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.