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.