Martes el 25 septiembre
So I have decided not to do all the reading for Sociology/Ecology this week. I am discovering that Tess is the only other one who does it, so this will be an experiment to see if I am more or less stupid for not having read it. I think this will leave me more time to do things that I actually care about, like applying for this fellowship program at UC Berkeley next summer. I am really excited about the possibility of getting free room and board and $1000 to study public policy and law and get a free LSAT or GRE course. I have no idea if I have any chance of getting into the program, but they say they’re looking for financially needy students who either come from underrepresented groups or have good experience working in diverse communities. WASP that I am, I am not underrepresented, but I’m hoping that the financially needy and experience with diversity quotients will kick in to my advantage. If nothing else, I think it would be a really good experience to help me figure out if I really want to go to law school. I feel much more productive editing my resumé (it was really exciting, by the way, to change my language skills to "Proficient in French and Spanish") and writing personal statements than I do reading; I think I will skim. Also, I have been rather enjoying this really weird book I borrowed from the ICADS paperback exchange shelf called "The Passion."
We had a substitute in Spanish today, which like in high school was at first was rather frustrating, but turned out to be helpful because we got to spend more time on the presentations we have to give tomorrow – six to eight minutes on an aspect of Costa Rican culture; I am discussing dance, and so I made a poster today of various feet doing the dance steps for tango, merengue, and salsa. I am unduly proud of the thing, it’s so pink and cheery.
Lunes el 24 setiembre
Nuestro viaje ayer fue muy largo, pero con desayuno otra vez en Bread and Chocolate, fue muy bueno. The only awkward moment was when I was talking to my Tico dad about animals I saw in Limon, he was like, "Monos? Pezes? Negros?" (Monkeys? Fish? Black people?) and then chuckled. It’s too bad that for such a nice man he says an awful lot of kind of inappropriate things.
Today was a magically good day. With no classes in the morning, I slept for some twelve hours and loved breakfast. Then I walked to ICADS to use the internet, which was great except that I got there and discovered I had left my power cord at home, so instead of the two or three hours I had planned to use it, I got one. But it was long enough to work on my blogs/Spanish diarios and clear out my e-mail, which was pretty full for it only being a day and a half since I checked it. I then spent an unreasonable amount of time stalking facebook and being annoyed that clearly it is early in the semester, because nobody is spending like five hours a day on facebook procrastinating. Finally I gave up and worked on my oral presentation on Costa Rican dance for Spanish class. That’s Wednesday, which makes me very nervous, but I’m hoping this irritating inclination I have to express myself in Spanglish will make the Spanish flow easily, since we aren’t supposed to read.
I also didn’t mention in my Spanish journal that Saturday night was very interesting for me. We decided to follow Sam in his adventures, which was actually a lot of fun. We met up with a bunch of people, including a guy from San Francisco who seemed like he was going to be a bro, the male equivalent of the California dumb blonde, but who turned out to have traveled all over the world and done a lot of cool stuff with his life. We also hung out with Vic, a really funny Finnish guy who told us about lizard dreams, the result of delaying one’s hangover for several days, and with whom we had fun with interlingual translations. Our waitress and cook were Swedish, and we met up with them later at Jhonny’s, and though I didn’t get to talk much to him, she was really a lot of fun in an infuriatingly gorgeous and worldly sort of way.
This next part is taken from my Spanish journal, so those of you who speak Spanish can see how atrocious my grammar is and those of you who don't can be impressed by my wordliness. Also, my ~s don't seem to work.
Sábado el 22 setiembre
Hay mucho tiempo que no he escrito, pero pasé unos días muy largos y interesantes. El jueves, fuimos en una playa de Punta Uva por la manana. Estaban hublado, pero la temperatura del agua estaba perfecto, no demaciado frío ni calienta como lunes. Habia dos otras personas en toda la playa, entonces teniamos mucho espacio por natar y descansarnos. Las olas estaban muy pequenas, pero estaba bueno por ver unos pezes y animales. Pude ver unos monos en los arboles!
Despues, Mateo y Sam (se llama hoy Samurai por los Bribris) y you fuimos en un restaurante buenisimo sin nadie pero con muy buen comida. Maqteo tuvo un argumento conla propriadora, y ahora no podemos vovler.
