Aimless Love

Shenzhen Day 4: Art Village

2012-01-16T04:31:00.000-08:00

Art Neighborhood

This day we were together as a pack of six and headed to an area of Shenzhen known for inexpensive art. And by art I mean mostly copies, but some originals also. Before we got started I had to use the restroom so we stopped in a free art museum, which lead to us wandering around the entire museum before doing anything else.

Some crummy photos of some cool art:

And then we went into the art village, which is shop after shop after shop of very inexpensive hand painted...well...copies. There was some original art. I was more into the artist work stations than the actual art.

On our way back to the train we passed by this calligraphy shop. This is not where Ji and I got our own calligraphy water mats, but it was one like this. There was a huge variety of brushes of all sizes.

Here is a picture and a video I took on our way home from the art village. It doesn't quite show how dense and beautiful the area was, but I loved it.

And, if you'd like to see some REAL video, check out the editing project Ji-Soo made (it blows my videos out of the water): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjQqy1r2svE

Real time update, Sunday January 22, 2012: We made scallion pancakes and pork dumplings for Lunar New Year. Well...we wanted to make the food and then realized afterwards that it was Chinese New Year so it worked out great!

We baked some pig skin also. Ji's comment: "I can't believe I'm going to say this, but I think it's too fatty." My comment: There was none, I was too busy eating.

Dumplings boiling, boiled and to boil, with sauce. Ji's comment: "Wow, they actually taste like what you get at a Chinese restaurant!" Success!

Shenzhen Continued

2012-01-12T03:09:00.000-08:00

Shenzhen: Day 2

We went shopping. Ji's sister is a super star haggler. I got a necklace and some super cute shoes. I'm too lazy to take a picture of them and put the picture here, but they are cute.

Shenzhen: Day 3
Eunnie had to work so Eric and the rest of us went to this combined exhibit thingie called "Splendid China and China Folk Culture Village". Splendid China = mini-exhibits of famous places in China. First reaction: How is this going to be cool? Final reaction: I want to go back and spend more time there. See below.

This is a mini-version of someplace in China where there are tens of thousands of these little shrines carved into the rock. Really, they are life-sized.

This is a mini-version of the Yellow Mountain in China. This version has bathrooms in the back. The cool thing about this exhibit is that Ji's dad has actually climbed this mountain! It took three days to go up and down. If you look closely at the picture, you can see the stairs in the mountain that he climbed. In this exhibit, each stair is about 1 cm tall.

A monk burial ground.

The Great Wall of China.

And then we saw this, which was the craziest, most wonderful, random thing ever: a sign that said, "Trees Planted by the Most Famous People in the World". And here they are:

Most of the people I did not recognize - the leader of the Nigeria in 1995? No idea. But...

this tree was planted by Fidel Castro! Pretty cool, huh? So, I touched a tree that Fidel Castro also touched. So close to greatness, so close.

We didn't get as much time to hang out at the Great Wall as we wanted because we had to hightail it to the "China Folk Culture Village" section of the park for The Best Show Ever. They re-enacted a attempted castle take over from back in the day. I know nothing about Chinese history so I will not embarrass myself by trying to guess what the time period was, but I do know that they were fighting while galloping on horses and throwing things off the wall. It was pretty exciting.
There was even one guy who could hop off his horse and then back on again, while it was galloping! Ji got a video of it, not me, so you'll have to talk to him if you want to see it.

These guys would lean over to pick things up off the ground while their horse was at full gallop.

Shooting a bow and arrow on a running horse. No hands! He didn't even come close to hitting the target, but I don't care. I still think it's amazing.

And to give you a little sense of how amazing and intense it all was, here is a short video. During the entire show there was dramatic music and Chinese narration. The video below is when the raider was killed and they took his body away. He didn't actually die, but he looks dead, right?

Then we saw some other shows, ate dinner and went to bed. It was a great day.

A Little Distraction

2012-01-09T08:15:00.000-08:00

So, I should be doing a gazillion more important things right now besides updating my blog, but:
1. I just made huge strides in figuring out my certification woes, and deserve a break and
2. I just came back from a fantastic vacation and want to tell you about it.

A quick summary:

Phase 1: NYC to Shenzhen, China for one week where Ji-Soo and I hung out with his family (mom, dad, sister, brother-in-law).

Phase 2: 3 hours in Hong Kong. This was not originally part of the trip but we spent the night here to make travel to the airport easier. We only had a few hours to see the city but it was so amazing it counts as its own, separate phase of the trip.

Phase 3: Fly from Hong Kong to Bangkok with a layover in Singapore. Cab to train station, overnight train to bus to ferry to Koh Samui for a few days for a wedding.

Phase 4: Travel home. Flight from Koh Samui to Bangkok, spend the night, fly to Hong Kong, lay over for 6 hours, 15 hr. flight back to NYC.

I'm not sure how to organize any of this, so I'll just look at my pictures and go in order.

Day 1, Shenzhen
Ji's sister, Eunnie and her husband Eric are living in Shenzhen for a year. We stayed in a faculty apartment in the same building they live in. This is my favorite way to travel: visiting people who live there. I didn't think I had any real interest in China, but it turns out I'm a little bit obsessed.

This is Ji-Soo the morning of our first full day. He's on the balcony of our 10th floor apartment, looking out on the river. It was hazy there every day, but I don't know if it was climate or pollution. It was pretty cool weather, sometimes cold. Space heaters were used and enjoyed by all.

Ji's parents had arrived from Seoul a few days before us (we got in on Christmas night) and had hung out in Hong Kong. The top note is Hong Kong money and the bottom note is Chinese money. I will be the first to admit that I don't really understand the relationship between the two. I know that Hong Kong was a UK colony and was given back to China (reintegrated?) in 1997 but all comprehension stops there. You have to go through immigration to pass from Hong Kong to mainland China and they have different currencies with different exchange rates. How are they part of the same country? I'm a little obsessed with this issue, and will do research and try to get back to you, since I can't imagine anyone NOT being as fascinated as I am by all this.

Eunnie had to work the first day, but she met up with us for lunch at the cafeteria where we were able to purchase and consume our first bowl of $1 noodles.

I'd been daydreaming about these noodles ever since I'd first read about them here. I'd been waiting and waiting and waiting, and finally I got to eat them. And yes, there were every bit as wonderful as I'd hoped.

They had pulled noodles and cut noodles. I got cut noodles and they were wonderful. I'd never had cut noodles but I watched the guy make them and now I'm an expert. Well, at least an expert how eating them. Poor Eunnie and Eric are a little bit sick of cafeteria noodles by now, but they were both wonderful hosts and very patient with my desire to devour 80 bowls of this stuff. Ok, I only ate one and was stuffed, but I wish I had a bowl right now...

This is Peking University, Shenzhen campus, where both Eunnie and Eric are working this year. Eric is a lecturer in the law department and Eunnie works in marketing. I think. After lunch Eunnie went back to work and Eric gave us a tour of the area. First stop: the library that was shaped like a dragon.

See how the tail curls around at the end? Or maybe that's the head. Whatever, I took a lot of pictures because I thought it was really cool.

The law studies section (for you, Ben) :

Some more shots:

While we were inside we discovered the most amazing thing in the world: a calligraphy practice mat! We spent a good chunk of time there. Apparently the law students use this station for study breaks. I guess 15 min. of Chinese calligraphy practice really calms the mind.

The mats are made of cloth, with a black velvet-like backing. You write on them with water brushes and when the water soaks through to the back, it shows through like black ink. After a few minutes, the water dries and the mark disappears.

This was fun and super interesting. Ji's dad used to be celebrated for his calligraphy skills back when he was a little kid, and both Ji's mom and dad know how to read and write Chinese because there are still a lot of Chinese characters used in Korean and to be really literate in Korean you have to know Chinese (who knew?). This makes very little sense to me since Chinese uses characters and Korean is phonetic, but I'm working on it. We had Ji's parents helping him with his handful of Chinese characters, in Korean and helping Eric with his Chinese in English. And, of course, everyone was using Chinese.

So, in case you had lost track, I don't speak Korean or Chinese. Ji's mom figured out how to write Virgin Queen (Virginia) in Chinese, taught me, and we practiced. I only remember the character for woman. I learned two or three characters in my week in China. I have no desire to learn Chinese, but I do find it fascinating.

On the walk back to the apartment Eric and I climbed a tower to get a good look of campus.

The four tall buildings are residence halls. The building we stayed in, and Eric and Eunnie live in, is #4, the one all the way to the right.

Ji-Soo and his dad did not climb the tower.

After this we stopped by the gym and had fun there. I will spare you the videos of the butt shaking machine or the goofy walking machine, but it was a really good time. We met up with Eunnie, went out to dinner, and went to bed. End day one.

Changes

2012-01-09T04:51:00.000-08:00

Goodbye Monteverde

To be honest, I don't really want to say to much more about it. It was a sad but wonderful last few days. I found myself crying more than once, and grateful all the time. My last night I spent with friends and fireworks - what more could a girl ask?

Some older stuff
Ji-Soo came to visit for a few days in October. We went to the beach, where it was cold and rainy. It was the start of an 11 day stretch of non-stop rain. There were land slides all over the place, none fatal as far as I know. We did get stuck in some weather related traffic delays.

Even cold rainy pacific coast Costa Rica is beautiful.

This one cost us about a 40 min. delay.

This one about 20 min. What I didn't get a picture of what the back half of the semi truck that was ripped apart, presumably by the land slide.

Thanksgiving Day Hike with Dad and Kenna

Hummingbird nest we found (Dad found) - Purple Throated Mountain Gem. Later that same day we saw the mom sitting on the nest. The next day or two days later we went back and found the nest with babies in it!

One of my favorite videos ever. Make sure your sound is on so you can hear the wind.

Oh, Monteverde

The Score

2011-11-29T05:33:00.000-08:00

Ginna: 4 (nights with no new bites)
Fleas: 0

My new technique is to wear leggings with long socks double folded over them. This morning I took off the socks to find four fleas stuck in the fabric of the socks. Kill rate: 75% - one got away.

Two nights ago I dreamed that I arrived back in NYC. It was a foggy night and NYC looked so beautiful I had to fight back my tears.

This is another dream that makes sense to me.

Dreams

2011-11-16T05:26:00.000-08:00

November 7, 2011

I hope that once I move back to NYC the dreams will stop. They aren’t bad dreams, nothing close to a nightmare, but not pleasant either. Maybe the worst part is that they are reoccurring - I have one every few months, variations on a theme. Usually I’m headed to a party to hang out with Ji but I can’t quite get there. Sometimes I can’t figure out the bus or train system. Once or twice I’ve lost my keys. Always, I’m confused and anxious and frustrated. Always, I’ve made plans to meet up with Ji but can’t quite get there. My phone is dead or I’ve lost the number. Always Ji is waiting for me and I can’t get in touch with him to tell him I’m lost but I’ll figure it out, I’ll be there soon.

I don’t believe much in dream analysis but this one seems pretty obvious.

LoveLoveLove

2011-09-20T13:01:00.000-07:00

Love

2011-09-08T06:50:00.001-07:00

Costa Rican Mother's Day

2011-08-15T11:31:00.000-07:00

Monday august 15, 2011

I woke up late today, 7:45 a.m., and felt a little guilty. I called Mom for Costa Rican Mother’s Day and got to talk to her and Dennis, which always makes me happy. I went for a run, showered, made some fry bread and did the laundry.

Living alone I spend most of my housework time listening to pod casts. (Who knew that pod cast is two words and housework is one? Thank you, spell check.) I love pod casts. This morning I listened to two really powerful pod casts, one that had an unexpected impact on me.

The first one was about the rise of militias in the U.S., especially since the election of Obama. Reaction: I am so naive to the world.

http://www.thechangingworld.org/archives/2011/wk31.php

The second pod cast, http://www.thechangingworld.org/archives/2011/wk32.php was about The Sierra Program, a rehabilitation project in a prison in Australia to try to stop the Revolving Door Syndrome of recidivism. This pod cast was pretty remarkable, listening to you men talk about the choices they had made that led them to prison and their desire to change the patterns of their life and not return to prison. Pretty moving stuff. But then, as I was hanging my clean laundry on the porch, in the sun shine and gentle breeze, I heard something so powerful it brought tears to my eyes.

The reporter had been talking to skeptical prison staff, those who did not think that the Sierra Program would make much of a difference. She then talks to Sierra Program participants about their reaction to that skepticism. She talks to one man who is 24 years old, formally in the armed forces. When he left the army he fell into drug and crime and describes in general terms the violence of his actions and armed robberies. The reporter mentions the skepticism of others and asks this man why she should that he, a violent armed robber, can change just because of participation in this program. He responds, without hesitation and with full respect and calm, addressing her by name:

“Sharon, I was an armed robber, not am. That’s the most important thing, that change has occurred in my mind.”

This is where the tears came in. I cannot help but be emotionally involved in the world. And I realize that this is one of the most powerful ideas for me: we are all capable of making poor choices, but with support, patience, love, understanding, structure and discipline, we can change. I can’t quite find the words to express how amazing I find this young man and all of those young men – trying, trying, trying to make change for better in their lives. What takes more courage than that?

Bug Killer

2011-08-15T11:30:00.000-07:00

Sunday August 14, 2011

I killed another scorpion last night. It’s not even that exciting anymore, but this particular death was kind of interesting. I was sitting on the toilet, peeing when it happened. I saw a movement out of the corner of my eye and there it was, prancing into my bathroom with no regard for my privacy. I didn’t even freak out. I just pulled up my pant leg so it wouldn’t get tangled in arachnid, stomped on the perverted critter and continued peeing.

Unfortunately, this did not get the job done. Even on the hard tile of my bathroom floor the arachnid exoskeleton held up against the soft bottom of my slippers. Still seated on the toilet, I stomped again. The second attempt did not manage to capture the tail scorpion and I sat watching as it jabbed at the sole of my slipper in an attempt to free itself.

In the end I had to stand, pull my pants up and grind my heel to immobilize the scorpion, and sweep it up and dump it into the toilet to finish off the job. And now I get to add “The Time I Killed a Scorpion While I was on the Toilet” to the list of things I’ve done in my life.

And while we are on the topic of scorpions, I would like to share that Costa Rica has debuted two new bills. They are smaller, made of a different material and with new designs. The 1,000 colon bill, I am sad to report, has scorpions on it. Why would they choose to do such a thing? It’s like if the currency for New York had a mugger on it, or a junkie, passed out on a stoop. I know what you are thinking: New York doesn’t have it’s own currency.

What’s your point?

Blogs, Podcasts, Books and The Fall (but not in that order)

2011-08-14T11:21:00.000-07:00

Saturday August 13, 2011

Yesterday morning I went running with Tricia and fell and ripped my pants. It didn’t hurt and I only got a little scrape and a bruise (thank goodness – all my bruises from mt. biking have faded). The painful part was that there was this guy there and the intersection where I ate it and he saw the whole thing. We ran down to the intersection, I wiped out, got up, turned around and we ran away again, me with a big hole ripped in the knee of my pants.

I tell this to Ji last night and we laugh a little. We really laugh when I confess tha they are not actually pants that I wear to run in, but long underwear. And then we keep laughing when I explain how the elastic waist is so shot I have to bunch it up and pint it with a safety pin so the pants don’t fall down, especially when I’m running downhill. Thank goodness I’ve got my bright purple, super-fly, 50% off Pumas to salvage my imagine a little. I’m not a total disaster.

When Ji finally settles down he asks, “Would you go running dressed like that in NYC?” This question never would have occurred to me. Of course I would run in that outfit in NYC! Because:

1. It can get cold in NY and long underwear, even ripped long underwear, will help me stay warm.

2. I’ve never understood why people spend a lot of money for fancy new workout clothes. I always wear my older, most beat up clothing to work out in. The clothes are going to ust get seaty and muddy (and ripped) anyway. Expensive workout clothes = poor financial planning.

3. No matter how hard I try or how much money I make I will never be NYC fashinable. I just can’t pull it off and I’ve given up trying. Hm – I reazlie not that I never have actually given a damn.

