were happy she wasn’t like her uncle.)
Thankfully, the second pig they slaughtered wasn’t as big of a deal. Unfortunately, all they ATE was pig. Breakfast, lunch, snacks and dinner. Karen, who doesn’t eat red meat, was also getting a stomachache from the awful smell of pork fat, day in, day out. So, what did I eat? Cheese. That was…pretty much it. The others ate pork and fruit, I ate cheese and fruit. I can’t believe it’s even physically possible to eat that much meat and nothing else and still function, my body shuts down one day without vegetables. Besides that, all the male cousins past puberty were BUFF. Like, ridiculous, every muscle in their bodies defined buff. The American student who was with me wouldn’t drop it, he was completely obsessed, they were THAT ripped. I have no idea how that can happen on a steady diet of pig fat, but apparently it can? It must also create the phenomenon of 95% of the female population having large breasts and not an ounce of fat anywhere else on their body.
I forgot to mention: every meal we ate, we ate off of styrofoam plates. I don’t think I need to go into detail as to why I don’t like disposable plates, especially not styrofoam ones, but the long and short of it is that they are awful for the environment. I started to help with the cooking, so I could scrape together whatever vegetables they had in the house (this resulted in a cabbage and tomato salad for the best lunch I had there), and I would always put things on reusable plates. I think the main problem was that there were not enough plates for everyone, so the women in the kitchen just used styrofoam for everything. I washed dishes to be helpful, and started to wash the styrofoam and plastic spoons as well because they were so lightly used I couldn’t stand to throw them away. Having a tortilla on a styrofoam for two minutes doesn’t result in a very dirty plate…
Then, we slept on the floor. The first night I was on a thin, single mattress with the other US student (we get nice and close here in Costa Rica…), and the second night I had it to myself, as he had a nest of bug netting (surprisingly cushy). Apparently all the inflatable mattresses that were bought for the occasion broke within minutes, which resulted in scraping together random soft things to sleep on. Some people went outside and slept in hammocks, as I found out the second night. So, the sleeping was like camping, which really wasn’t that bad, but everything combined just caused me to feel anxious and sick. On the way home, the first bus was half an hour late, and we had to wait for the second one for two and a half hours. I was extremely happy to be home, once I finally got there, and even missed my tica mom’s oily cooking and my extremely hard mattress and pillow.
Aside from learning to appreciate what I had, I also had some great experiences on Karen’s family vacation. It helped me learn to understand groups of ticos at a time, I learned how wonderful it is to eat a mango with its skin, I tried a ‘guaba’ for the first time (a large pod with slippery, black seeds, in which the casing of the seeds is eaten), I experienced the relaxed tica family dynamics, had my first arroz con leche (and pretty much learned how to make it) and had some great conversations. When I got any of the kids around my age alone and chatted with them, I was pleasantly surprised how intelligent they were and how easily we could have conversations about important things. I gave my opinion on ‘third-world and first-world countries’ for one of their school projects, and we ended up discussing politics and environmental education. You must understand, I wasn’t judging intelligence as a factor of where they came from, it was simply after watching two days of guys being guys to the extent that I taught Karen the phrase ‘sausage fest’. Most activities centered around the two pools that were there, and after watching how interested everyone was in swimming and not feeling the same sentiments, I realized how spoiled I was growing up with a pool. I still joined in the festivities to the extent my noncompetitive nature let me (I was not getting in the way of a bunch of muscular guys pegging each other with a ball, nope), and had a great time when it started raining at the tail end of our walk to the nearby river and we all immediately stripped down to our bathing suits once more for a night swim. I bonded with the cousin who owned the house’s son, which is apparently not his usual behavior, and he built himself a ‘granja’ (farm specifically for animals) and stuck me in a cage of foam blocks. (We totally slept on those blocks later, double purpose.)
Speaking of the rain, it was magnificent! The drops were huge, the air was still warm and the mini-rainstorms were frequent. I fell asleep to the sound of the rain on the roof the second night I was there and had the best sleep I’ve had in ages. Apparently, the rain drowned out the noise of the immature yelling and teasing that went on all night among the boys who couldn’t sleep, which Karen told me about later. I almost forgot: there were many chickens, ducks and geese running around, and the most adorable of all were the tiny chicks and ducklings following their mothers :)
I also learned that it wasn’t just my perception, but ticas really do like to always be right. In Spanish, they say ‘jugando como Dios’, or something similar, which means playing God. And that ‘horita’, which to me translates to ‘right now’, could mean ‘later’ or even ‘later, but I really mean never.’ This word basically means everything and nothing, because someone else just yesterday explained it to me as ‘in just a bit’ or ‘within the next few minutes’. Now I know, every time I hear that word, I have to take a random guess as to what it means and hope that I’m taking the correct course of action for how the word was intended.