Por la tarde, hablamos con una director de una projecto por conservar los bosques. Su opinion fue muy interesante, pero despues de la playa el el sol, tuvi mucha dificultad a permanecer despierta.
Ayer por la manana, fuimos en la finca de Jose Rodriguez. Despues, Mateo estaba muy cascarrabia, un poco como un pequeno nino cansado.
Hoy a sido un día muy bueno. Dormé hasta las ocho y media, y Katie Roja y yo fuimos en un soda se llama Bread and Chocolate. Los huevos con salsa caribena, las papas, y la fruta fueron buenisimo, y el chocolate fue perfecto.
Despues de nuestras conferencias con Mateo y David sobre nuestros proyectos independientos, alquilamos bicicletas para volver en la playa de Punta Uva otra vez. Fue largo y caliente el viaje, pero you estoy muy feliz, si consada y covierta de arena.
Miércoles el 20 setiembre
Lo siento por mi escrito muy pequeno, pero cuando estaba escribiendo en la playa, conoci un hombre se llama Emanual, que me halaba por mucho minutos, y no pude terminar antes de tener que salir. Tambien, ayer fue un día muy largo. Fui mordita para una hormiga zompopa porque no llevaba mis botas porque son muy incomodas. Pero el almuerzo fue delicioso, y nadie mató David.
Hoy, fuimos en el reservo de los Bribris (un grupo de indigenos de las montaZas Talamancas). Damos un paseo largo en la bosque, donde los Bribris manejan los recursos sosteniblemente. Almorzamos sandwiches muy soborosos, y despues hablamos con dos hobres sobre el desarollo y el TLC.
Nada grande me mordió, y no conoci nadie en la playa, pero vise David cuando el llevó una culebra por demonstrarnos sus dientes.
Martes el 18 setiembre
Estoy en la bellisima playa en frente de nuestra casa de Limón, el Hotel Maritza de Puerto Viejo. A mis pies está un perro café y blanca, que me oló y decidó que soy asi bien para ser una campanera. Esta playa es muy protegido por una dota de tierra con muchos palmas y no mucho más, y pues el agua es muy tranquila. Ayer, tan temprano que estuvimous en Puerto Viejo, fuimos en la playa para natar.
Sábado el 15 setiembre
This week was an interesting week because it was very full, which means we had a lot of interesting experiences, and also that it was the week when a couple of people in our group reached their exhaustion, nervous breakdown, yelling at the professors, breaking point. Friday afternoon, everybody was so ready to go out and blow off some steam, and then Friday night when it came time for us to meet up to go out, the two who had been most gung-ho decided to stay in because they were sick with exhaustion. I hope they use this weekend to relax since we leave for the Atlantic coast Monday morning, and a week in close contact with people just on the edge of psychotic explosion will not be much fun.
The cool thing that’s this weekend is the Quinze, the celebration of Costa Rica’s independence. Yesterday, a dozen local fourth graders dressed in traditional clothes came and did traditional dances for us. They were not very good, but they were very cute and very proud. Then we ate really delicious typical food. When we walked home, the three of us stopped by the park in Curridabat where pretty much the whole town showed up to sing the national anthem and see the kid’s fulares, sort of like luminaria on sticks, many of which were very elaborately homemade. After dinner and watching the highschoolers go by our street drumming, Tess, Sarah, and I went to a bar in Curri that was very chill and very fun, and I enjoyed watching a couple of locals dancing on the tiny dance floor.
At the moment Haydee (my Tico mom) is asleep, and I have no idea where Mano (my Tico dad) is, but I’m very content.
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Friday, September 14, 2007
La Lingua Pegajosa
Martes el 11 setiembre
Today was a wholly pleasant, and very fast, day. My alarm clock rang too early, but maybe one of these days I won’t feel tired. My shower was hot, and I felt good in my clothes, and I parted my hair according to a dream I had (as strange, I think, as the one in which my sister gave birth to a strawberry plant. The largest and most important strawberry’s name was Magnus.). Then we had gallo pinto (rice and beans) for breakfast, which I love, with eggs and fried cheese, and a piece of bread for me.