So, for Ji-Soo and the rest of you who might ask, yes I would go running in the fashion capital of the world in baggy, ripped long underwear. And I wouldn’t think twice about it.
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I just finished reading Annie on My Mind by Nancy Garden. It was published in 1982 and was supposedly the first gay/lesbian teen novel, which is pretty cool, but I liked it for a different reason. I liked it because it really captured how falling in love in NYC can turn the dirty, gritty, monotonous city into a beautiful, endless playground. I was so down on NYC and then one day (really, it happened that quickly) everything changed.

I left anyway.
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I just listed to and episode of The Changing World podcast: “The Kill Factor”. Pretty powerful. My thoughts:

1. So upfront, so shocking, so necessary.

2. Kudos to those who can talk to openly and honestly about their experience. I can’t imagine the courage that takes.

3. I wish they’d included women. Do women go to the front line? Do they kill?

4. Being here in Monteverde has made me realize that I’m not a pacifist, but I still don’t like war.

5. Powerful idea #1: The safety switch to keep soldiers from killing gets turned off so they can kill but how can we put it back before we send them home?

6. Powerful idea #2: We ask soldiers to do so much but then don’t support them when the come home.

7. Powerful idea #3: Hearing one of the soldiers talking about going from war zone to war zone. What are we doing in this world?

8. The word WAR – seems perfect for what it is.
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I’ve been reading some new blogs lately (I never thought I’d say that):

• Neil and wife Andrea, who just moved to Hilo, Hawaii: http://haoleherald.tumblr.com/

• Ji’s sister Eunnie and The Husband, who just moved to Shenzen, China: consumateconsumer.com

• Amanda and her husband, who live in Cambodia and just had a baby. We were friends in middle school and have not spoken since, but its an interesting blog: http://amandaniel.blogspot.com/

My Life: Summer 2011 - Last Bit

2011-08-05T07:25:00.000-07:00

So, I got to go to Alaska for a wedding and had an amazing time and love loved it but then I left in camera in NYC and came back to Costa Rica and I have nothing to show for it. But, I will leave you with this link where my PIC has written wonderfully about it. He took most of the pictures anyway: http://have-not.blogspot.com/

And also, some pictures of the orange tree, happy with new growth in it's Brooklyn greenhouse. You can see other posts of my beloved orange tree at the link above also. This silly tree has brought me hours and hours of happiness. Oh, and it's not really an orange tree.

Background: Apt. 15C

Background: Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Background: Joy, joy, joy.

My Life: Summer 2011 - Part II

2011-07-07T15:21:00.001-07:00

Oops - started this a month ago and never finished. Here it is:

I went upstate for a wedding. My friend's family rented a place on the south western shore of Lake Canandaigua. This is the view from the back porch, after a quick summer rain:

I love this part of the world with all of my heart and soul.

Back in NYC at Bryant Park. I also love this place, but not with all of my heart and soul.

The sun setting behind the Williamsburg Bridge. This picture does not do the scene justice. Whoever says NYC is not a beautiful place is just wrong.

Collingswood, NJ with Dad for the 4th of July. This poster claims to combine the two best things about Philly into one, but I am doubtful. Sometimes two good things should just stay two good things and not try to become one great thing.

My Life: Summer 2011

2011-06-20T15:14:00.001-07:00

Saturday Ji and I went on a 2+ hour mt. biking adventure in Ringwood Park in New Jersey. It was my first time exercising in a month and my first time on a bike in over ten months. I was tired and out of shape, but had a great time. Ji-Soo fell and I got to wash the blood off with my water bottle. I did not fall because I have not yet bought my summer-time health insurance.

We went directly from mt. biking to Ji-Soo's aunt's house to shower and eat a pretty respectable amount of food: ribs, fish, bean sprouts, oyster kim chi, fruit, ice cream. I am grateful that Ji-Soo's family seems to have no problem with me laying on the floor and moaning as I recover from my bike ride and giant meal.

Sunday Ji-Soo and I went on another bike ride around the city (if it means anything to you: from Williamsburg, Brooklyn up Kent Ave to Vernon Blvd. into Astoria, Queens, across the Triboro bridge and back again). After our bike ride we did that same exact as the day prior (what else does one do after a long bike ride?): shower and eat Korean food, leftovers sent with us from the previous night.

Life
is
Good

That evening we watched "Street Fight", a documentary about Cory Booker's first run for mayor of Newark, NJ in 2002. Then we read as much as we could about him online, Ji-Soo focusing on his remarkable college football career and myself on his educational reforms and desire to live in the poorest, most violent parts of Newark. I highly recommend checking the man out.

This morning, Monday, I spent some time gorging myself on U.S. educational reform blogs, articles and videos. I watched "The Lottery" and it made me cry, also highly recommended. When I looked up it was almost 2 p.m. and I had to get out of the house. I walked across the Williamsburg bridge and into Chinatown and then took the subway back to Brooklyn. Here are some photos from my trek:

This is along the first stretch of the bridge. This is the bike route that I took because the first half of the pedestrian walkway is closed for repairs. I love the bridges of NYC. Love, love them. I don't know anything about architecture or art, but I do know that the lines of these bridges are beautiful. The other day I was talking about how beautiful the Queensboro bridge is and Ji said, "I'm not sure anyone else would use that word to describe that bridge." Yes, it looks industrial and a little rusty, but fantastically so.

I took this picture to show the road sign in the upper left corner. Also to show how highly used the biking and walking paths in NYC are. One day I would like to sit next to one of these bike paths and count the number of people that use them in one day. Today I also wanted to take portrait photos of the people who cross the bridge on bike. I wished Laura.d.n.c was there to launch the project with me because she is good at talking to people she doesn't know, and asking to take their pictures.

The Williamsburg Bridge is covered with graffiti, and I love it. At first I think this makes me gritty and down, but then I realize that it is easy to like colorful graffiti in a safe, hip, neighborhood.

Graffiti on a rooftop seen from the bridge.

This picture came out blurry. It is hard to see the screen of my digital camera in bright sunlight. Regardless, you can still see the teeth-tower, which I really like a lot.

More lines. More colors.

Halfway across the bridge there is a connecting point between the bike path on the north side of the bridge and the walkway on the south side. This section of the walkway was open. As I crossed a train passed under me. This is another reason that I love the Williamsburg Bridge: it has trucks, cars, pedestrians, bicyclists and subways. It is like a small city unto itself.

The train passed and I was left with more lines.

More graffiti. More color.

More trains. More lines.

The Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges to the south. To the north you can see the Queensboro bridge, Chrysler building and Empire State building. I took a picture of them, but it came out blurry.

This is maybe the most beautiful part of the bridge. This is where the bike path and walkway converge, if you are Manhattan-bound, or separate, if you are Brooklyn-bound.

It says:
CITY OF NEW YORK
WILLIAMSBURG BRIDGE
DEPARTMENT OF BRIDGES

The silver paints shines in the sun.

At this point in the bridge there is also a seemingly random art installation: the colored tiles on the cross beams. I don't know who did them or what they are supposed to mean but they decrease in number, heading towards Manhattan, until there are none, and I like them.

An unusually detailed spray paint stencil.

I have no idea what it is, but it grabbed my attention. It can't actually be a stencil. I don't know how they did it.

I tried to walk past this one, but it wouldn't let me. You could make a movie about this.

And then I was in Chinatown and buying tea and too distracted and thirsty to take anymore pictures. But here are some from last week:

Salad in bowl from Mom: lettuce, spinach, bean sprouts, walnuts, parsley, green olives, zucchini, Basic Vinaigrette from the How to Cook Everything cookbook.

Never-fail no-knead bread.

The Glove, a gift that Ji's mom brought me from Korea when she came to Costa Rica. It's made with a special scrubby yarn and can be used in the kitchen or the shower. I chose the shower and have been very happy ever since. I've never felt so clean!

Ji-Soo makes noodle soup. Same wonderful bowl from same wonderful Mom.

Small Joys

2011-06-16T07:15:00.000-07:00

This past April when I was in the states for a week I took a day trip to Philly to see my family. I wanted to get a Philly treat for Ji, so Dad took me to Di Bruno Brothers. Dad was very excited about the balsalmic vinegar, and when I was too cheap to buy it for Ji-Soo, he did. I lovingly cradled the balsamic vinegar in my lap, next to the not-as-pricey sausage I bought, all the way back to Brooklyn.

Ji-Soo and I made a loaf of no-knead bread with which to try the vinegar, and it was delicious. What more could a girl ask for?

Food and Bug Fotos

2011-06-15T06:04:00.000-07:00

Ji's Mom and Aunt found this almost-dead critter in the bathroom during their visit. I took it out to the porch to take pictures while his family made jokes about how we were starting out own bug exhibition and could charge people money to come see it. After pictures the beetle went next to the beautiful dead moth we'd found that morning during breakfast. As evidenced by this episode, it was a fantastic visit. I'd never seen a beetle with bumps on its back like that.

Harmless beetle, huge claws. Funny pads on feet. The surface the beetle is resting on is Ji's shorts because he's ok with me putting almost-dead bugs on his leg to take pictures.

And then Ji's family left and I made pejivalle. It's palm fruit, and pretty fantastic. Step 1: boil.

Step 2: Peel. You'll noticed that I skipped the very important step of "let cool". Ouch.

Step 3: split in half.

Step 4: Fill with natilla, Costa Rican sour cream.

Step 5: eat/enjoy

Step 6: store any leftovers

Not a step, just organic trash, which is more times than not just as beautiful as the edible part.

Pejivalle project over, move onto to boiling eggs.

Back in NYC, time for an update

2011-06-15T05:39:00.000-07:00

From a while ago:

Bits of White Tiger by Aravind Adiga that I loved:

(about family members) "At night they slept together, their legs falling one over the other, like one creature, a millipede."

"My father's spine was a knotted rope, that kind that women use in villages to pull water from wells...The story of a poor man's life is written on his body, in a sharp pen."

From June 8, 2011

In the a.m.: "This morning I woke to the sound of howler monkeys calling and birds hopping on my corrugated roof."

and then in the evening:
"What a funny day. Tonight I worked until 7 p.m. Walking home the fog was dense and still. My flashlight at full power could only show me the rocks right in front of my feet. The light extended from my hand in a solid cone. There were single, split second flashes of lighting, so fast I wasn't sure they had even happened.

And then to add to the already beautiful, spooky-but-not-scary atmosphere: as I approached the gate to my house to lean over and unlatch it from the other side I froze and then jumped back. There was a thin brown snake on the waist-high gate, about 2 1/2 feet long. Half of its body was wrapped through and resting on top of the gate, the other half poised, waiting in the air above the gate. If I had actually reached over the gate to unlatch it I could have given the snake a little kiss on the top of its i-think-its-not-triangle-shaped head.

I am not afraid of snakes. I think they are beautiful and interesting. Startled by them yes, scared no. Until I moved to Costa Rica and learned that there are 27 speices of venomous snakes in this small country. Did you know that Costa Rica is one of the world's top (or maybe the actual top) exporters of snake venom antidote? They have enough deadly snake venom to make lots of snake anti-venom and ship it all over the world.

Yes, I got myself educated on venomous snakes. I went to the serpentario three times and learned the difference between a triangle head and a round head, cat pupil and round pupil. I know about that nostril looking pit that venomous snakes have in their faces and it was all very interesting.But it only gets you so far when it's dark and foggy and there is a snake in your face. There was nothing about this snake that told me it was venomous but I still didn't want to kiss it.

I found the longest stick I could (a good 8 inches - great job, Ginna) and gently poked the snake with it, hoping that this would be enough to convince it to move elsewhere. No such luck. After a few more pokes at its thin, long body I remembered that young snakes can be more deadly that adult snakes because they will dump all of their venom into you at once, having not yet learned how to control their bite. This was a long but young looking snake that was begining to zigzag the top half of its body, lower half anchored firmly to the gate. David Attenborough has taught me that this is ideal striking stance. No way I could move faster than this little guy.

Finally, the thin brown snake slowly moved into the bush next to my front gate. I gingerly opened the gate and let myself in, scrutinizing every stick I could see. I turned to look at the brown snake in the green bush but could not find it. Sneaky little bugger.

Weird Things Happen When You Travel

2011-04-20T06:41:00.000-07:00

It is true, they just do. Here are some examples from my last stint of international travel (Monteverde to NYC) to illustrate my point:

Weird thing #1: Oscar on the bus
I took the 2:30 bus from Monteverde to Alajuela on Friday afternoon because my flight left early Saturday morning. I got to sit next to Oscar, who really wanted to talk to me and tell me how pretty I was, but instead he feel asleep in the heat, thank goodness. Unfortunately, as the sun set and the air cooled, Oscar woke and chatted me up. I had no interest in talking to him but he did not seem to notice how I kept burying my nose in my book or gazing out the window. He insisted on telling me all about his world travels and even asked me if I was married. I guess he didn't notice that he was almost 50 years my senior. I was very happy to mention my wonderful boyfriend whom I was in route to visit. For the record, our old friend Oscar did nothing inappropriate or out of bounds, I just wasn't in the mood for geriatric chit chat.

Weird thing #2: Public viewing hotel room
I chose to stay at a hotel in Alajuela that myself and others from Monteverde have used regularly. They are nice, helpful, clean and pretty inexpensive. This time, however, I got a room with a shared bathroom in an attempt to save a few additional dollars. There were three windows in my room, each of them opening to an open space in the hotel, not to the outside. These windows had blinds that only partially obstructed an outsiders view, which meant that I had to turn the lights off to change, and as I snuggled into bed to read at night, I could make direct eye contact with anyone passing. Thank goodness my neighbors had the decency not to linger.

Weird thing #3: Costa Rica's new national sport
I shared my 5:15 a.m. taxi to the airport with a Swiss couple heading home after their third visit to Costa Rica. Our taxi driver was very excited to explain to us the new Costa Rican sport: fútbol vacero or something like that. Two teams, soccer field, most goals wins - nothing new there. But instead of playing with a soccer ball, they play with a COW. With horns. You are not allowed to touch the animal, but if you usher it into your goal, you get a point. Once we had arrived at the airport and unloaded our bags, our taxi driver proudly lifted his shirt to show where he had been gouged in the gut by cow horns.

Weird thing #4: Airplane adventure
The first leg of my airborne journey, San Jose to Atlanta, when smoothly. The flight from Atlanta to Newark was delayed about an hour due to poor weather in Newark. I called Ji who confirmed that yes, in deed, it was raining in his part of the world. The first hour and a half of the flight, from 4 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. , when pretty smoothly. Around 5:35 p.m., when we were over Pennsylvania, the captain explained that due to poor weather in Newark we would be entering a holding pattern over PA until about 6:15. He would keep us updated. Two minutes later he came on again to say that we were actually just gonna head right into Newark.

Then we were struck by lighting. Yeah...no one was really expecting that since we were above the clouds and had seen no rain or lighting at all. The ride was still pretty smooth when all of a sudden there was a bright flash of light, a shudder thru the airplane and a loud BOOM. People were freaked out (gasping, yelling, "of my gosh!"ing) but luckily two flight attendants happened to be standing in the aisle right next to me and I was able to observe them not flinch at all and overhear them talk about how an airplane is actually a pretty safe place to be in a lighting storm, they'd been on much worse flights than this, the plane is equipped with "static sticks", etc. Surprisingly, I did not freak out. Yes, I did feel that prickly heat that rises from your armpits to your neck after a sudden scare, but I was not nervous. This, for me, came as a surprise and relief because over the past few years I've been developing an anxiety around flying. But here I was calm as could be surrounded by a flurry of fear. Interesting.

We approached Newark, we were put in a holding pattern for awhile, then started our final descent. The sky got darker and the air bumpier as we slid beneath the storm clouds. I heard the landing gear lower. And then, all of a sudden, we were accelerating back up into the smooth, bright skies above the clouds. The captain gave us this explanation: "Folks, we came in to land but the rain was so intense we couldn't see the airport." That's all he said for a while, leaving me to wonder: and now what? but I still was not nervous. I was, however, beginning to get a little queasy due to the mild but constant turbulence for the past hour.