Looking back at it all, I probably wouldn’t do it again, but I’m glad that I did do it. And I’m glad that Karen proved to be the sweet, caring person I took her for, and that none of my discomfort transferred to our friendship. The next day, I just took the entire day for myself. I ate what I wanted, when I wanted to, and even went out to buy myself exactly the food I wanted. It was a good day to prepare me for the start of school once more, and to recover from my lack of sleep and cheese stomachache.
Oh right, that was also Easter! Easter here does not involve chocolate bunnies and Easter egg hunts, there are full-blown re-enactments of the resurrection of Christ through the streets and things are shut down. I didn't go watch, because I was still recovering, but my tica mom was amused by my explanation of our commercial celebration of the day they know only as 'La Resurrección'.
I’ll admit, I didn’t post about my trip to the farm right away because I told myself I wanted to figure out how to describe my experience accurately. The truth is, the whole thing made me extremely uncomfortable, therefore thinking about it was uncomfortable, and after settling all leftover feelings I became too lazy to want to bring them up again. I’m still not really sure how to go about this…
The premise: I would join Karen and her family, along with another student from my group to go to her cousin’s farm/vacation house. There were maybe 20 people in total besides us three who went, and four of them were women (we were highly outnumbered, in other words). Other people came the next day, but I didn’t really meet them as they were friends of the cousins from the martial arts academy and we were leaving the next day. At first, I was upset to only be going from Thursday until Saturday, but by the end I was more than willing to leave earlier. Right off the bat, I was made extremely uncomfortable, and the trend continued on a lesser but still irritating level for me.
Spoiler alert: there were still some great things, and I will make sure to finish with those, but the discomfort I am certain is integral to the cultural experience I had.
To start off, something that was only physically uncomfortable! If you are someone who is extremely concerned about my safety and well being and will be upset with it being compromised, then the next paragraph might be a good one to skip. I'm still alive and well, see? I'm typing in complete, coherent sentences and everything :)
After getting off the bus, we had to take a taxi to the farm. Unfortunately, the taxi-truck had just been hailed by a different group. So, what did we do? Well, hopped on the back, of course! The other student from the program just looked at me and we exchanged sentiments that the program would DEFINTELY not approve, but everyone crammed into the truckbed, luggage and all. I was slightly nervous about going over bumps, as I was on the veeerrry back edge, but I survived, and was taken into the interior of the car as soon as the first group got out. Doing things the tico way, 100%.
And now, the farm experience.
As everyone is chatting, maybe an hour or two after we arrived, someone suddenly says, ‘alright, who wants to go kill a pig?’. I, as a long-time vegetarian, am used to being harassed about my eating habits, and as a gringa I am used to missing humor among ticos. This, however, was no joke, and all the guys got super excited about killing this pig. I realized that they were serious, and was horrified. Yes, I prefer the free-range lifestyle to factory farms, but that doesn’t mean I want to be involved. Karen was very good through this, and she sat with me and a few others as the rest went off, and I made peace with myself that there was nothing I could do and that the pig had had a good life, at the very least. As long as I didn’t have to deal with it, I would be fine. As I am keeping my mind on other things, I see the student from my group taking pictures of me. I soon realize it’s because Karen’s 50+-year-old uncle is standing behind me with the dead pig draped over his shoulders to try to get me to turn around and freak out. Hilarious, right? And no, there is no April Fool's Day here. I have no words, I was extremely upset yet remained calm (except for railing on the other student a bit for being supporting obviously unsolicited behavior). Typing this is getting me upset, I just can’t stand when people purposely try to hurt others (he knew EXACTLY what he was doing, this was no ‘culture barrier’).
(Note: Just after typing this, Karen brought up the incident while we were talking online and apologized for her uncle’s behavior. She also told me that her mother, who practically raised her siblings, heard about it and felt embarrassed on behalf of her brother. We both agreed that we were happy she wasn’t like her uncle.)
Thankfully, the second pig they slaughtered wasn’t as big of a deal. Unfortunately, all they ATE was pig. Breakfast, lunch, snacks and dinner. Karen, who doesn’t eat red meat, was also getting a stomachache from the awful smell of pork fat, day in, day out. So, what did I eat? Cheese. That was…pretty much it. The others ate pork and fruit, I ate cheese and fruit. I can’t believe it’s even physically possible to eat that much meat and nothing else and still function, my body shuts down one day without vegetables. Besides that, all the male cousins past puberty were BUFF. Like, ridiculous, every muscle in their bodies defined buff. The American student who was with me wouldn’t drop it, he was completely obsessed, they were THAT ripped. I have no idea how that can happen on a steady diet of pig fat, but apparently it can? It must also create the phenomenon of 95% of the female population having large breasts and not an ounce of fat anywhere else on their body.