Katie took pictures of graffiti while we walked to school, and we had a few (sadly internetless) minutes before class. Matt did the lecture today, about different economic paradigms of development, which was actually really interesting because I love alternative economics. After our break, he sort of ranted about how traditional tourism is killing the environment and itself and thus Costa Rica, and how (his form of) rural community tourism is much, much better. Katie and I enjoyed talking over lunch, my leftover bread and generic nutella and banana, with celery and cream cheese that needed more fat in it. You could say alternately that we processed verbally or gossiped, depending on your perspective. Spanish class was a lot of fun, and I was only frustrated like twice, and once it was because I got something right and the professor heard me wrong. We played parto-de-cuerpo go-fish, and I finally correctly remember cejas (eyebrows) instead of obejas (sheep).
Earl: I missed you a lot in Spanish today because, to practice the progressive tense, we had to list our four most important people and say where they were and what they were doing, and my list was my mom and dad, you, and Katie. Since it was around 3:15 here, 2:15 California, I said that you were either in class or at home, and in either case probably eating an afternoon snack.
Lunes el 10 setiembre
Sunday, I’m sure my family was under the impression that I was sleeping off a tremendous hangover, but no, I was just really rather emotionally exhausted. Taking care of friends is hard work, especially when they don’t want it, and though I try to avoid it in the realization that it can just get worse, sometimes I would rather sleep than try to communicate in a foreign language and culture.Today, though, was better. We had an incredibly relevant lecture on certification systems for agriculture (organic, Fair Trade, etc.) from this really hot (if like forty-something) Belgian man. Then, I lunched with Sarah on warm, freshly baked bread and cheese and bananas with an interesting generic Nutella in the ICADS garden. She is fun, the food was tasty; it was magical. Then we had Spanish, and since it was Monday, it was our next professor, Rolo, who is the funniest yet, without the distracting attractiveness (and obnoxiously-good-smellingness) of Jhonny. Also, Jose gave us this Peruvian tea with eucalyptus flavor and coca extract, so we were all a merry bunch of Spanish-speaking minstrels after the break, during which we watched an episode of the Office.
Topher: I’m listening to All For You. It always makes me think of eating vegan hotdogs on the beach with SPEAK and singing backup for you on guitar. I get the impression our guitar-playing kid doesn’t think I’m very cool, so he gets no backup singing from me.
Sábado el 8 setiembre 2007
So there is this aspect of Latin American culture that makes it acceptable, and seemingly almost required, for men in cars to honk at women in the street. It comes from private vehicles, taxis, and bus drivers, and if their windows are down or there are guys in the back of a truck, they are almost guaranteed to talk to you. I don’t understand this; it doesn’t seem to have any purpose, as I’ve never seen or given any response other than to ignore it, and it doesn’t even appear to me to intensify when I’m dressed attractively or provocatively. However, even though I (in all my ethnocentric cultural bias) don’t get it, it doesn’t really bother me that men whistle and holler at me on the street. What bothers me is that they do it in English.
Am I really so obviously American, even from behind and yards away? I know I must be, but what is it? My walk? My clothes? My hair? I just can’t quite identify it, since there are any number of people here just as white and blond as I, and yet I know I can always identify Americans on the street too, especially if they’re in a group. But when I’m walking to Katie’s house at 7a.m. so that we can all meet up, what identifies me on the street as being someone so obviously alien to the culture that "Hey baby" (or more like, "Haaa-eey, bay-beeeee") will be somehow better than "Hola chica"? It’s a close kin to the indignance I feel in Hawaii when I’m mistaken for a tourist, knowing that in some ways I am an outsider but I am also enough a part of the culture not to be treated as completely foreign.
But that’s okay, I’m working to take things in stride, be easygoing and flexible and open-minded and loose and all that other b.s. they tell study abroad students to be. Yesterday, for example, I was licked by an ox. It was a little traumatizing, I’m not going to lie. Oxen have really big tongues, and apparently I tasted like a sweet vegetarian morsel, because one of them reached out its four-by-nine inch gooey tongue and probed it into my new green tank top. I was vaguely wet and sticky for a good hour or so, but I am hoping that I will get enough mileage in my life out of the sentence, "I got licked by an ox once," to make it worth it.