The captain explain further that we were going to circle around and try to land again. This process took about 20 minutes, during which time I closed my eyes and breathed deeply, trying to calm my motion sickness. I was successful, but the little boy two rows ahead of me was not, and we could all hear him retching.

When we landed successfully on our second attempt three interesting things happened almost simultaneously:
1. The plane erupted into applause. This is not the first time this has happened on a flight I've been on, but it is the first time I've participated.
2. My eyes welled up with tears and I realized how stressed I actually had been. I have never been so happy to be in windy, raining, grey, Newark NJ!
3. A woman one row ahead of me across the aisle threw up, which is especially interesting since we were smoothly taxiing to our gate.

When I saw Ji-Soo waiting for me I latched on with both arms and did not want to let go.

Weird thing #5: Getting duped by a hasid
Finally, I am in NYC. Finally, I am with Ji-Soo, rushing to tell him every detail of the flight and the hotel and the past three months during which we have been apart. It is chilly out and he has brought me a vest to wear. I throw this on as we get out of the car and grab my bags. It is windy and raining but we are close enough to his building that I don't bother to dig my raincoat out of the very bottom of my pack.

We are one door away from Ji's building when a hasidic man approaches us and says in heavily accented English: "Excuse me, I can not carry. Can you carry a box for me just from here", he points to the apartment building we are in front of, "to the synagogue?", he motions across the street.

Ji-Soo agrees and starts to walk with the man, who then adds, "You just have to go up to the second floor. My son will give you the box." This was not part of our original understanding. Ji looks at me, cold and wet, a worried look on his face. We pause for a second to decide. The hasid adds quickly, "I give you one bread." I nod at Ji-Soo to go ahead not so much because I want to be nice, but because I can not turn away from what is happening right now.

Ji follows the man into the apartment building and disappears. It is only then that I realize that I've just let someone I care a great deal about walk into a locked building with people I don't know to do something I don't quite understand. I try not to get nervous, and am very relived when I see Ji-Soo approach the door, arms full with a large box. We finally make it to his apartment to enjoy our "one bread", which turns out to be a box full of chocolate bread rolls. Totally worth it. Yummy.

I've Done Some Traveling

2011-04-20T05:28:00.000-07:00

San Juan del Sur

In late March the assistant director and I took a group of six high school students to San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua for a visa run. We were there for about three days.

San Juan del Sur at sunset. You can see a statue on the hill on the right. That is Jesus, and he will be featured later.

The view north of San Juan del Sur from the top of the hill with the Jesus statue. It was hot.

This is Jesus, up close. He is made out of fiber glass and is the result of a Nicaraguan man who survived prostate cancer and wanted to give back.

Miravalles
In early April I went with the 7th and 8th graders on their field trip. We went to a wind farm in Miravalles.

The approach. I think they look like gentle gaurdians. I love them.

Drivin' by.

We got to go into the control room. This is a map the entire farm. I think I remember that they have 57 windmills and can produce 50,000KW of energy. That day there were only putting out 39,000KW because of wind velocity and five wind mills out of service.

It seems like everything there was labeled with worker names.

Everything.

The bases are painted green to lower the visual impact the windmills have on the environment. So far there have been no other complaints since the plant opened for full operation in December 2010, except one woman who complained about the noise that they make. Each windmill at full capacity makes less than 80 decibels, which is the limit for harmful noise levels, so the plant did not have to change anything. The stairs in the picture lead into the base of the windmill which you can climb up into for maintenance.

Miravalles Volcanoe as seen from the bus on our way to the Miravalles Geothermal plant.

Us at the geothermal plant.

Control room.

The turbines. We had to wear hard hats and ear plugs in this room.

This turbine was out of its casing and set off to the side. When I first thought of turbines, I pictured fans. It did not occur to me that they would be so detailed. Of course now, it seems obvious.

Giant gears.

Keeping the turbines clean.

Water cooling station. The water falls towards the center of the room because of the force of the cooling fans above it.

Leaving the geothermal station, Miravalles Volcano, source of the energy, in the background.

Our hardhats, awaiting their next tour.

Overdue Photo Update

2011-02-20T11:39:00.000-08:00

This was a post I started in February, but lack of access to fast internet makes uploading pictures boring, so I stopped.

This is the sunset over the Gulf of Nicoya. The Gulf of Nicoya is beautiful and being able to see it is one of my favorite things about living in Monteverde.

This is sapote, a fruit I discovered one day at the farmer's market. I've tried it twice and realized that it's not a fruit I think I'll buy again, but we did have a good time together. Brown and papery on the outside,

red and slick and smooth on the inside.

Big 'ole center pit.

Good with coffee.

This was one of two twin pits I found in a sapote one day. What a beautiful, curvy, shiny thing it is. (more info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapote)

Jacotes before consumption.

Jacotes post consumption. (more info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spondias_purpurea)

My walk home after work. Very bright, whole sky rainbows are not uncommon in Monteverde.

Friday Morning Human Offensive

2011-02-06T12:06:00.000-08:00

Friday February 4, 2011

Thursday night I saw few ants. I thought that maybe this occupation had been too costly for them, the casualties too great. I thought they had packed and gone.
Friday morning I realized that I was wrong. Not only were they back full force (had they taken the night off?), they had violated the previously agreed upon understanding which dictated that they would stick to the walls and corners of my house and not march across open spaces. Specifically, my bathroom floor, over my olive green woven mat where I keep my naked feet warm on cold mornings, especially before 6 a.m. And here I thought I had given up.

I remembered that Dad used to wet a sponge with bleach and wipe down counters on warm, sticky, summer days in upstate New York. I remembered the chemicals I had: Clorox Anit-Hongo spray. I went to town and did not feel remorse.

This evening there is not a wiggly ant to be seen.

On a more mysterious note: I arrived home last night to find bird poop on my kitchen counter. How did this happen? I leave my windows open during the day but can not imagine a bird finding its way thru the small space between the glass panes. I saw no bird – it must have, improbably, found its way out again, but not before wrecking havoc on my house. Bird poop was found not only on the kitchen counter but on my bed, the dining room window and, tonight, the electric range on the stove. I picture a small bird, frantic, trapped in my house, crapping its brains out trying to find its way back home. I do hope it found its way out or else I fear that I will find a lightweight bird carcass sometime soon.

Reflections On the Death of a Community Member

Yesterday a man died – a long-standing member of the community. Today school got out at 12 for a funeral at 2. I want to say something poetic and profound, but its just not there. I want to be able to put into words what this feels like: a call at 7 p.m. Thursday, being part in a phone tree, word spreading quickly to all members of the school and community. I’ve never worked in a school that doubles as a funeral space before. The cemetery is next to the school, where we take kids sometimes for group activities.

It feels…nice. It feels like sliding over to give a stranger space on a bench. It feels like compassion.

My Bucket List

How appropriate that these are the thoughts that follow.

This is how un-cool I am:
Setting: Teacher lounge, Monteverde Friends School, Monteverde, Costa Rica
Characters: Two co-workers and myself
I sit browsing new pictures on Facebook. When I get to work before 7 a.m. I feel comfortable with a guilty peruse of Facebook by 9. I see pictures of my bad-ass sister, smiling wickedly into the camera with her father next to her. They each straddle a motorcycle – hers metallic blue, his dark red, and they’ve just gone on a joyride. I think: I love this. I think: I want this. I want to be bad-ass and joyride Florida streets with Dennis and Heather. The title of the photo album where I found these pictures is “Cross Riding with Dad off the Bucket List”.

I’m envious. I must find out everything about this, and then do it myself. I start with vocabulary.
I turn to my co-workers:
“Do you guys know anything about motorcycles?”
“No,” one of them responds. “Why, do you want to get one?”
“Well, kinda” I say, feeling a little exposed, “but that’s not why I ask. I was wondering if you knew some motorcycle terminology.”
“What?”
“What’s a bucket list?”
They laugh. “I know a bucket list to be a list of things you want to do before you die. You know, before you kick the bucket.”
Click, click, click.
“Ooohhhh….that makes a lot more sense.”

I tell my sister about my silly little mistake and she asks the question that will not leave my head all day: “Now that you know, are you going to make one?” I am immediately enthralled: of course I want to make a bucket list! Lists are my favorite things, ever. I write Ji-Soo and tell him we should write bucket lists. He finds the title a little morbid and suggests a few tamer (lamer?) possibilities. But I wonder:

-once you put an item on a bucket list, can it be taken off?
-if you die and don’t do some of the things that you’ve put on your bucket list, do you go to hell? HaHa! Just kidding – but I am overwhelmed by the idea.
-Do you actually write out a bucket list?
-What goes on a bucket list? What degree of vagueness or specificity is necessary? What degree is allowed?

I know some of you will be tempted to respond and say, “It is your bucket list, make it what you want”, but I am not interested in this. I want someone, sometwos or threes or fours or more, to tell me the rules governing their bucket lists, or why they don’t have a bucket list.
I’ve picked it up and now I can’t put it down.

Under Attack

2011-02-06T12:03:00.000-08:00

Wednesday February 2, 2011

I am under attack - again. This is not the first time this year that my Costa Rica home has been marching grounds for thousand of industrious little ants. I didn’t write about it last time not because it wasn’t remarkable but rather because I was so appalled and disgusted by my living circumstances.

Last time was different: I saw some ants, figured they would swarm in, do their thing, and be gone, taking with them any bug carcasses and crumbs they had encountered. I was so wrong. They came, they stayed, they clumped into a healthy grape fruit sized mass at the seam in the wall of my entryway. What did I do? Nothing, at first. I was too horrified to react. After a day I sprinkled Gold Bond athlete foot powder, the closest thing to Borax I could find, in the doorway to my bedroom and living room. Because, you know, ants can’t climb walls. The pulsing mass only grew.

Then, I gave up. I stuck my head in the sand. I lived with the repulsive mass for days, pretending it was not there. Ugh. I don’t even want to think about it.

Eventually, after about a week, the mass went away, leaving behind only the spent shells of hundreds of colony members, sprinkled neatly along the foot of the wall.

This time it is different. It started on Saturday with a gentle stream of much smaller ants parading out of a crack in the floor by my front door. They were almost cute in their precision. Almost.

I was dismayed. Again? I don’t want it. I was then struck by an idea – an idea I took to be divine intervention. I heated water in the kettle and filled the ant hole with boiling water a la Grandma Barnes weed control on the front walk.

I walked around all day with my chest puffed out. Not a single ant came back out of that hole. Boy, I sure was feeling good about myself. Fast forward to Tuesday night when I discovered a stream of ants coming from the space between the wall and the floor under my bathroom sink. This is the same space that Julia and I had shoved a wad of clear tape into last May to keep out the scorpion we saw escape via that route.

I’m getting tired of this story, so let me just say that it didn’t work as well (at all) this time (times) and now I have
1) boiled ant bodies and gritty cement wall crumbs spread across the bathroom floor, where they floated to when I splashed boiling water at them and
2) ants flowing steadily to and from who knows where.
And again, I give up. They can win.

A Very Sunday Sunday

2011-01-31T14:59:00.001-08:00

1/30/11

Today is what I imagine Sundays should be:

Wake at 7 to do laundry (I can already hear some of you thinking “What? This sounds like a horrible day already!”). I love doing laundry here in Costa Rica, especially in the dry season. Today it is cool and sunny and windy. A perfect day for laundry. Doing laundry on my front porch in Costa Rica means this:

1. Fill left side of machine with water and powdered soap. Put in clothes. Set timer for 12-15 minutes, depending on how dirty the clothes are. The ridged disk at the bottom of the tub turns this way and that, washing the clothes.

2. Drain left side tub, put clothes in cylinder on right side of the machine with holes in it. Set timer to 3 min of fast spinning, throwing water out of clothes, through a hose and into the garden (lets not talk about the environmental ramifications of me washing my clothes).

3. Fill left side of machine with water, again. This time add a capful of wonderful smelly chemical rinse stuff that I never would have used in the States but is a fine ally in the battle against mildew and must and mold here in my mountain cabina. Set timer to 12-15 minutes.

4. Drain left side tub, put clothes in cylinder on right side of the machine with holes in it. Set timer to 5 minutes of fast spinning, throwing water out of clothes, through a hose and into the garden.

5. Hang clothes on the line on my porch balcony.

6. Sit back and watch my clothes dance in the wind, breath deeply (ah, the artificial aroma of clean clothes!) and feel like I’ve done something good in my life.

Feeling extremely satisfied with myself, I continue putzing around, picking up from last nights book club meeting, washing dishes, putting dishes away (which really means taking them out of the dish drain and spreading them all over the counter so they can fully dry before I put them in the dark cabinet again). We are reading The Bone People by Keri Hulme. This morning I wonder if I am like Kerewin Holmes as I cook myself an egg and cheese sandwich, heat up sweet potato soup and pour myself a glass of red wine, smiling to myself and to Patrick Cox on The World in Words pod cast that keeps me company in the kitchen.

This is what happens when I am alone: I read and listen to pod casts almost non-stop. Not in the shower. Today I listened to Radio Lab (all about science) and The World in Words (all about language) and read parts of An Anthropologist on Mars by Oliver Sacks and The Bone People. I think I probably retain a very small percentage of what I take in, but that’s ok with me.

This is why I love Oliver Sacks: after reading a detailed 40 page of a case of a painter who loses his ability to see color due to a car accident he ends the chapter with this sentence: “Three centuries later, we still have no hypothesis, and perhaps such questions can never be answered at all.” I like this so much more than Laurel Zuckerman’s painful two part interview on The World in Words (#55 and #56) in which she proclaims to understand the flaws in the French educational system in regards to teaching English, and lays out steps on how to fix it. I find her hard to listen to (I originally wrote “I want to kick her”, but then though better of it).

Now I will temporarily bid farewell to my friends Oliver, Keri, Jad, Robert and Patrick and go to meeting.

January January

2011-01-26T05:20:00.000-08:00

Monday January 24, 2011

This is decided: I love having visitors. Please come visit. Jane and Ann were here for a week and now they are five hours away on the coast and I am hearing the echoes of their visit bounce around the walls of my little mountain cabina.

This is the story: Jane is turning 60 and her eldet-of-3 daughter, Julia (very good high school friend of mine), has been planning her b-day trip to Costa Rica since last May when Julia spent a few weeks here with me. It’s a sweet idea, but not that remarkable until you consider that Julia and her family kept the destination of Jane’s two week birthday trip a secret for six months. Jane did not know that she was going to Costa Rica until the night before she left. Even more remarkable: her very good high school friend, Ann, also came along. As a total secret. Jane didn’t know until she and I had arrived in the San Jose airport and Ann tapped her on the shoulder.

I realize that I am leaving large logistical holes in my story here, but the point is this: we had a good time and now they are gone and I miss them.

I am trying to think of highlights from their stay, but I find myself marveling instead at the nature of relationships, in general. How wonderful to cook and talk and laugh with two women 30 years older than I. How delightful to hear them talk about their children, their families, their lives, to hear them reminisce about high school days and college road trips.

And at the end of a week this is how I feel: I am lucky to be able to live in this beautiful place and want to share it with as many people as I can. So please feel free to stop by.
******************************************************************************************

Tonight there is a ferocious sunset. An explosion of colors. I sit at my dining room table and think of Jane. Jane loves sunsets. One could appropriately use the word “obsessed”. Sometimes I had trouble understanding what she was so excited by: until she had dragged me out and there I stood in front of it, heart opened to the world.

Tonight I stayed inside. I looked out the windows, through the trees at the splashes of sunset instead of walking five minutes down the road and through the bushes to see the entire sky ignite. A sadness, a regret came to me as I watched the colors fade: no one to share the colors with, no one to eat dinner with, or share dish duty.