I forgot to mention: every meal we ate, we ate off of styrofoam plates. I don’t think I need to go into detail as to why I don’t like disposable plates, especially not styrofoam ones, but the long and short of it is that they are awful for the environment. I started to help with the cooking, so I could scrape together whatever vegetables they had in the house (this resulted in a cabbage and tomato salad for the best lunch I had there), and I would always put things on reusable plates. I think the main problem was that there were not enough plates for everyone, so the women in the kitchen just used styrofoam for everything. I washed dishes to be helpful, and started to wash the styrofoam and plastic spoons as well because they were so lightly used I couldn’t stand to throw them away. Having a tortilla on a styrofoam for two minutes doesn’t result in a very dirty plate…
Then, we slept on the floor. The first night I was on a thin, single mattress with the other US student (we get nice and close here in Costa Rica…), and the second night I had it to myself, as he had a nest of bug netting (surprisingly cushy). Apparently all the inflatable mattresses that were bought for the occasion broke within minutes, which resulted in scraping together random soft things to sleep on. Some people went outside and slept in hammocks, as I found out the second night. So, the sleeping was like camping, which really wasn’t that bad, but everything combined just caused me to feel anxious and sick. On the way home, the first bus was half an hour late, and we had to wait for the second one for two and a half hours. I was extremely happy to be home, once I finally got there, and even missed my tica mom’s oily cooking and my extremely hard mattress and pillow.
Aside from learning to appreciate what I had, I also had some great experiences on Karen’s family vacation. It helped me learn to understand groups of ticos at a time, I learned how wonderful it is to eat a mango with its skin, I tried a ‘guaba’ for the first time (a large pod with slippery, black seeds, in which the casing of the seeds is eaten), I experienced the relaxed tica family dynamics, had my first arroz con leche (and pretty much learned how to make it) and had some great conversations. When I got any of the kids around my age alone and chatted with them, I was pleasantly surprised how intelligent they were and how easily we could have conversations about important things. I gave my opinion on ‘third-world and first-world countries’ for one of their school projects, and we ended up discussing politics and environmental education. You must understand, I wasn’t judging intelligence as a factor of where they came from, it was simply after watching two days of guys being guys to the extent that I taught Karen the phrase ‘sausage fest’. Most activities centered around the two pools that were there, and after watching how interested everyone was in swimming and not feeling the same sentiments, I realized how spoiled I was growing up with a pool. I still joined in the festivities to the extent my noncompetitive nature let me (I was not getting in the way of a bunch of muscular guys pegging each other with a ball, nope), and had a great time when it started raining at the tail end of our walk to the nearby river and we all immediately stripped down to our bathing suits once more for a night swim. I bonded with the cousin who owned the house’s son, which is apparently not his usual behavior, and he built himself a ‘granja’ (farm specifically for animals) and stuck me in a cage of foam blocks. (We totally slept on those blocks later, double purpose.)
Speaking of the rain, it was magnificent! The drops were huge, the air was still warm and the mini-rainstorms were frequent. I fell asleep to the sound of the rain on the roof the second night I was there and had the best sleep I’ve had in ages. Apparently, the rain drowned out the noise of the immature yelling and teasing that went on all night among the boys who couldn’t sleep, which Karen told me about later. I almost forgot: there were many chickens, ducks and geese running around, and the most adorable of all were the tiny chicks and ducklings following their mothers :)
I also learned that it wasn’t just my perception, but ticas really do like to always be right. In Spanish, they say ‘jugando como Dios’, or something similar, which means playing God. And that ‘horita’, which to me translates to ‘right now’, could mean ‘later’ or even ‘later, but I really mean never.’ This word basically means everything and nothing, because someone else just yesterday explained it to me as ‘in just a bit’ or ‘within the next few minutes’. Now I know, every time I hear that word, I have to take a random guess as to what it means and hope that I’m taking the correct course of action for how the word was intended.
Looking back at it all, I probably wouldn’t do it again, but I’m glad that I did do it. And I’m glad that Karen proved to be the sweet, caring person I took her for, and that none of my discomfort transferred to our friendship. The next day, I just took the entire day for myself. I ate what I wanted, when I wanted to, and even went out to buy myself exactly the food I wanted. It was a good day to prepare me for the start of school once more, and to recover from my lack of sleep and cheese stomachache.
Oh right, that was also Easter! Easter here does not involve chocolate bunnies and Easter egg hunts, there are full-blown re-enactments of the resurrection of Christ through the streets and things are shut down. I didn't go watch, because I was still recovering, but my tica mom was amused by my explanation of our commercial celebration of the day they know only as 'La Resurrección'.
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Estoy retrasada
Which is to say, I'm very behind in posting. Hopefully I'll get on that soon, as I'm feeling better (coffee is magic! and intense exercise probably helped). Tomorrow is another early day, though tomorrow I get an extra hour to sleep (I need to be at the university at 8, as opposed to today's 7), so I'll just challenge myself to get as far as I can tonight and see what happens.
Monday, April 5, 2010
0_0
I am a zombie.
I signed up for yoga today, but I can't even stay awake while singing in choir practice.
Goodnight, it is past my bedtime.
I signed up for yoga today, but I can't even stay awake while singing in choir practice.
Goodnight, it is past my bedtime.
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