Today I had more fun with human animals because I got up at the same time I get up for school (quarter to six, although this morning I woke up at 5:30) to go to the Poás Volcano, northwest of where I live in San Jose. It has a big round crater, very different from the one at Hawaii Volcanoes, but with the same eye-watering smell of sulphur. We caught it early enough to see it in daylight, though they say on a clearer day you can see all the way to the Atlantic Coast. There were also an excessive number of American tourists, most in a gigantic group, one of whom had a deep red sunburn the exact shape of a tank top, including a big, scabbing blister. I tried to flirt with one of them (not the sunburnt one) by asking him to take our picture, and endeavor slightly hindered by Sam’s suavery when Kate asked, "Where’s Tess?" and Sam replied, "Fuck Tess." My picture taker, clearly amused, said, "1-2-3, Fuck Tess!" and that was the end of that exchange. Sometimes I really loathe Americans.
Joy: I am listening to Simple. There are no skyscrapers here. But the truck horns play a pretty tune.
Bethany: I saved Katie’s life today. Thought you should know.
Earl: You can get what I estimate to be roughly a forty (it is a big-ass stein) of beer for ¢1000, or about $2. Even you could get drunk cheaply here. Though you would feel very blond and white doing it.
Josh: One of the kids in our group bought a cigarette today (you can still buy just one here) and I am annoyed that I have come to associate that particular form of high with you. I wanted one; I think it’s because I miss you.
Emily: They are very neat here. Everyone closes their cupboard doors all the time; I make my bed every day. I miss you.
Today was a wholly pleasant, and very fast, day. My alarm clock rang too early, but maybe one of these days I won’t feel tired. My shower was hot, and I felt good in my clothes, and I parted my hair according to a dream I had (as strange, I think, as the one in which my sister gave birth to a strawberry plant. The largest and most important strawberry’s name was Magnus.). Then we had gallo pinto (rice and beans) for breakfast, which I love, with eggs and fried cheese, and a piece of bread for me.
Katie took pictures of graffiti while we walked to school, and we had a few (sadly internetless) minutes before class. Matt did the lecture today, about different economic paradigms of development, which was actually really interesting because I love alternative economics. After our break, he sort of ranted about how traditional tourism is killing the environment and itself and thus Costa Rica, and how (his form of) rural community tourism is much, much better. Katie and I enjoyed talking over lunch, my leftover bread and generic nutella and banana, with celery and cream cheese that needed more fat in it. You could say alternately that we processed verbally or gossiped, depending on your perspective. Spanish class was a lot of fun, and I was only frustrated like twice, and once it was because I got something right and the professor heard me wrong. We played parto-de-cuerpo go-fish, and I finally correctly remember cejas (eyebrows) instead of obejas (sheep).
Earl: I missed you a lot in Spanish today because, to practice the progressive tense, we had to list our four most important people and say where they were and what they were doing, and my list was my mom and dad, you, and Katie. Since it was around 3:15 here, 2:15 California, I said that you were either in class or at home, and in either case probably eating an afternoon snack.
Lunes el 10 setiembre
Sunday, I’m sure my family was under the impression that I was sleeping off a tremendous hangover, but no, I was just really rather emotionally exhausted. Taking care of friends is hard work, especially when they don’t want it, and though I try to avoid it in the realization that it can just get worse, sometimes I would rather sleep than try to communicate in a foreign language and culture.Today, though, was better. We had an incredibly relevant lecture on certification systems for agriculture (organic, Fair Trade, etc.) from this really hot (if like forty-something) Belgian man. Then, I lunched with Sarah on warm, freshly baked bread and cheese and bananas with an interesting generic Nutella in the ICADS garden. She is fun, the food was tasty; it was magical. Then we had Spanish, and since it was Monday, it was our next professor, Rolo, who is the funniest yet, without the distracting attractiveness (and obnoxiously-good-smellingness) of Jhonny. Also, Jose gave us this Peruvian tea with eucalyptus flavor and coca extract, so we were all a merry bunch of Spanish-speaking minstrels after the break, during which we watched an episode of the Office.
Topher: I’m listening to All For You. It always makes me think of eating vegan hotdogs on the beach with SPEAK and singing backup for you on guitar. I get the impression our guitar-playing kid doesn’t think I’m very cool, so he gets no backup singing from me.