I know this feeling and it is called LONELY. It’s not an entirely bad feeling, for it could not exist without the counter-balancing existence of love and good times. Yay – I have such good people in my life that I get to be sad when they are far away.
******************************************************************************************

SOME WONDERFUL THINGS:

→ The five hour ride back to Monteverde from Tamarindo, the beach town where Ann and Jane left me off to catch my shuttle. The last hour was over hilly mountains with the sun setting on the right and an uncovered Arenal Volcano on the left. Rodrigo, the shuttle driver, reached into his bag to snap some pictures of the volcano.
“Even living here you don’t get tired of the view?” I asked. He is from Cerro Plano, right next to Monteverde, and had been driving the Tamarindo – Monteverde evening route for years.
“It’s always different,” he told me.

→Just a few moments later as the sun’s last rays were bending around the curve of the earth, stretching, reaching, pushing, losing against the spin of the earth. The world was golden. Someone had spilled ink all over us as we wound through the mountains to Monteverde. We were on fire.

→This morning’s cold coffee and whole milk. How can something so simple be so delightful?

→ Sunday morning Jane and I left the apartment at 8 a.m. to walk the beach. After about 20 minutes we came across a hermit crab. I bent to examine it and heard Jane laugh.
“Oh my gosh – Ginna! Look at this!” I looked up.
“They are everywhere!” she said. At first I didn’t see, but then I stilled my eyes (now there’s a metaphor for life). Briefly frozen in place when they felt our footfall on the sand, hundreds of hermit crabs started their engines again when we stopped walking. I laughed out loud. All sizes – from pomegranate seed to walnut – they cruised up and down the beach, each zipping toward their own urgent appointment. I could almost hear the zoom-zoom-honk! of the Hermit Crab Highway.

→ That same morning I showed Jane how to use the macro setting on her camera and we took cool pictures. Spread the macro love!
******************************************************************************************

Tonight I tell Ji stories from my beach weekend with Ann and Jane and try to get a handle on my creeping loneliness.

Female Awareness

2011-01-08T11:50:00.000-08:00

Ji-Soo got me this two hour class for Christmas and it was fantastic. The woman who gives the class is knowledgeable, funny, engaging, patient and encouraging. I wish I could gift this experience to every woman I know. The best part: the entire first hour was all about how to avoid physical confrontations, which for me was as or even more useful than the second hour of strikes and breaking holds. Check her out and pass on the word to any woman you know in the NYC area!

http://www.femaleawareness.com/

Recipe for Tears

2011-01-03T18:14:00.000-08:00

Ingredients:
1 monthly surge of hormones
1 very good friend driving back to VA after a wonderful visit
1 vacation in NYC half over
1 movie - "UP"

Directions:
Mix.

Results:
Ginna crying on the couch. "UP" was in the "Children and Family" section, but I think it was misclassified.

Tonight over dinner we hear the Sam Phillips song "One Day Late". The opening lyrics,

"Help is coming,
Help is coming,
One day late,
One day late"

prompt me to say, "That's so sad."

Pause.

Ji-Soo, sounding a little desperate, says, "It's ok."

I laugh and say, "Don't worry, I'm not going to cry!"

Ji-Soo and Ginna Try to Leave Brooklyn: Take Four

2010-12-29T19:46:00.000-08:00

I could not spend another day cooped up in the apartment and Ji-Soo had the great idea of going to the Botanical Gardens. We chose to go to the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, which didn't get us out of Brooklyn, but we had to take the J train into Manhattan to get the 2/3 so technically, we got out. And, a pleasant surprise upon arrival - admission was free! Here are some highlights:

This area was hot and humid. I was pretending to be some sort of jungle animal - maybe a howler monkey.

Ji-Soo loved this flower because it looks like there is a little puppy inside.

I don't know what this is, but I liked it.

Ji-Soo thought this one looked like it had a little alien in the middle with head, eyes, out-stretched arms and a funny leg/butt part. I like the color and the markings.

Hanging roots.

Little guys at work.

Symmetry.

No. Clue. But it looked cool - colorful, like a fruit dessert, sprinkled with confectioners sugar.

Jamaican poinsettia.

Bonsai.

I fell in love with the little leaf in the center. I think this is an elm - Ulmus?

More Ulmus.

I love these sad, dried out little guys. Ji's take: resilient, not sad.

We made a little friend.

My favorite of the day, vine lilac, snuggling with rosemary.

I thought these guys looked like little snakes.

Bromeliads - in the desert! I have only ever seen them in the cloud forest in Costa Rica.

Don't touch.

More ants.

Ji-Soo and Ginna Try to Leave Brooklyn: Take Three

2010-12-29T18:06:00.000-08:00

We waited and waited. We told ourselves that if the plow came by 7 p.m. we could still make it to Rochester. At 8:30 p.m. on Wednesday night the plow came by. We could see it from the window of Ji's living room and were very excited and talked about the plausibility of leaving for Rochester at this hour. We decided it would be a dangerous headache to drive all night let go of the idea of a trip to Rochester (this was difficult for me).

We looked out the window and saw that the plow had come to a stop on the corner and had not moved for five minutes. Across the intersection from the plow we saw a group of about 15 Hasidic men congregated in the middle of the street. What were they doing? I hoped that they were protesting the lack of public services. Ji and I decided to put on our layers and wander out to investigate.

The situation on the street was this: the plows (we could see now that there were two, one behind the other) could not pass through the intersection because on the other side the intersection a mini van was stuck in the snow, dead, halfway into the street. Close to 30 Hasidic men and young boys were swarmed around the van, pushing and rocking, hoping to move it back into its spot to allow the plows to pass. While this project was in in the works, the plow driver was having a discussion with a group of 6-8 Hasids on the corner. Imagine this:

Hasidic man, very think Yiddish accent: "What about in '96? You guys had everything plowed by the next day?"
Plow driver, very think NYC accent: "We are short 600 men! We had 600 more men back then. We're just short men."

There were very few other people on the street and being surrounded by so many Hasidic men gave an odd feeling of being in the 1800's. I'm glad Ji had his phone and the wherewithal to use it.

Group work getting the mini van back in place.

Waiting. The plow driver is the man across the street dressed in green.

Finally, the mini van is moved. Finally, close to 9 p.m. the plows move. And Genius Ji-Soo takes a video.

Ji-Soo and Ginna Try to Leave Brooklyn: Take Two

2010-12-28T09:39:00.000-08:00

This morning, more than 24 hours after the snow stopped, S 9th st. in Brooklyn still has not been plowed. I convince a very unwilling Ji-Soo to try to dig the car out of the street with me. This involves digging a car wide path through 1-2 ft of packed down snow from Ji's car, past a van, another van and out into the intersection. I think this sounds like a fantastic challenge. Ji-Soo does not.

But he is kind and supportive and starts the project with me. After about 30 minutes he decides that he is not having fun and heads back inside. I continue the project, not with any real hopes of being successful, but because I can't stand another day in the apartment waiting for something to happen. After about 30 min a garbage truck with a plow on the front goes thru the intersection and yells out his door.
"I'm trying my best to get to you!"
"Are you coming through?"
"If not this time, then the next time around!"
"Thank you!"

But, I've been waiting over a day for a plow to come by, so I don't get my hopes up or stop digging. 10 min later I see him on the street, one block down, slowly working his way toward me. I can't yet believe that the plow might actually pass, so I keep picking away at the snow. I'm about to call up to Ji and tell him the plow is coming if he wants to come down to watch when Ji shows up with a Thermos of hot tea. He pours me a cup of steaming hot chamomile tea while we stand in the middle of the street watching the plow, less than a block away, get stuck in the snow. I finally realize that my toes and fingers are cold and that I want to go inside.

From Ji's apartment on the 15th floor we are able to watch the plow stay stuck. A tow truck arrive to help but ended up leaving the plow stuck in exactly the same place. He is now sitting sideways in his cab, door open, legs out.

I've showered, I've eaten, and I'm going to watch a movie.

Ji-Soo and Ginna give up

2010-12-27T09:48:00.000-08:00

Ji-Soo and I were supposed to drive to Rochester this morning. When we woke up the sky was clear blue. The blizzard was over. We ate breakfast, showered, packed and headed out, knowing that we would have to dig the car out. Digging the car out only took about 20 minutes even with the three foot drifts. What we were not expecting, however, was for the road that the car was parked on to be unplowed and covered with 1.5 ft of snow. We went back inside.

Back inside I got grumpy. Why couldn't we buy snow shovels and dig a path for the car out to the paved road? We had just given up! We had run from the adventure! We were so close! Although Ji was not as eager I to spend hours shoveling snow, he did agree to bundle up again and give it a shot.

Step One: Find a snow shovel. Result: Failure.
We asked at the front desk but he said he had to use it. We went to a hardware store and they were sold out. We tried to find a second hardware store and decided we would not pay more than $35 for a snow shovel, imagining that with such demand they could jack the prices.

On our shovel hunting expedition we passed:
-about ten cars stuck in the street
-plows sitting on side streets not willing or able to plow thru three foot drifts that had accumulated
-a city truck stuck, fishtailing dangerously close to a parked car.
-people of all types out in the streets shoveling out cars, rocking stuck cars
-traffic jams caused by cars stuck in intersections
-a car who took a turn too fast and slammed into a snow bank
-tons of Jewish kids shoveling sidewalks all over the neighborhood
-a man with a plastic snow shovel, snapped in half
-cars that had gotten stuck halfway into or out of a parking spot and were then abandoned

This is when I realized that even if we were able to dig a path for the car to get out of the unplowed road, there was still real potential disaster. We never found the second hardware store. I said to Ji: "You were right. Let's go home and watch movies."

Blizzard of 2010

2010-12-27T07:16:00.000-08:00

Last night at 11:30 Ji and I decided to wander out into the blizzard. A block away from his house we saw a minivan stuck in an intersection, a Hasidic Jewish man frantically shoveling snow away from the front of the car. Since Ji moved to Williamsburg I have become fascinated with Hasidic Jewish culture. Earlier in the day Ji's brother in law had joked about whether or not after 6 months of living here Ji has made eye contact with any Jewish people. They are an insular people.

Dire circumstances, however....

As we passed thru the intersection, past the man and his shovel, we heard a voice from the window of the projects on the corner.
"You better not hit my car! Watch out for my car! You better not f***ing hit my car! Motherf***er!"
And on and on.
The Jewish man ignored for a minute then turned toward the voice and yelled, "Which one?"
"That one, right there. Right next to you. You better not f***ing hit it!"
"It's ok!"

The window voice turned into inaudible grumbling and the Jewish man returned to his shoveling. Barriers broken down, cultures crossing, ground covered. Or just some crazy person yelling out a window.

Ji's car

Cold and wind blown Ji-Soo. Total outside play time: 20 min. We couldn't last much longer.

We weren't the only ones out for a midnight stroll. Notice how little snow there is on this street because it was out of the wind. The next morning we saw five foot drifts in some places.

A happy little sign.

Our poor bikes covered by a snow drift. The tassels on the bike to the right show how windy it was.

Ji-Soo defrosting in the elevator.

International Christmas Eat Fest

2010-12-26T05:10:00.000-08:00

Phase One: Christmas Eve

Stage One: Ji's cousin's house in Wayne, NJ. Lots of Korean food I don't know the name of but it was good and I wanted to eat more but did not because we had Stage Two to go to. There was meat and noodles and dumplings and mung bean cakes and green tea cake and almond cookies.

Stage Two: Ji's friends house in Leonia, NJ. Cuban cuisine. Suckling pig with rice, beans, yuca, avocado with onion and lemon juice. Ribs, crispy skin, cheeks. I almost busted my button off my pants.

Phase Two: Christmas Day

Stage Three: Ya's house in Plainview, LI. Enough (mostly) Thai food to last 3-4 months: lo mein, spring rolls, ginger noodles with shrimp, chicken, spinach cakes, green curry soup, baked ziti, fried sweet potatoes and taro. Having nothing to do with food, this get together also included Senegalese sabar drumming by Mass and some cousins and some really enthusiastic dancing by my aunts. Ji, Mindy and I got sabar lessons and I only smacked my hand with the stick once. Mass says this means that I'm really starting to understand sabar.

Languages spoken during this 24 hour period: English, Korean, Spanish, Thai, French, Wolof.

When Ji and I got back to his apartment we watched How To Train Your Dragon and then spent about three hours working on projects - Ji-Soo fiddling with his guitar and me sewing a sewing pouch.

And I am happy, happy, happy.

New Things

2010-11-15T07:30:00.000-08:00

Sunday November 14, 2010

Some More New Things(why does everything seem so new recently?):

-I love eggs. I eat fried eggs all the time. Ever since I have decided the grocery list I have not bought eggs. I don’t mind the taste, but they make me sleepy. Until about a month ago. I bought some eggs and fried one for breakfast the morning before I left for San Jose to fly back to New York in October. And now I’m hooked. I hardly eat meat or cheese here and think my body is asking for protein.

-My body has been asking for lots of things lately. When I’m hungry its not just hunger, it’s craving. It’s always craving. I get more exercise here then I’ve gotten since high school and I feel my body responding. It’s become gluttonous for exercise. I’ve always felt better the more active I’ve been but it’s risen to a new intensity. Even one day without at least 20 min or exercise and I find myself slipping into cranky and sad. I’ve always been intimidated by people who NEED to exercise every day and now I am one of those people. I wonder about the month I will spend in Brooklyn over Christmas and New Years. How the hell will I exercise in the freezing cold?

Changes

2010-11-15T07:28:00.000-08:00

Tuesday November 9 2010

The weather here has taken a somewhat sudden turn. Gone are the endless rainy days and here are the freezing-cold-crazy-windy days. Just like that. I woke up one day and that was how it was. No gradual cooling off of the days and lessening of the rain. And now I go to work in my long underwear and wool hat.

Showering in the cold is…an experience. I have what I’ve heard called a “suicide shower.” Cold water running over hot electric coils for a warm shower. The hotter I want the water the slower I have to pass it over the coils which means less water pressure. These days my choice is usually between low pressure with lukewarm water or a falling trickle of scalding hot water. Believe it or not the second option seems pretty great on some of the colder mornings.

I am happy about this change in the weather because it means I get to wear my long underwear to work under my pants. I know I already mentioned that I do this but I did not mention how happy it makes me. How warm and snugly it feels. I love layers. Today I wore wool socks, long underwear, pants, tank top, t-shirt, sweater, hoodie, raincoat, wool cap and scarf. And. I loved it.
Another cool thing that has happened recently: a sloth sanctuary has opened by my house. Right by my house. For all intents and purposes, right next door. I like this for a number or reasons:

1. Now I can cross “live next to a sloth sanctuary” off my list of things to do.
2. I feel safer.
3. Lazy bears are cool! That’s a direct translation from Spanish. Oso perezoso = lazy bear. I picture Care Bears.
(How many items must a list have to merit the making of the list?)

On Sunday I went to the last free open house (are all open houses free?) before the official opening on Monday. This is what I learned:
• Lazy bears are not actually related to bears. They are related to armadillos and anteaters. Common characteristic: strong back. Lazy bears use them for hanging, armadillos and anteaters use them for digging.
• Like a cow, sloths have four chambers in their stomachs.
• It takes about one month for food to pass thru the digestive system of a lazy bear. This process takes about 32 hrs for humans.
• Lazy bears poop once a week. They have to come down to the ground to do it.
• Lazy bear digestion is so efficient that they don’t have to drink water. They get all the water they need from the leaves they eat (or fruits, flowers and leaves depending on the type of lazy bear).
• There are two types of lazy bears: two-toed and three-toed (two toad, three toad, one fish, blue fish). I don’t remember which is which but one kind has external genitals and the other internal. The way to differentiate between the sexes for the type with internal genitals is by the color of the patch of fur on their backs. Yellow = male, white = female.

The sloths at the sanctuary have been rescued from a wide range of trauma – sideshow, dog attack, kid attack, animal attack, hunters, hit by car, electrocuted on power lines. There is one lazy bear at the sanctuary by my house who had one arm burnt badly by a power line only to fall to the ground and be attacked by a dog on the same arm. When she arrived at the sanctuary they amputated the damaged arm. She is the only three legged lazy bear in the sanctuary She is also the only (not so)lazy bear that has escaped from her enclosure in the sanctuary, and she has done it three times.

