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.