Sábado el 8 setiembre 2007
So there is this aspect of Latin American culture that makes it acceptable, and seemingly almost required, for men in cars to honk at women in the street. It comes from private vehicles, taxis, and bus drivers, and if their windows are down or there are guys in the back of a truck, they are almost guaranteed to talk to you. I don’t understand this; it doesn’t seem to have any purpose, as I’ve never seen or given any response other than to ignore it, and it doesn’t even appear to me to intensify when I’m dressed attractively or provocatively. However, even though I (in all my ethnocentric cultural bias) don’t get it, it doesn’t really bother me that men whistle and holler at me on the street. What bothers me is that they do it in English.
Am I really so obviously American, even from behind and yards away? I know I must be, but what is it? My walk? My clothes? My hair? I just can’t quite identify it, since there are any number of people here just as white and blond as I, and yet I know I can always identify Americans on the street too, especially if they’re in a group. But when I’m walking to Katie’s house at 7a.m. so that we can all meet up, what identifies me on the street as being someone so obviously alien to the culture that "Hey baby" (or more like, "Haaa-eey, bay-beeeee") will be somehow better than "Hola chica"? It’s a close kin to the indignance I feel in Hawaii when I’m mistaken for a tourist, knowing that in some ways I am an outsider but I am also enough a part of the culture not to be treated as completely foreign.
But that’s okay, I’m working to take things in stride, be easygoing and flexible and open-minded and loose and all that other b.s. they tell study abroad students to be. Yesterday, for example, I was licked by an ox. It was a little traumatizing, I’m not going to lie. Oxen have really big tongues, and apparently I tasted like a sweet vegetarian morsel, because one of them reached out its four-by-nine inch gooey tongue and probed it into my new green tank top. I was vaguely wet and sticky for a good hour or so, but I am hoping that I will get enough mileage in my life out of the sentence, "I got licked by an ox once," to make it worth it.
Today I had more fun with human animals because I got up at the same time I get up for school (quarter to six, although this morning I woke up at 5:30) to go to the Poás Volcano, northwest of where I live in San Jose. It has a big round crater, very different from the one at Hawaii Volcanoes, but with the same eye-watering smell of sulphur. We caught it early enough to see it in daylight, though they say on a clearer day you can see all the way to the Atlantic Coast. There were also an excessive number of American tourists, most in a gigantic group, one of whom had a deep red sunburn the exact shape of a tank top, including a big, scabbing blister. I tried to flirt with one of them (not the sunburnt one) by asking him to take our picture, and endeavor slightly hindered by Sam’s suavery when Kate asked, "Where’s Tess?" and Sam replied, "Fuck Tess." My picture taker, clearly amused, said, "1-2-3, Fuck Tess!" and that was the end of that exchange. Sometimes I really loathe Americans.
Joy: I am listening to Simple. There are no skyscrapers here. But the truck horns play a pretty tune.
Bethany: I saved Katie’s life today. Thought you should know.
Earl: You can get what I estimate to be roughly a forty (it is a big-ass stein) of beer for ¢1000, or about $2. Even you could get drunk cheaply here. Though you would feel very blond and white doing it.
Josh: One of the kids in our group bought a cigarette today (you can still buy just one here) and I am annoyed that I have come to associate that particular form of high with you. I wanted one; I think it’s because I miss you.
Emily: They are very neat here. Everyone closes their cupboard doors all the time; I make my bed every day. I miss you.
Friday, September 07, 2007
Tristes Tigres
Jueves el 6 septiembre 2007
We ate lots and lots of fruit today. Some of it was gustatorially thrilling, but that was not always good, as a picture Sam took of me can attest. The fruit I particularly was given to try, I had to break open, and it was like autopsying an alien’s head. (Unrelatedly, it took me a moment to write that sentence because I had forgotten where the punctuation keys on an American keyboard were.) I pushed my thumbs into its hard, yellowy exterior until it cracked, revealing a layer of what looked like white sponge underneath. Beneath that was the apparently edible part, a goo the texture of sinus infection mucous with big black seeds in it. I have no recollection what it’s called, but I’m willing to bet it’s the fruit to which Melissa Polsenberg, a previous Interterm student at ICADS, refers as an alien brain. Despite that, it was pretty tasty, like passion fruit almost, once I got past the feeling I was sucking on cold, chunky snot.
I’ve also been working on taking more pictures; the landscape here is incredible, with mountains on three sides, and I’m arriving at the point where I don’t feel like I will simultaneously be mugged, be raped by rampant taxi drivers, and fall in an open manhole if I stop to take pictures on the street.