Reflections

2010-11-01T13:04:00.000-07:00

October 24, 2010

This morning at meeting an older man came in wearing dress shoes, slacks, a button down shirt and a cardigan. Half of the cardigan was tucked neatly into his pants with his shirt, the other half was not. I imagined him tucking in his shirt and not realized that he’d also tucked in his sweater. I couldn’t help but think that it was somewhat adorable, cute, endearing. I feel like it’s patronizing to call old people cute, but I also feel like its true.

Both of my parents have recently fallen into this Cute Older Person category. They have both also recently had their 60th birthday which maybe allows them to be cute, or allows me to see them as cute. Their most recent cuteness?

In the Charlotte airport during a layover on my most recent trip back to the States I call my dad to let him know that…well…that I’m in the Charlotte airport on a layover. This is what is wonderful about parents: it’s so easy to call them just to say hi. He barely registers this information and launches into something which sounds to me like bullfighting school. It must be a poor connection.

The following day when my family gathers in NJ I realize that I heard correctly. He and my Uncle are going to sign up for bullfighting classes in CA. While he’s at it, my Uncle is going to take stunt-driving classes in NJ. Ji-Soo is with me and I look to him to gauge his reaction only to see him launch into conversation with my Uncle about how fun and relatively affordable stunt-driving classes would be. I wonder if my wacky family is a surprise for him or if somehow, through knowing me, he is prepared for this. I wonder: in his mind, am I part of this group?

Mom, just in time for her 60th birthday, has joined the local rowing club. She updates constantly about the goings-on of the Indian River Boat Club. She is excited. I comment to Ji that although both of my parents are mature and capable adults, they both have a certain childlike quality about them. They both get very focused and excited about new endeavors they take on. I wonder if this has been passed on to my brother and I. I wonder if this is part of what first drew my parents together. I wonder, am I part of this group?

A few months ago during children’s meeting the facilitator had the kids draw two pictures of themselves: one of how they see themselves and one of how they think other people see them. I was at the same time overwhelmed by the difficulty and depth of this task and by my desire to try it. How do I see myself? How do others see me? In a recent email to a friend I confessed, “It may make me a total sap, but I just miss hanging out with you.” She responded, “You’ve always been a total sap, and I miss you too.”

Just One Big Queja

2010-09-28T16:47:00.000-07:00

Disclaimer: This entry is just one long complaint.

And now I'm sick. And everything is wet because it hasn't stopped raining for days. Even my tea infuser for my Get Well tea (thank you Mom!) smells like mildew. And it's cold and damp and I'm behind on my work and I wake up scared in the middle of the night because of the robberies and assaults that have been happening.

What being scared in the middle of the night makes me think and do:

-if someone abducted me and dropped me in the middle of the cloud forest I'd be screwed because I don't know what I can eat and I'd never find my way out
-If you climb up on the roof of my house and swing down on the balcony I bet you could break into my house and the dogs wouldn't even notice.
-Even if its raining, if I'm walking at night and hear voices I'll take my umbrella down and grasp it in my fist to make me feel safer

I can't wait for October break. I love my job, but I can't wait for October break.

Downfalls To Teaching

2010-09-28T16:45:00.000-07:00

9.24.10
This morning I crouched naked in the shower for 30 minutes pouring vinegar over my head to get rid of lice. What a funny thing to be doing, I thought. I wonder if they told me to do this as a joke, I thought. I wonder if I’ll have vinegar left over to cook with, I thought.

Vinegar does not smell as strongly as I’d thought. After shampooing the smell does not stick as strongly as I’d worried. Or I just got used to it. Today was a stinky mess anyway – I pulled out clothes I haven't worn recently (the others tossed in the laundry) and with them a comfy, musty, mildew smell. Tonight I sit in mildew pajamas after my vinegar shower. How often do I need to work vinegar into my scalp? When will the lice be gone? I don’t know. But I do know that vinegar makes my scalp warm, 30 min is a long time to sit on my heels and reading with my head between my knees and vinegar dripping off my nose is barely worth it.

Continued Thoughts

2010-09-18T08:53:00.000-07:00

I'm not finished with the book. Here are some thoughts, lifted more or less directly from a letter I just wrote to a good friend on her way to Bogota, Colombia:

I'm just now finishing an essay by William P. Roberst Jr. I love the way he writes. Its sort of crazy and poetic, which I think fits pretty well with his actions. After more than a year in prison he got paroled to work in a hospital and wrote this to his still incarcerated pacifist friend Larry (the guy who put the book toether):

"In my first ramble among snow and trees I had a long talk with a terribly wise and ancient maple druid and he asked especially about you, Larry, and wanted to know what this conscription thing is that has the ghastly power to pin you to cement, where he can't talk with you. But druids know how to wait and I told him you do too."

Later he said: "Although there is much that hurts, there is so wonderfully much that sings - which, after all, is life."

This is also the guy who was initially in a minimum security prison and told the authorities that he was going to leave because he didn't want to be his own jailer. He was immediately transferred to a higher security setting. Then he was happily paroled in Boston for a bit but decided his life would be much more productive and meaningful it if were his own so he wrote to the parole board: "... I want to tell you that I no longer consider myself under the authority of the parole board." He was re-arrested. Who does such a thing? I feel like he must be either wise or crazy.

And lastly, the title of his essay is "Prison and Butterfly Wings". He says, "We flapped our butterfly wings in prison. Who can know their effect in our interconnected world?" What a wonderful, uplifting thought.

almost forgot - in following up a reference to Mann Act (the prisons had many conscientious objects but also men violating the Mann Act) I went to wikipedia and found this super interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mann_Act

An (Unfinished) Essay on Emptiness and Confusion

2010-09-12T11:27:00.000-07:00

August 30, 2010

I have come across a book that has really shaken me by the soul. Its funny how books like those come into our lives. I found this one in the Monteverde Library on a rainy Saturday. I stopped into the library for a break from the rain and a rest on my trek up the hill to my soggy house.

Sometimes I am no good at choosing books and sometimes I know just by glimpsing the spine that we are going to be great friends. The latter was the case with this book, a few small candles: war resisters of wwii tell their stories by larry and lenna mae gara.

I loved this book from the start for its all lower case title and black cover (who writes WWII in lowercase?!? Unfathomable! The “i”s no longer look like roman numerals and the only reason left to do it is because that’s the way its always been done but it doesn’t even make sense any more but somehow I suspect that’s the whole point! Genius!) I don’t remember if I started this book that same evening or the following morning but I do know that by the time I walked to meeting on Sunday morning I was filled with ideas and questions.

…

And that was two weeks ago. I’m still not finished with larry and lenna mae and their collection of war resisters. Everyday I plan out another small piece of the detailed and insightful essay I will write and post about pacifism, ideals, religion, support, beliefs, spirituality, politics and history. Every book I read and every podcast I listen I relate back to what I’m reading in this book and I add another small section to my essay.

But lets be real – unlike Laura Norton-Cruz and Raquel Maldonado (my inspirations when I think about how I want to write about powerful ideas and share them with the world) I will never write this essay. Maybe I’m just not an essay kinda girl. Maybe I’m not a war resister and locked in a cell 23 hours a day for going on a work strike because I’m not down with segregated dining halls even though it’s the 1940’s and I’m white and now I have nothing left to do but read and write. Maybe I love my job more than ever this year and find that I don’t have much down time between work and exercise and reading and phone calls to Brooklyn and sleep.

This is my wish: that you will read this book and then talk to me about it. Maybe you will be as touched as I was by John H. Griffith’s father who supported him through his resistance with the same fervor that he supported his other son who was in the navy because he felt that they were both trying to do the right thing. Maybe you will stop and sit up when you read Ralph DiGia’s account of how he realized that he was going to jail because “what would ideals mean if one gave them up when they were put to a test?” Maybe you would then spend days searching for your own ideals and wondering what you would stand up for if given the opportunity. Maybe you too will realize that you’ll never be a Quaker because even though you think pacifism is important and admirable, you think the butt-kicking scenes in The Girl Who Played With Fire are just so cool you want to go out and take Thai Kick Boxing classes so you too can beat up bad guys. Or maybe you’ll have a totally different experience with the book and we’ll discuss and clash horns but it will still be a wonderful conversation.

I’ll leave you with my list of “Things to follow up on from a few small candles: war resisters of wwii tell their stories” even though I am just over half way done:

1. U.S. support of Hitler in the late 1930’s
2. Anti-Nazis in Germany in 1930’s and 40’s
3. U.S. immigration policy from Germany during this time. What did the U.S. know?
4. Nazi-Soviet Pact 1939
5. All Quiet on the Western Front and Johnny Got His Gun, two anti-war novels
6. The Power of Non-Violence by Richard Gregg
7. “Civil Disobedience” by Thoreau
8. Gandhi

Vacation on Vacation = The Best Idea Ever.

2010-08-04T08:21:00.000-07:00

This is why:

Lobster rolls in Maine.

Poking stuff in Acadia National Park.

Orange seaweed on the beach on Campobello Island, New Brunswick. We camped so close to this beach that we could hear the waves from the tent.

Seaside cliffs on Campobello Island.

Long exposure moon-rise shots on Campobello Island. This was a 15 second exposure. Half way through a car turned on its headlights. I thought my picture was ruined, but it was enhanced.

Long exposure shots of long exposure shots. It's like going on vacation on vacation.

This was at about 10 p.m.

Maybe my favorite picture from the whole trip. We were on the beach and the sun started to come out so I burst into "Here Comes the Sun" and Ji snapped a picture.

Pretty pretty Campobello Island.

Pretty pretty beach.

Breakfast on Campobello Island. Eggs with herb and garlic goat cheese cooked over the fire, on tin foil. We heated up tortillas to wrap them in. It was delicious, but took forever and started off with me dumping two whole eggs in the fire by accident. The only utensils we had were two titanium alloy sporks from my aunt in North Carolina (Thank you Aunt S!).

Hiking in Fundy National Park, New Brunswick.

Snails snuggling with barnacles at low tide in Fundy National Park.

On a rock preparing for a jumping picture that was such a disaster that I won't even bother to post it.

Ji's awesome shot of a waterfall on a hike we did in Fundy National Park.

Looooow tide in Alma, New Brunswick.

Hopewell Rocks. Not as cool as they were when I was a kid. Most areas are collapsed or roped off. No climbing allowed.

Hiking the Franconia Ridge in New Hampshire.

The Ridge.

and back down... I was sore for three days.

I Love Biking

2010-07-15T14:17:00.000-07:00

7.15.10

Why is it the most wonderful thing ever? Ji-Soo and I left the house today at 8:30 a.m. on our bikes and returned at 5:00 p.m. This is what we did:

From Brooklyn Hts. crossed the Pulaski Bridge then over to Roosevelt Island. Looked at some apartments there and left feeling like I'd spent a few hours in the Twilight Zone. Back into Queens, through Astoria, across the Tri-Borough and rested for a bit on Randall's Island. A loop around the island and then across the foot bridge into Manhattan, down the East River, across the Queens Boro Bridge back into Queens and then more or less traced our steps back home. Phew.

And it was awesome.

De-Centering?

2010-06-16T16:18:00.001-07:00

I just read a reflective post on my good friend Laura's blog about her time in Mexico (lauritadianita.info) in which she talks about her search for fresh chicken. In her mind this meant a store with refrigeration. What she found was a woman willing to slaughter a chicken in front of her. This sparked an "Oh yeah, I guess I never thought of it that way" memory of my own.

On an early morning taxi ride the day before I left Costa Rica the cab driver commented to me how much he loved the rain.
"You live in the right place, then." I said. "But how do you dry your clothes?"
"Well, I have a little covered space where I hang them. They dry fine there. In two days just about everything is dry."
And then he went on to share with me how one can use the back of their fridge to dry small pieces of clothing, like underwear.
"It's great," he said. "Everything will be dry in two days!"

And I thought: "So this is my problem. I thought two days drying time was slow!"

So, there you are LauritaDianita, my own reflections on de-centering.

NYC: Day 1

2010-06-08T10:52:00.001-07:00

This may not be very interesting to those of you who have your own lives, but here are some reflections on my time in NYC in comparison to life in Monteverde. Hopefully very soon I will either be too busy with insane summer fun or a job to be able to update regularly, but for now, here it is (much more exciting life updates can be found at lauritadianita.info or ebomb.quehubo.info, which is the story of friends biking across Mexico and other exciting adventures):

On Day 1 I met Ji-Soo for lunch downtown by Ground Zero. We got, on his right-on recommendation, falafel platters from a truck vendor. This is one thing I have missed about NYC - street food, everywhere.

My falafel platter with Business Ji-Soo in the background.

Business Ji-Soo and I being super serious downtown. Me rocking my new pearls. Behind us there was a whole mess of florescent green and orange as workers from Ground Zero took their lunch break. Business Ji-Soo headed back to the hive and I started back for Brooklyn. When I came out of the station at Borough Hall I found myself smack in the middle of a mini-, mid-week farmer's market. This is another thing that doesn't happen in Monteverde - random awesomeness like street performers and farmer's markets. As I walked back to the apartment laden with multi-grain bread and apple cider I was a aware of how out of touch I was with the fact that it was a gorgeous day. Sure it was warm and sunny, but there was no full body and soul awareness that you get in Monteverde. Pros and cons, yings and yangs, I guess.

Some Random Photos That I Never Got Around to Posting

Snuggling scorpions. In my bathroom. Right by the toilet. Apparently they are mating and the male is leaving his sperm pouch on the frame of my bathroom door and then pulling his mate over it to pick up. Awesome. Get a room, jerks. But they have a room, and it's my bathroom.

Captured snuggling scorpions. Ha! Take that!

Volcano Arenal seen from the hike down to the San Gerardo biological station in the San Elena Reserve. This was in April sometime and we were lucky enough to have a clear night and a good set of binoculars to be able to see lave flow at night (orange glowing rocks tumbling down). Recently, with all of the eruptions in Latin America, Arenal has been more active than usual. Gas and ash are being thrown 200m up into the air and the temperature in town has been rising. All of this is within the normal activity of the volcano but it has not happened in a few years.

Stupid horrible asshole scorpions that I caught in my house. This is the other species that they have in Monteverde.

Eating guava for desert. This is not what I knew as guava, which I guess here in Costa Rica is called Guayaba. Who knows? In general I'm confused about fruit in Spanish.

It looks like a giant grub that we ate segment by segment.

I found these three chillin' in the corner of my bathroom one evening. They were having a party and didn't invite me.

Scorpion + black light = awesome.

Travel Makes for Good Blogging

2010-06-08T07:08:00.000-07:00

6.7.10

How To Travel Internationally

-wear the wonderful brightly colored socks Mom gave me for my birthday so when I go shoeless through security at least I can do so in style. I can look down and wiggle my toes and remember my mom and I on my porch taking pictures of our newly decked out feet

-make six peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in the hotel kitchen this morning even though there is no way I’ll eat them all in one day with out getting sick. Think about the past few weeks with the Queen of Thrift, Julia, and how she’d be proud.

-Listen to “Miss Otis Regrets” by Porter Project and try to remember what its like to listen to a song I love for the first time. Think again about my porch and sunsets in Monteverde.

-Send a silly Damn the Man email with curse words in it to Ji-Soo to pretend that me going to NYC to spend this summer with him ain’t no thang. Pretend that there is no belly butterfly ballet.

-Think about how Julia flew from Costa Rica to the USA just this morning and there is nothing to be nervous about. Wonder why the older I am the more anxious I get about travel.

Highlights From the This Trip to NYC

4:00 a.m. Sunday – wake up in Monteverde, shower, do last second cleaning and packing

5:05 a.m. Sunday – leave the house tomeet the taxi in front of Hotel Villa Verde, dragging giant broken wheelie bag over rocks and through mud

5:15 – 6:05 a.m. Sunday – wait for bus to San Jose. Decide that plain yogurt with passion fruit is too bitter to be worth it. Dash to front of the line when we learn that there will be two bus loads worth on people on one bus because one bus broke down

6:10 a.m. – give up hard earned seat in the front of the bus to a woman with a one year old baby

6:30 a.m. – 8:30 a.m. – stand up on packed bus heading down the mountain in the rain. Try not to get scared of falling off cliffs. Try not to get car sick. Try to be helpful when the four-year-old girl in the seat next to me starts vomiting. Julia offered a plastic bag, I offered a bigger one. With holes in it. Oops. Note to self – sometimes helping is not that helpful

8:30 – 10:30 – ride to San Jose seated and in peace

10:30 – 1:00 – hang out in San Jose airport with Julia, Adam and Jessica until Adam and Jessica go to their flights and Julia and I grab a place to spend the night in Alajuela

5:00 p.m. Sunday – buy belt in Alajuela for 1,200 colones. Fall in love with it immediately. Reflect on my attachment to material possessions.

5:15 – 6:00 p.m. – Early dinner with Julia. Sit talking, sharing a plate of Chinese friend noodles, sipping Imperial. Try not to get involved with the waiter who tells me about how crazy it is that his white Costa Rican female friend married a black American. I fail, get yelled at, and leave, wondering why I’ll learn to keep my mouth shut.

6:00 p.m. Sunday – fall asleep face down on the bed with all my clothes on

7:00 p.m. Sunday – wake up, change

8:00 p.m. Sunday – go to bed for real, pajamas and all

12:00 a.m. Monday – wake up with a start when we hear what sounds an awful lot like six gunshots RIGHT OUTSIDE OUR WINDOW. Let me say a few words about where we spent the night: super clean, very affordable, bare bones. Part of bare bones means paper thing walls. So when you think someone might be shooting a gun right outside the door, being locked in your room does not make you feel any safer. I convince myself that it was not gunshots, just someone slapping mud off their shoes. Really hard. At midnight. I wait for my heart to stop pounding and start to drift off to sleep again only to hear a whisper from the other bed. “Ginna! Are you still awake? That was so sketchy!” I calm myself down, again, and fall into a nervous, shallow sleep.

3:00 a.m. Monday – Julia wakes up and gets ready to catch her early morning flight

4:00 a.m. Monday – We stand in the lobby waiting for Julia’s cab to the airport. In sleepy slow Spanish I ask the hotel manager, who called the cab for us,
“At around midnight we heard-“ he cuts me off by making two guns with his hands, throwing them above his head and going
“BAM! BAM! BAM!”
“You heard it too! Do you think it was gunshots?”
He looks at me calmly and says, “Of course it was. I went out back to check it out and could smell the gun powder.”
Awesome. And then Julia climbed into a cab and was gone and it was still 4 a.m. and I had to go back to bed alone in my paper and plywood fortress.

1:20 p.m. Monday – at the gate in San Jose. Ate two peanut butter sandwiches. Feel really full, but not too sick. Maybe I can eat six!

10:30 a.m. Tuesday, Brooklyn, NY - I never did eat more than two pb&j sandwiches. But they are in the fridge waiting for me!

Some Thoughts

2010-05-29T14:41:00.000-07:00

5.24.10

On peeing with the door open:

Why is it so wonderful? I ask myself, do men pee in front of each other the way women do? Do high school friends and fathers and sons stop their conversations when they need to use the restroom or do they le their words flow as freely as their bodily fluids?
I really do feel that there is a bond or expression of sisterhood among women who pee with the door open. Yes. Peeing with the door open = sisterhood. Thoughts?

On how curiosity killed the cat:

Scenario 1: You are on vacation with your family and a scorpion strings your poor cousin. Four times. And instead of smashing the vile thing to smithereens as is rightfully allowed by The Rules of The Universe (if it stings you, you can kill it ), you and your family capture it, Google information about it, study it, photograph it, talk about it, and then gently let it go.

Scenario 2: You find a scorpion in your house and instead of smashing the vile thing to smithereens as is rightfully allowed by The Rules of The Universe (if it comes into your house, you can kill it) you trap it in an empty yogurt container and keep it on your kitchen counter over the next few days. You slowly add to your collection so that when your mother comes to visit you have three scorpions to how her. The night your mother arrives, instead of going straight to bed because she’s been traveling all day and you have to work the next morning, you take the lid off the yogurt container, turn out the lights and play with the black light your mother brought. Instead of being totally disgusted, you are mildly fascinated by the fact that scorpions fluoresce neon green. Enough so that you save the scorpions for two more day in order to show your friends when they come over for dinner on Wednesday. Enough so that you’re a little bit glad when after dinner you friend finds a 4th scorpion to add to the collection, this one at least three times bigger than any of the others. Enough so that you keep all four scorpions in the yogurt container in the kitchen for an additional three days in order to show different friends when they come over for dinner on Saturday.

On being cold:
Tonight I am cold in my little mountain cabin. So cold it feels like my rings are going to fall off. And I’m happy because scorpions like the heat.

Scorpion Update

2010-05-16T12:08:00.000-07:00

Last night as I lay innocently in my bed watching a movie, I heard a clicking noise and looked up. There, above my head where the wall meets the ceiling was a three inch, tan, scorpion investigating my home. I paused for a minute in fear, cursed a little and then went to get a container and a broom. I paused again and then as I tried to sweep the horrid creature off the wall and onto the floor to be corralled into a plastic container it reached up and pulled itself back into the space between the wall and the ceiling. I didn't even know there was a space there. This is my bedroom. I hate this.

Tomorrow, when I go downtown to get my mom off the bus from San Jose, I am going to buy a can of Scorpion Killer. I am going to carry this lovely can around with me every second of every day and use it with glee.

I Live in a Freakin’ Zoo and To Be Honest, I’m Just Not That Into it Anymore

2010-05-15T16:36:00.000-07:00

5.14.2010

All of these things happened tonight:

1.the onslaught of golden June bugs. I get dive bombed everywhere and wake up every morning to a house that looks like a battle field, with little beetled bodies scattered across the floor.

2. I flip on the bathroom light to see one of these golden beetles by my hand on the wall, struggling thru some spider web. On the beetle’s back, behind the head, where wing attaches to body, is a little black and gray spider doing something mean looking.

3. a lightning bug flashing away on the floor

4. a beetle the size of a hacky sac, buzzing like a helicopter, crashing full force into and careening off of the walls until I toss it outside.

5. a trio of grasshopper, giant beetle (see #4) and spiked green and black lizard, chillin’ in my bathroom. That’s right, a six inch lizard.

If you’d asked me a week ago if I’d ever had a tarantula, baby scorpions, lightning bug, helicopter beetle or spiky lizard in my house I would have said no. But that was a week ago. Ji says people pay good money to come to Costa Rica and see these animals. Well, I’m gonna pay good money to go to New York and spend the summer away from them.

Scorpion update: I spoke to my landlady today. Turns out she’s very allergic to scorpion stings. The sting site swells and she gets a fever. She says as soon as she sees them she sprays anti-scorpion spray on them and they die immediately. Maybe this is just the excuse I need to start killing these arachnids that I hate so much, instead of carefully capturing them and tossing them outside.

Youth is My Salvation

2010-04-25T12:58:00.000-07:00

April 24, 2010

And here is an example why:

This past Monday was Monteverde Day. School got out at noon so everyone could attend a community picnic celebrating the 50-something anniversary of the Quakers arriving in Monteverde. I did not want to go. Socializing saps me of my energy and I had spent the entire weekend socializing and was depleted. The last thing I wanted to do was sit in a field, roasting in the Costa Rican mid-day sun and try to make conversation. Please don’t let my attitude misrepresent the charming and interesting population of Monteverde. It’s not for lack of cool people to talk with, it’s my own idiosyncrasy (I’m trying to put a charming twist on my grumpiness).

A few hours of class with charming kids on Monday morning had put me in a considerably better mood (although still grumpy), and by dismissal I was considering attending the picnic. Two of my students sat munching food on the steps of the library. One is a third grade girl I will call FutureFamousArtist. She is the most insightful, creative, articulate and loving kid I’ve ever known. Next to her was a fourth grade girl who I’ve struggled coming up with a name for. I’ve settled on Down, since she is truly very down in all senses of the word, and I’m not sure there is any more admirable quality a person can have. Needless to say, I totally adore these two kids.

I walked past these two students on Monday afternoon with a Should-I-Stay-Or-Should-I-Go? scowl on my face.

“What’s wrong?” called Down from her perch on the steps.

“I’ve been grumpy all day and I’ve done a great job of hiding it and now that my professional responsibilities are over, I’m letting it all out!” I barked at her.

She smiled and already I felt a little better. She waved me over and I sat down next to her. She looked up at me.

“Who was that guy you brought to Frisbee?” she asked, innocently. I feigned my own innocence.

“What guy?”

“That guy. His name was like, a letter of the alphabet.”

Busted. Ji had come to Frisbee when he was here a month ago and had even sat in on part of my class. Not a single student had asked a question about him, until now.

“Oh,” I said with a smile, “you mean Ji.”

“Yeah, Ji,” she said with a little laugh. “Who’s he?”

“He’s Ji,” I responded, still avoiding. I don’t want to lie to people, but I’m also not that eager to divulge personal information.

Down laughed. “Is he your boyfriend?” she asked. No avoiding this one.

“Yes, he is my boyfriend.” FutureFamousArist had been listening quietly the entire time. She piped up now:

“Do you love him?” Jeeze, they sure are direct little buggers.

“Yes”, I answered. “I love him very much.”

“He’s your boooooooyfriend”, laughed Down. She asked a few more questions about why he still lives in NYC and then she and FutureFamousArtist started talking about their favorite foods and I was off the hook.

And I knew, that if I were going to have a chance at a good time that afternoon, I had to convince these two kids to hang out with me. And I paused, wondering if it is appropriate for a twenty-six year old woman to really, really want to hang out with an eight and nine year old. But I asked them anyway.

They made the appropriate phone calls, grabbed their bags, and we were off. FutureFamousArtist had to bring home her guitar and struggled with it as we walked down the driveway of the school. It was almost as big as she was, and probably weighed just about as much also. Down took one look at her struggling and said, “We’ll take turns.” Shamed – my thought had been, “There is no way I’m helping this kid lug that thing.”

We stopped by the Cheese Factory for a milkshake, which I needed their help finishing, passed by the store for a snack to pass and then headed to the picnic. Once we arrived at the picnic they took off and I didn’t see them again until the following day at school but I could not have been more content.

Youth is My Salvation, Example Two:

The next day at school I was sitting outside at a picnic table with a group of five students doing a phonics program called Wilson. Wilson is for kids who are still struggling with decoding fluency and accuracy and spelling. Wilson is old school and very teacher directed. Wilson, for me, is boring but useful.

We were doing a spelling activity that entails me saying a sound, sentence or word, the students repeating it and then writing it. Zero room for creative thought or interpretation. No free thinking here. So, it should come as no surprise that after every repetition at least one student would start a conversation as they wrote. One cannot be patient all of the time and last Tuesday, this was driving me crazy.

“Why,” I half snapped, half grumbled, “do you have to have a conversation between every single question?”

Four of the five students feel silent, recognizing that they had just been reprimanded. Down, seated to my left, looked up at me with a smile.

“Because,” she said quietly, “we’re kids.”

P.S. – Live-scorpion-in-the-house count is up to five, after finding a fat black female cruising the walls of my bathroom in the middle of the night earlier this week. Captured and tossed successfully

Missing Pictures

2010-04-25T12:26:00.000-07:00

April 21, 2010

The howler monkeys are back and I could not be more delighted. I’m not sure why I’m so thrilled by the sounds of rumbling indigestion outside my window, but I am.

Mini-Course update: Last Thursday was maybe the most fun I’ve had since I’ve been here in Costa Rica, visits from loved ones aside. I remembered my running clothes and ran up to the farm with a handful of kids. They had all decided they were going to run but only about five or six actually ran the whole way. It is wonderful to be with a group of fun, dynamic kids who beg you to do something with them that you love to do anyway. This is the first time in my teaching career that I share common interests with students, and it feels great. Outside of a few books, movies and the Mets back when I had TV access, I never really had many interests in common with my NYC kids.

Arriving at the farm sweaty and happy, we were pleased to learn that this was the long-awaited day: cow milking! And it doesn’t make much sense to milk your cows and not milk the goats at the same time, so we got to do that too. I had learned once how to milk a cow and a goat, probably about ten years ago. Needless to say I did not get the same strong, steady, frothy stream that some did, but I got milk from both cow and goat! The last activity was to wait out the downpour (the first real sign of the rainy season’s arrival – quick, fast, hard afternoon drenching) and feed the baby goats.

************************************************************************************

Now I’d like to share a fun little story that I am choosing (with heroic effort) to put in the Exciting Life Adventures category, instead of the Reasons To Hate My Life in Monteverde category. Last Thursday night as I was sitting on the toilet I looked past the trashcan and saw on the door frame a tan and black splotch. I looked closer and concluded that it was a bundled mess of five or six multi-colored cockroaches, of the type I’d seen when we went to the butterfly garden.

(insert picture)

When I finished my business I moved closer to the mass of roaches and crouched down to get a closer look. Upon closer inspection I realized how far from the truth my initial observation was - I was actually looking at two male scorpions, snuggled together, head to head, I’m assuming for warmth. They may have been, in fact, plotting how to make my life miserable.

(insert picture)

Gross. Why are they so gross? I sighed. Up until that point, I had only seen one scorpion in my house since I arrived last August. Oh yes, plus the one outside on the porch on one of my first days, before I really even know that scorpions were a reality of Monteverde life. I chose the same plan of action last Thursday night as I had on my two previous scorpion-in-the-house encounters: I walked away and pretended to ignore them.

I say pretended to ignore because of course it was the first thing I told Ji that night when he called. Most appalling to him, it seemed, was not the fact that I had two scorpions cuddling in the bathroom, but that I had done nothing about it. I explained that with two of them being perched on the corner of the door frame, capture or extermination seemed uncertain and I didn’t want to piss them off and send them scurrying into another part of the house such as my bedroom, where I was about to snuggle in for the night.

“What’s keeping them from just going into your bedroom during the night anyway?” asked Ji with a laugh.

“Please,” I shot back, “that’s not gonna happen.”

And almost as if I had willed it into being….

I woke up at about 2 a.m. because I had to pee. I hate getting up in the middle of the night, even if it will alleviate the ache, and laid in bed trying to will myself back to sleep. And then I heard a noise. A faint little noise. A clickslap noise.
“Hmm,” I thought. “That sounds a lot like exoskeleton on tile.” Pause. “Nah.”

And then I heard a second noise. A distinct, loud noise. A rustling of the plastic bag in the trash can right next to my bed noise. I sat bolt upright, slammed on the light and there it was: a small, tan and black male scorpion walking around the top edge of my trash can, tail up and claws extended, open and reaching. Luckily, I have a large, heavy knife that I keep unsheathed on my bedside table (that’s another story). I grabbed it and flicked the scorpion into the trashcan.

After my heart stopped pounding I figured I might as well pee since I was now awake and alert. I crept slowly towards the bathroom, knife in hand. I stabbed at the wall a few times with the knife blade in an attempt to turn on the bathroom light. When I finally found success I glanced down, expecting to find only one scorpion, but there were still two in the same place, same tender embrace. After some rapid middle-of-the-night mathematics I came to the unsettling conclusion that there were now THREE LIVE SCORPIONS IN MY HOUSE. Holy. Crap. I didn’t know that they traveled in packs.

At this point in the story, even though I am the main character of this autobiographical tale, I get confused. I had three ugly and poisonous creatures in my house and had captured one. They had shown themselves very capable of coming into my room in the dark and performing acts of great balance and athleticism. I needed a plan of action, so I tied up the trash bag with the scorpion in it, put it in the dining room so I wouldn’t hear the rustling while I tried to sleep, and CRAWLED BACK INTO BED. That’s right, I once again turned my back on the lovebirds. I’m not sure why I thought this was a good idea, but I once again chose to pretend to ignore the situation. Pretend to ignore, because I didn’t try to sleep, but stayed up reading for a least an hour.