Yesterday was also an interesting challenge, as we spent the first half of the morning looking at bugs. Large, dead ones. Preserved in a substance that smelled rather like the jungle juice at Adelpho parties, only less fruity and more, well, like death. After the centipede slithering through my bathroom a couple of nights ago, it was perversely satisfying to hold a giant (I’m talking half an inch wide and five inches long) crunchy millipede in my tweezers for the purely scientific purpose of examining its legs and what my ecology professor very enthusiastically calls its "chewing parts." I was relatively pleased to find out that the centipedes here a sting similar to the ones in Hawaii (I said very coherently to my host father something like, "there is a very big, um, animal in my bathroom, and they are very bad in Hawaii." He replied, "Yes, here too," before squishing it beneath his shoe.), and not like the ones in Guam and parts of South America that bore through flesh. The second half of the morning brought our interviews on the Central American Free Trade Agreement, here known as the TLC. We six (with Caroline and our professor floating around) stood in the large mall in San Pedro harassing people walking by for their perspectives on the treaty and its potential implications. It was incredibly scary, very trying on my Spanish, and really rewarding that I managed to engage twelve people in conversation in a still fairly foreign language in an hour.
Speaking of language, the preterite is killing me. I loathe, loathe, loathe memorizing vocabulary and conjugation rules. Especially since our book is actually wrong in several places. But today’s linguistic excitement was listening to Sam talking about his first face (carra) dying. He meant his first carro (car), but we spent a good several minutes laughing at him anyway.
Domingo el 26 agosto 2007
So it turns out my Spanish is not as bad as I had thought. Sure, I can only converse in the present tense, and I screw up my agreements all the time, but I seem to communicate about ninety percent of what I want to say and understand about seventy percent of what is actually said to me (much less of what is said around me), and my homestay parents say that I speak Spanish very well and should be in the lots-of-Spanish class when I take my interview tomorrow.
Today we went to church; honestly it wasn’t that much different than the not-knowing-what’s-going-on I felt going to Catholic mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York last spring. After that we had brunch, tasty tasty red beans and rice. (My homestay parents asked after dinner if I was happy here; I lacked the ability and gall to tell them that they are nice and feed me really yummy food, and that’s really enough for me.) Then we went to a farmers market, which was really cool. It is much like the one in Hilo, only about ten times the size. Similar smells though, and similar fruits, although there were papayas literally the size of my head.
Then we met up with my friend Katie (who also goes to Chapman) and her host mother to walk to ICADS. It is a beautiful old house with really lovely gardens; I am excited that I get to spend half my day there every day. We all also met our ecology and sociology professors and read a bunch of stuff they handed out; I’m a little nervous about the science stuff, but so stoked about the traveling we will be doing. I still have no clear idea what to do for my research project, but I guess I’ll figure it out.
Sábado el 25 agosto 2007
Revelation of the day: I like coffee. Costa Rican coffee with sugar and milk is like the richest chocolate milk but better. Which is good, because although I feel like I am communicating pretty well considering I haven’t ever actually studied Spanish, I am making a lot of mistakes and being very confused and I’m sure I sound like an idiot. I try to make up for it by smiling a lot and making friends with the abuelitos, whose names, I think, are Axel and something like Amarilla.
I also discovered that, unlike in Europe, people here eat a big lunch and then eat a small dinner very early. I was slightly expecting the Spanish-style midday snack at five, and so I didn’t eat very much, and snacked on my Goldfish and Luna bars before bed (which will be in a few minutes). So far my host family is incredibly nice; my room is simple but really very comfortable, and I’m going to church in the morning. Hopefully this American Protestant doesn’t make too big an idiot of herself at Costa Rican Catholic mass.
We ate lots and lots of fruit today. Some of it was gustatorially thrilling, but that was not always good, as a picture Sam took of me can attest. The fruit I particularly was given to try, I had to break open, and it was like autopsying an alien’s head. (Unrelatedly, it took me a moment to write that sentence because I had forgotten where the punctuation keys on an American keyboard were.) I pushed my thumbs into its hard, yellowy exterior until it cracked, revealing a layer of what looked like white sponge underneath. Beneath that was the apparently edible part, a goo the texture of sinus infection mucous with big black seeds in it. I have no recollection what it’s called, but I’m willing to bet it’s the fruit to which Melissa Polsenberg, a previous Interterm student at ICADS, refers as an alien brain. Despite that, it was pretty tasty, like passion fruit almost, once I got past the feeling I was sucking on cold, chunky snot.