When I did finally sleep, it was not very restful. I spent a lot of time thinking about how to capture scorpions. In the morning I awoke to no scorpions in the bathroom and felt half relief (now I really can ignore them!) and half dread (where the hell are they now?). I looked for them with minimal enthusiasm and found them cuddled behind the bathroom door. Poor babies, they had gotten chilled in the night and curled up behind the door for warmth. I wish they had frozen to death. I finally mustered the courage to flick them into a plastic container with my big trusty knife.

(insert picture)

Here they chilled while I showered and got ready for the day. I flung them into the woods on the way to work and tossed their companion in the trash where it will slowly die of starvation and I won’t feel bad about it. Come on, you would have killed at least one also.

Update: This morning at work our Belgium volunteer showed up a few minutes late and looked haggard.

“I killed twenty-one scorpions last night,” she whispered to me during the lesson. “I didn’t sleep very well last night.” I thought I must have misheard.

“Twenty-one?”

She confirmed with a grimace and a nod. She found one in her closet and suspecting company, investigated. She found a mother with her seventeen babies (gag, vomit) and killed them all. She counted them up and added them to the three she had killed earlier that evening, giving her the staggering sum of twenty-one. Later in the day she showed me a picture of them all, laid out neatly on a white background. I almost threw up in my mouth. She wins. I’ll stop complaining.

Oh yeah, I forgot

2010-04-11T12:23:00.000-07:00

1. I'll be in NYC this summer and wanting to have a paying job that does not involve children. If you have any ideas outside of temp agencies and craigslist, please let me know.

2. Ji-Soo came for a visit and it was wonderful. There is nothing better then this:

freshly showered after a few hours of barefoot Frisbee, reading in the hammock with the early afternoon sun. And then he left and I tried to not get sad.

Farm Master B

2010-04-11T11:50:00.000-07:00

Today at meeting a lot of good things happened, but I walked out feeling sad.

Thursday April 8, 2010
Thursday afternoons have become the highlight of my week. This is how today went: At 1:30 after clean - up (a ten minute period where every student in the school is responsible for the cleaning of some part of the school) I met up with my group of kids aged 8-12, one other teacher and two brand new volunteers to walk to Benito's farm and learn farm skills. Each of these 15 kids and the other teacher is pretty fantastic and could constitute their own entry easily.

At the farm we met up with two more volunteers (one is an occupational therapist and has been working with some of my kids - thats a whole other entry, its fascinating stuff!) and their eight year old son and Benito. I like to think of Benito as Farm Master B. To give a taste of how cool he is, he is the one raising the baby sloth and who walked the 13 km walk-a-thon last year on stilts.

Today we divided into three stations:

1. Five kids on a rope swing. The Mother of All Rope Swings. It swings you 30 ft in the air out over the garden.
2. Five kids with me pawing through dirt, which is actually old rabbit poo, hunting for earthworms. When we find the earthworms we put them in a tin can so Farm Master B can put them in the cow manure pile, which it turns out they like better. The pawed through, supposedly but never actually worm free dirt gets put in a bucket and taken to the next station where
3. Five kids are planting fig trees and cauliflower.

I stayed in the earthworm pit away from the black wasps that sting even when not provoked. 16 kids (I know, you're thinking 5 X 3 = 15 but don't forget the OT's son. I don't know what group he ended up in) and seven adults and only one wasp sting today. Poor brand new volunteer. But Farm Master B put some plant on it that made it feel better.

Towards the end the groups started to fall apart as everyone migrated towards the Mother of All Rope Swings and there were some rabbits that had to be fed and cuddled with. Then we headed back to the school. All in all only one kid cried and that's because it was too hot and dusty. I told her to bring a water bottle next time and wondered to myself what she's going to do when the rainy season starts any day now.

I like these people and I like what I'm doing. I like that they were excited to claw through dirt and compare worms and find beetles and suck on bright red coffee beans plucked right off the bush. I like that they rotate without complaints and that only one kid lied about how many turns they'd had on The Mother of All Rope Swings. I like that half of the kids begged me to run with them to the farm and back again and when I said no they pointed to my "Virginia is for runners shirt." I like that Farm Master B is almost organic but uses chemicals to kill ticks.

(Ok all you grumpy "You haven't updated your blog"ers, are you happy now?")

Trying to be good about updates

2010-04-03T17:38:00.000-07:00

My family came to visit and we went to Volcano Arenal. And then I updated my blog and didn't know how to turn off the underlining.

This was the view from my and Mary's room. It's super rare to actually get to see the volcano so we lucked out with two really clear days.

So cool. We got to hear it rumble and see it throw down debris. Yes, it is still active. Interesting bit of data: In 1968 the volcano erupted. Less then 90 people died but 45,000 cattle were killed.

Volcano at sunset.

Some Chapters from My Life

2010-02-13T14:22:00.000-08:00

2/13/10

Walter and His Moto

This morning I woke at 6:20 and hauled myself out of bed at 6:30 to go grocery (groshery) shopping at the feria in Santa Elena. I stood at the road at 6:45 waiting for the 450 colones bus ride down to town. After I had been waiting for about a minute, a man rode by on his moto and stopped. I recognized him. He was in his late 50’s or early 60’s with a round face, light eyes and white hair. A few months ago when I saw him working at the feria he had asked me if I Lived by Hotel Villa Verde and I had replied that I did. He told me that he saw me every morning as he took his wife up to the reserve for work.
“At about 6:45?”, I asked.
“Si.”
“That’s me. That’s when I leave for work.”

And that was it. I hadn’t seen him again and figured that it was because I no longer leave my house so early.

So, this morning when I saw him heading down the mountain I knew he had just left his wife at work.
“Are you going to the feria?”, he asked me.
“Yes.”
“Would you like to go with me?”

I hesitated for a second, remembering them motor I’d seen skid out in front of me a few weeks ago, sliding on the gravel and spilling its driver onto the dirt road. The man offering me a ride had a helmet; I did not.

“Ok.”, I responded. I threw my pack over my shoulders, climbed on behind him and wrapped my arms around his barrel belly. This was not the wisest decision I’ve ever made, and I knew it. My rationale for accepting was not courtesy, or to save time 450 colones or because I was in a hurry (which I was not). I decided it was ok because everyone else does it, which is quite possibly the worst reason to ever do anything.

As we bumped down the mountain road (waving with a smile as we passed my friends waiting for the bus) I kept thinking about what to do if we were to skid out. Tuck and roll? Brace? Pray? Finally I just put my faith in my driver and had fun. I was eventually able to release my grip from his middle and hang onto the metal rack behind me, above the rear wheel.

The driver is a good friend of my land lady and was born in Monteverde. He name is Walter and his father used to own a farm in the area many years ago. As we talked tears streamed out of my eyes and down my face from the wind and dust. It was fun and I made a new friend.

A Poor Choice of Words

A few weeks ago at the school the high school students were consumed with tickle fever. Oh, the sweet flirtations of adolescence. There were fingers darting, elbows flying and squealing all over campus. I took a moment to appreciate my pre-pubescent students and kept my distance.
It took me by surprise then, when at the end of the day a boy in the junior class asked me, “Ginna, are you ticklish?”

Monteverde is a small, realized community. I see my kids on the weekend, get invited to their homes for dinner, see their parents at parties. Roles and boundaries here are different then they are in NYC and I’m still figuring it all out. Students call me by first name and I can wear jeans and a t-shirt to work. All of this is very nice, but I did NOT want to be tickled by a 17-year-old boy. And so, in the moment, I freaked a little and acted on only one thought – set a clear boundary.

“No, I’m not ticklish”, I replied. And then added: “And if you touch me, I’ll punch you in the face.”

Oops.

I could feel the Quaker walls trembling around me. Learning to set clear boundaries is one thing, learning not to be a scary woman is another. I’m still working on it.

More Life Experiences

2010-01-30T12:43:00.000-08:00

January 25, 2010

Today at the end of the school day it had gotten chilly. I grabbed my jacket and left the room to supervise my third and fourth graders as they cleaned the meeting room and the library. Back and forth between the library , meeting room and classroom I went for ten minutes, guiding student. I joined multiplication practice with the students who were finished with their clean-up jobs. The student in charge of the flash cards quit her job and I reached up to take the cards from the top of the book shelf in order to take over.

I felt a wiggle under my jacket on the back of my left shoulder. Gross. I clamped down on the fabric of my jacket and pulled it away from my body in a loose fistful. I flipped the collar inside out, slowly releasing my grip to see what critter was in there, if any. I saw a small, black-segmented worm moving slowly. What was that? It had no head. I stared at it for a few seconds until I realized, along with all of the third and fourth graders at Monteverde Friends School, what I was looking at – the tail of a black scorpion, which was tucked nicely in my jacket.

This is when I lost my cool. I yelled. I squealed. I didn’t let go of the wad of fabric that was between the scorpion and me. 21 students and one very calm co-teacher instantly swarmed me. I had no idea how to get myself out of this situation. I looked at Tedi with panicked eyes and pleaded, “Help!” He helped me slowly wiggle out of my jacket and took it outside.

My heart raced for ten minutes. A parent told me later in the day that this year will be scorpion heavy because it is so dry. When I shared my concern about allergic reactions (my elbow is swollen, hot and tender today with two bug bites, despiste the antihistamine) she assures me that very few people have reactions to scorpion stings. “Sometimes your tongue can go numb,” she adds as an after thought.

I have resigned myself to the fact that while I am here in Monteverde I will get stung by a scorpion. It will hurt a lot, totally freak me out, and then be over.

I can’t believe I have to add “the time I found a live scorpion inside of the jacket I was wearing” to my list of life experiences. I have not missed NYC or the states since my first night back. If anything, the thought of life there saddens me. Until today. Oh, how I crave not having to tap out shoes, shake out clothes and peer under sheets. I miss not having to wash slug slime off the greens left by a tough little visitor who has survived three cold days in the fridge.
This too stings for a bit, but will pass.

Community

2010-01-24T14:43:00.000-08:00

Today is a beautiful day in Monteverde. Today I went to a birthday gathering for three wonderful people here in Monteverde. Today I sat in the sun and watched dogs and babies and listened to people play guitar and flute and drums and saxaphone and I laughed and I was happy. Today in Monteverde I felt, finally, like I was part of a community.

Today in the sun of Monteverde I thought about my days at MHC and ached so badly to be sitting in the sun with those women again. Maybe this is life - finding people you love all over the world. I know it sounds wonderful, but sometimes this is hard. Sometimes I wish I did not have so much love to give out, but then realize immediately that that is not what I want.

Right now I am listening to "Too Many Birds" by Bill Callahan, sent to me by a wonderful man I know in Brooklyn. It if funny and beautiful and interesting, just like he is.

Back in Monteverde

2010-01-16T15:46:00.000-08:00

Monday January 11, 2010

Here I am in Monteverde again. I was looking forward to being back in my own space again, my own bed. It has been 3 ½ weeks of couch hopping and trying not to inconvenience my hosts and I was looking forward to a break. This is what happened instead:

I trudged the last leg of my almost 24 hour journey through the falling darkness, cold rain and relentless wind, struggling with my bags, dropping my vest in the mud and getting barked at by the landlady’s dog. I stepped inside my house and felt no relief, only loneliness. A big, strong, cold wave of it.

And already, life here in Monteverde is more difficult. My clothes grew a nice fuzzy layer of mildew while I was away. There are dead beetles and spiders and grasshoppers all over my floor. I have to ask myself – Why did I choose this? At the moment I can’t seem to remember. I can only remember the last 3 ½ weeks in a culture that makes sense to me, a language I don’t have to plod through, surrounded by people who know me well and love me for it. I’ve spent the last 3 ½ weeks reclined lazily in a web of loved ones and I forgot that that web is not here in Monteverde. I forgot that that web takes years to build and for right now I’m just on a lonely adventure by myself.

Hmm…adventure…adventure. That’s why I signed up for this gig in the first place, right? Why did I sign up for this again? Adventure? Experience? I’m not sure I’d say that getting back to Monteverde was an adventure, but it sure was an experience.

My flight left La Guardia airport at 9:40 p.m. on Sunday. That in itself was its one experience – one that hurt. It’s supposed to make me stronger, right? I wonder. I arrived in Charlotte, North Carolina at 11:30 p.m. and walked slowly through the empty corridors of the airport watching the graveyard shift cleaning crews quietly deploy to all corners. I was sad and regretting my decision to save money by taking a long late night layover in Charlotte. I tried to be adventurous and have an open mind and soak in this experience that I may never have again and paid attention to the quiet empty gates as I passed. I found a place to snuggle down for the 7 hours of layover and watched late night security do rounds and sip large coffees. I watched a movie on my laptop. I dozed.

At about 2 a.m. I woke to a middle aged man with a vacuum cleaner talking adamantly to two young black men about the plight of the afro-American male these days. “We are turning on ourselves, killing our own people”, he said with a sadness in his voice. The two young men were quiet and attentive. The middle-aged man suddenly ended the conversation saying, with a laugh “Well, I gotta work or they’ll bust my ass.” The two young men wandered away as the vacuum started up and I tried to stay out of the way of the cleaning.

I’m skipping a lot now because I’m tired and it was nothing super exciting. I did neglect to mention my tummy adventure, but that’s for another day. On the ride up the mountain we blew a tire and spun out a bit, fishtailing feet away from the lush, plunging cliff side. All I could do was laugh. We drove up and up and up with the sun setting over the Nicoya Gulf on one side and a double rainbow disappearing into a deep valley on the other side. There were a number of trees down in the road due to the gusty winds. It is beautiful here, that is for sure.

So, I have a lot of thinking to do. I have to get used to my Monteverde life again. I have to start remembering to tap out my shoes for spiders and scorpions, store items so they won’t mildew, throw toilet paper in the trash can and get all the groceries I need for the week at once because there is no Key Foods across the street.

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

And now I remember why I love it here. I feel good here. I get to say to students: “Please speak up so we can hear you over the wind.” I get paid to sit in Meeting every Wednesday and just think. Today I stared at my shoes and the wooden floor and tried to focus on why I feel so good being here. There is a lot to think about.

I do still miss the comforts of the states. I miss insulation and heating. I am cold here and it doesn’t go away. There are bugs here and they don’t go away. But there is something here that also won’t go away. And I’m working on it, ok? I’m working on articulating it. And then folding it up gently in my pocket so when my life takes me back to the states I can unfold it in front of me and look at it and wrap it around me and not feel so out of place.

Which brings me to this: I have finally made my decision about next year. I am going to stay in Monteverde. I feel at peace with this. I am happy. Thank you to everyone who helped me figure myself out and who support and love and believe in me even if I am far away.

Lay. Over.

2010-01-10T20:54:00.000-08:00

It is midnight and I am in the Charlotte airport. My flight to San Jose leaves in over seven hours. Why did I think this was a good idea?

Fun in New Bern

2009-12-27T19:30:00.000-08:00

At midnight last night Mom decided it was a good time to open her new box of 72 colored pencils. Then we decided together it was a good time to take pictures and play with the setting on my camera. Mom and I share a fascination with nice pens and colored pencils.

There was a massive amount of fruit here at my aunt's in New Bern when I arrived this past Thursday morning. They had already given some away to people in the neighborhood and Mom and I brought a bunch to a shelter, but there was still too much. We found a banana bread recipe in a vegan cookbook and I volunteered to make it. Aunt S thoughtfully set out on a tray all of the ingredients and tools I would need the next morning....

...on a folding table in the shower! There is not a lot of space in an RV and we are a creative family. For the record, I had to sit on the toilet to take this picture.

Mom and I headed into town for some more sight seeing. We saw this beautiful church and some graves on the property. I promise, we did not go looking for grave sites, but once we had found them, I couldn't help but take some pictures...

Mom is a good subject. When I asked her to sit on this bench and look casual, she did not even hesitate. She also did not say anything about the fact that her youngest child was crouched in the middle of the street taking pictures.

We passed a barrel of flowers on the sidewalk and Mom said they were petunias. I got excited and told her that I know someone who calls every flower a petunia. I thought it would be a great idea to take pictures of actual petunias so this person could learn. After I'd taken one picture Mom says, "Oh wait, those aren't petunias, they are pansies." Whatever. They are pretty and I kept taking pictures. And now we know - this is not a petunia.