I’ve also been working on taking more pictures; the landscape here is incredible, with mountains on three sides, and I’m arriving at the point where I don’t feel like I will simultaneously be mugged, be raped by rampant taxi drivers, and fall in an open manhole if I stop to take pictures on the street.
Yesterday was also an interesting challenge, as we spent the first half of the morning looking at bugs. Large, dead ones. Preserved in a substance that smelled rather like the jungle juice at Adelpho parties, only less fruity and more, well, like death. After the centipede slithering through my bathroom a couple of nights ago, it was perversely satisfying to hold a giant (I’m talking half an inch wide and five inches long) crunchy millipede in my tweezers for the purely scientific purpose of examining its legs and what my ecology professor very enthusiastically calls its "chewing parts." I was relatively pleased to find out that the centipedes here a sting similar to the ones in Hawaii (I said very coherently to my host father something like, "there is a very big, um, animal in my bathroom, and they are very bad in Hawaii." He replied, "Yes, here too," before squishing it beneath his shoe.), and not like the ones in Guam and parts of South America that bore through flesh. The second half of the morning brought our interviews on the Central American Free Trade Agreement, here known as the TLC. We six (with Caroline and our professor floating around) stood in the large mall in San Pedro harassing people walking by for their perspectives on the treaty and its potential implications. It was incredibly scary, very trying on my Spanish, and really rewarding that I managed to engage twelve people in conversation in a still fairly foreign language in an hour.
Speaking of language, the preterite is killing me. I loathe, loathe, loathe memorizing vocabulary and conjugation rules. Especially since our book is actually wrong in several places. But today’s linguistic excitement was listening to Sam talking about his first face (carra) dying. He meant his first carro (car), but we spent a good several minutes laughing at him anyway.
Domingo el 26 agosto 2007
So it turns out my Spanish is not as bad as I had thought. Sure, I can only converse in the present tense, and I screw up my agreements all the time, but I seem to communicate about ninety percent of what I want to say and understand about seventy percent of what is actually said to me (much less of what is said around me), and my homestay parents say that I speak Spanish very well and should be in the lots-of-Spanish class when I take my interview tomorrow.
Today we went to church; honestly it wasn’t that much different than the not-knowing-what’s-going-on I felt going to Catholic mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York last spring. After that we had brunch, tasty tasty red beans and rice. (My homestay parents asked after dinner if I was happy here; I lacked the ability and gall to tell them that they are nice and feed me really yummy food, and that’s really enough for me.) Then we went to a farmers market, which was really cool. It is much like the one in Hilo, only about ten times the size. Similar smells though, and similar fruits, although there were papayas literally the size of my head.
Then we met up with my friend Katie (who also goes to Chapman) and her host mother to walk to ICADS. It is a beautiful old house with really lovely gardens; I am excited that I get to spend half my day there every day. We all also met our ecology and sociology professors and read a bunch of stuff they handed out; I’m a little nervous about the science stuff, but so stoked about the traveling we will be doing. I still have no clear idea what to do for my research project, but I guess I’ll figure it out.
Sábado el 25 agosto 2007
Revelation of the day: I like coffee. Costa Rican coffee with sugar and milk is like the richest chocolate milk but better. Which is good, because although I feel like I am communicating pretty well considering I haven’t ever actually studied Spanish, I am making a lot of mistakes and being very confused and I’m sure I sound like an idiot. I try to make up for it by smiling a lot and making friends with the abuelitos, whose names, I think, are Axel and something like Amarilla.
I also discovered that, unlike in Europe, people here eat a big lunch and then eat a small dinner very early. I was slightly expecting the Spanish-style midday snack at five, and so I didn’t eat very much, and snacked on my Goldfish and Luna bars before bed (which will be in a few minutes). So far my host family is incredibly nice; my room is simple but really very comfortable, and I’m going to church in the morning. Hopefully this American Protestant doesn’t make too big an idiot of herself at Costa Rican Catholic mass.
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