House in New Bern.

This is a seed pod from my new best friend, the crape myrtle.

This is the thingie that holds the seed pod onto the tree, my new best friend, the crape myrtle.

The walk back to the car.

I Love Vacation

2009-12-26T16:39:00.000-08:00

Today was great. We started off by doing that thing that families do -spending quality time together. Making memories. Being happy. Telling stories. And, in my family, taking pictures of everything funny or beautiful that we see.

Then Mom and I ran some errands which included a lot of stopping the car and walking around and taking pictures of beautiful and interesting things we saw around New Bern. The story follows:

This was my Day After Christmas present from Aunt S. Mom the vegetarian can't eat it, so she misses out. I got it! Ji-Soo homie, you and me are all over this when I get back to Brooklyn, ok? I have recently been really fascinated with packaging and am in love with this blue and red and yellow.

This is what it looks like when you unwrap a block of Nestle Abuelita's chocolate for making hot coco. I took a quarter of this and melted it with half a cup of soy milk and half a cup of 2% milk and a half a cup of sugar. Mom and Aunt S and I all thought this picture made the chocolate look like a chocolate cake. I love that I think like my mom and aunt. This block is about the size of a hockey puck.

As we were sitting around this morning we heard a thump and saw something fall in the front of the RV. Turns out we had a suicidal banana. It "unzipped" itself, to use Mom's word, and threw itself on the seat below.

Here is the scene of the crime. We had a good laugh over this. We took pictures. I picked up the unzipped banana and put it on the table and went back to doing the dishes. Two minutes later we heard it again.

I guess misery loves company. This banana had unzipped itself also and thrown itself off the hook and towards its friend. This one missed the chair and landed on the floor next to the heat vent.

I went back to melting Abuelita's chocolate with milk but had to stop immediately because it looked so cool I had to take a picture. Why does it look so cool?

Abuelita's chocolate turned into buelit chocolate.

Then Mom and I went driving to do some errands and found ourselves on a road we didn't need to be on. We pulled over to turn around but really just stopped and I got out and took pictures of this building, because I fell in love with it.

And I also fell in love with this one.

And this one. Mom says, "Imagine the conversations that have happened on that porch."

After we had dropped off the pounds of extra fruit at the shelter, we stopped at the cemetery. I was in love with these crape myrtle trees (don't get too impressed, I only know what they are called and how to spell it because Aunt S told me). The wood is smooth and polished and looks like muscle.

New Bern Cemetery.

Spanish moss on crape myrtle.

And now begins the onslaught of gravestone pictures. They were beautiful. Mesmerizing. Mysterious. We only left the graveyard because Mom and I got cold. I also had to poop but I didn't tell Mom that.

There are a lot more cemetery pictures that I would be happy to share if you are interested, but for now enough is enough. Next, we stopped next to some modern sculptures or herons made our of car parts, took some pictures of historical landmarks, including the childhood home of photographer Bayard Wootten and then we found this guy in front of the Sudan Shriner monument:

Christmas Day

2009-12-25T19:50:00.000-08:00

Here are some images from my wonderful, warm and wet Christmas day in New Bern, NC. I wanted to post the picture of my mom with her head tilted back dropping a handful of pomegranate seeds into her mouth, but I decided not to.

These are peach tree leaves that Aunt S brought in for us.

This is the little dude that guards the campground. Thanks, faceless, genderless little dude, thanks.

Some ducks trying to act like it was actually cold out today. Not even.

Aunt S was in the shower and mom snuck these blue lights in and set them up. She asks me, "Do you think these with drive Aunt S crazy?"
"Um...they might drive me crazy." Which really just means that they are awesome and I love them. Aunt S calls them snorkeling lights and has decided to keep them. Mom says she got them for free and I ask how.
"Dumpster diving."
I scoot a little further away from the trash lights.

Non-image update:
I am out of pomegranates. I'm not sure what to do.

My Vacation As Seen By My Tummy

2009-12-24T16:50:00.000-08:00

Here I am in Brooklyn eating curry soup:

Here is my favorite person ever attacking a "wit whiz" from Pat's in Philly:

Energetic french man making us volcanoes:

that looked like this:

Snow storm in Philly. You can see the fruit, cheese and bread tray reflected in the window:

This was my lunch at Saigon Grill in Manhattan with Megan:

Back in Brooklyn. Smoked horseradish cheddar cheese. So delicious. I think it looks like cheese cake.

Our desserts here in North Carolina: peppermint white chocolate covered Ritz peanut butter sandwich (I'm not even making that up) and peeled, roasted chestnuts from the Korean grocery store in NYC that my mom and aunt lovelovelove:

Pomegranates in a blue glass bowl (Raquel, where are you?):

Eating with my vegan mom:

Is This Really My Life?

2009-12-20T21:00:00.000-08:00

Wednesday December 16, 2009

What a day. Today was a day full of “Is This Really My Life?” moments.

Is This Really My Life Moment #1

Walking to school this morning I was deep in thought planning how I was going to check email, make dessert for the staff holiday get together and take out cash during the day. A stones throw away from the entrance of the school I saw a movement and looked up to see two white and grey speckled horses turning out of the driveway of the school and heading up the road towards me. This was a first. Maybe they were just returning their books to the library – I don’t know. I hesitated for a second, remembering stories of kids almost getting kicked by neighborhood grazing horses. The horses, one small enough that I almost want to call it a pony, saw me and hesitated. They looked as wary as I felt and hugged one shoulder of the road as I hugged the other. Before I passed them on the road they turned off the road into the cemetery that is next to the school to eat and poop on graves.

I turned into the entrance of the school playing over in my head what had just happened. Before I was even in the school parking lot I faltered in my step again – on the front lawn of the school was another horse, this one brown and muscular with a black tail and mane. I walked past, keeping a good ten feet away, watching the muscles above the animals hind legs and thinking about the force and velocity that could send one of those back legs shooting out towards my delicate bone structure. Once I was safely past the horse I paused and looked back. The horse turned to me, ears back, forward, swiveled. I turned and headed into the school building.

Is This Really My Life? Moment #2

Thirty minutes later kids had filled up the front yard, hallways and open classrooms of the school. As I headed towards the 3-4 classroom I saw a gaggle of my students and stopped short. One of my 4th grade girls had a tiny black kitten held delicately against her chest. All of the things I should say passed through my mind:
Whose cat is that?
What are you going to do with it?
Why did you bring a cat to school?
Has it had its shots?

But this is what came out: “Oh my gosh! Look! Oh – it’s so cute! Aw…”

Once I regained my composure and asked some coherent questions I found out what was up – they had brought the kitten for the family of a student in my class that was going to adopt it. Unfortunately this student is habitually fifteen minutes late for class and the bell was about to ring. “Well, I guess the adorable kitten will just have to come into the classroom”, I said. “Darn.”
The bell rang and we had to start morning meeting. The girls put the kitten in a shoebox with a string to keep the top on and placed it on one of the classroom tables to await the arrival of the mother who was going to take the kitten home. We began to organize ourselves, seated in a circle in the circle area. I looked up and saw a fuzzy black head and front left paw poking out of the shoebox. My brain didn’t work very fast: “Cat! Cat! Cat!” I called, pointing to the kitten that was by then ½ out of the box. The girls leapt up and grabbed the kitten before it tried to leap three feet onto the concrete and tile floor.

“Just hold it in your lap”, I suggested. Great idea, but I am one of two teachers for the 3-4 classroom and this is the sort of thing you would usually want to discuss before hand. “How do you feel about tiny kittens in the classroom?” My co-teacher arrived and when I updated her on the situation she just smiled, raised her hands and shrugged.

We sat down, the kitten curled peacefully in the lap of a student and began reading “Pelitos” by Sandra Cisnero. Every once in a while the kitten let out a weak mew, but was mostly content to suckle on the fingers of the students on whose lap she was sitting. And here’s the crazy thing – I was more distracted by the kitten then the students were. How are they able to focus? I looked around the circle – if I hadn’t know better, I would have said that no, there was not an adorable kitten in the circle with us. There is nothing like getting schooled in maturity by a bunch of eight and nine year olds.

Is This Really My Life? Moment #3

During recess I mentioned to a teacher who has been in Monteverde for four years about the horses on the lawn that morning.
“Did you see them?” I asked.
“No,” she said matter-of-factly. Then, “I’m surprised we haven’t had any cows yet this year. My first year, almost every morning we’d come in and see at least one cow in the field.” She motioned to the soccer field behind the school. Oh. I guess horses chillin’ in the school yard is no big deal. Silly me. I’m such a city girl.

Is This Really My Life? Moment #4

Today there was only a half-day of school. We had a special program for Christmas and the students went home at noon. At 1:00 a van came for us teachers and we headed down the mountain to have a potluck lunch at the house of a woman who works at the school. The ride itself was pretty fantastic – past grazing cows and then down down down into Alto San Luis, past breathtaking views of the San Luis valley and the Nicoya Gulf – but I had done this before. What was new today was climbing out of the van and into the forest to the house surrounded by plantain tress and coffee plants. It’s a coffee plantation, actually, and they harvest and sell to the local co-op. We sat on the porch sipping juice and relaxing until we relocated to the fire pit. To get from the house to the fire pit one has to take a short walk past the hanging rope swing, under the plantain tress, past a few rows of shaded coffee plants, over a tiny creek, past more coffee plants and into a clearing carpeted with fallen plantain leaves. I filled my plate with food and paused – Here I was at a holiday party IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FOREST ON THE SIDE OF A MOUNTAIN IN RURAL COSTA RICA. I took a deep breath, smiled and sat down to eat.

Is This Really My Life? Moment #5

We were fed and happy and back up the mountain and at the school by 4:45. I got a lift into Cerro Plano to take money out from the ATM, but had to walk back. It was about 5:15 and the setting sun had turned everything goldenrod. The sky was clear but a cloud was blowing through creating an Across The Entire Sky Rainbow. No one talks about the rainbows here in Monteverde, but already I’ve seen enough eye-popping dashes of color in the sky to write a book. I walked quickly because the sun was setting, feeling the fine, cool cloud mist on my face and walking towards the end of the rainbow.

A List

2009-12-18T18:20:00.000-08:00

Things I Am Digging About NYC

-When you turn the handle on the left in Ji’s bathroom, HOT water comes out.
-I can put toilet paper in the toilet.
-I ate stuffed grape leaves, hummus, pita chips, ramen and kimchi in the same day.
-Pomegranates.
-I can slip on shoes and slippers without tapping them out for spiders and scorpions first.
-Christmas trees on the corner.
-Typing this as I sit under a blanket next to Ji and he writes a final paper for class.

Travel = Adventure

2009-12-18T17:54:00.000-08:00

December 17 2009

And here I am in an airport again. And oh yeah – I love airports. I feel like I’m home already, in a sense. In an airport everyone is out of place and it brings a great sense of comfort. I forgot how wonderful it is to be in a crowded place and to sink into the background, where no one will even look twice at you. Oh, the safety and comfort of being ignored.

I have been nervous about this flight months before it was even booked. Long gone are my days of carefree wandering – in the past five years I have developed a For Real Fear-of-Flying. I have been emotionally preparing for this first flight home since late July when I arrived in Costa Rica. I used to be able to pack in 20 minutes flat. For this trip I spent 3 days of making and remaking piles on my dinning room table.

The plan this time was to NOT pack light. I had borrowed a suitcase to move to CR and wanted to return it, which means I had to find stuff to put in it. This meant that I’d have to take a taxi into Santa Elena instead of walking, like I normally do. Which involves figuring out how to get a taxi to my house at 5:30 a.m. I no longer live in Manhattan - I can’t just step into the street at any hour on any day and get a cab in less that two minutes.

I asked around for information, got a couple of taxi company phone numbers and was assured that it was actually more reliable to call at 5:30 a.m. then to make a reservation the night before. I was doubtful, but had nothing else to go on.

This morning I woke at 4:30, showered, ate and put some last minute items in my bags. At 5:30 a.m. I called a taxi. This would get me to the bus about 45 minutes early and would not be the first time my obsessive I-Must-Be-Super-Early trait has saved my butt.

5:30 a.m. – I called the cab company and listened to it ring and ring as I replayed co-workers’ reassurances in my head that yes, you can get a cab at any hour, and yes they’ve done it before. I called a different company. And then the first number again. And again. I tried some random numbers that sounded familiar, then cursed out loud.

5:35 a.m. – I took my small bag with a zipper and flew out of the house to the hotel next door. They are a hotel, they are always open, right? Then can help me get a cab, right? The reception area was locked and dark. I raced down the hill to a more luxurious hotel and ran up the driveway to the dark and locked reception. There was a man who saw me and said, tentatively, “Hola”. I must have looked like some kind of lunatic running around a deserted hotel in the early dawn hours. I explained my situation and he unlocked the door to the reception, turned on the lights and ushered me inside.

5:40 a.m. – By now I was trying not to cry and held my hands below the desk because they had started to tremble, but was still optimistic. As the hotel worker called taxi agencies I reminded myself to get his name so I could send a thank you card when I got back. Because he would be able to get me a ride, right?

5:45 a.m. – He had called four different companies and gotten no answers. “Que raro” he said, shrugging and explained that “a noche hubo fiesta” and the taxi drivers probably didn’t want to work early. He finally hung up the phone and shook his head.
“Do I have any other options?”, I asked, still looking for him to be some kind of miracle worker.
“No, sorry” he responded. He didn’t have any more numbers to call.
I took a deep breath and pressed my hands down flat on the front desk.
“Well, than you very much for your help,” I said and walked out as calmly as I could.

These were my options:

Option #1: Walk into Santa Elena with what I had on me at the moment (iPod, book, diary, computer, wallet, passport, fancy pens), hop my bus to the airport and go to NYC with no clothes, camera or gifts.

Options #2: Go home, repack a small bag of necessities (you know, underwear) and walk quickly into Santa Elena for my 6:30 bus.

Option #3: Go home, call a friend with a car, beg a favor and get a ride down to Santa Elena with my suitcase for my bus.

Option #4: Sit down in the mud and cry.

Option #5: If I miss the bus to San Jose (US$5) I could pay a cab more money than my flight cost to drive me 3.5 hours to the airport.

Now, before I tell you what I did, I’m curious – which do you think I chose? Looking back on the situation it is obvious that I chose the option I did, but I wonder if it is as obvious to the rest of the world.

My thoughts in that moment:

Option #1: Super sad. All the time packing, all those gifts, sitting on the floor of the entryway to my house for three weeks. Que lastima. No camera. No computer charger.

Option #2: It would take too long to pack and walk to Santa Elena. The walk, quickly, usually takes about fifty minutes and I only had 45.

Option #3: Same as #2. No guarantee that I’d make the bus. If I couldn’t convince anyone to get out of bed for me, I was left with no back up plan.

Option #4: Very, very tempting.

Option #5: This was a back up emergency plan. I could do it, but it would be a hassle, I would be pissed and broke. I make less than US$500 a month, ya know.

I chose Option #1, but I didn’t want to. I wanted to get a taxi when I called at 5:30 but I prioritized – was I going to the states to bring stuff or to spend time with people I love? Oh yeah – perspective.

I turned at a half speed-walk, half run downhill towards Santa Elena. This was NOT the plan, but at least I’d make my bus and flight.

5:50 a.m. – I hear a motor approaching me from behind and slow to a fast walk. I don’t’ want people to think I’m deranged. The motor slows as it gets close. I looked up to see a man I have never seen before on a motor bike. In Spanish:
“Wanna ride?”
“Where are you going?”
“Santa Elena.”
“Um…yeah, that would be wonderful.”
This is not something I would normally do. Not only did I have no idea who this guy was, I couldn’t even see his face because of his helmet. A helmet – what a great idea. Oh well. I hoped on and we zoomed off down the hill, bumping over pot holes and sliding around in the mud. My hope was to get to town quickly enough to grab a cab up to get my stuff and back down in time to catch the bus.

As we bumped and slid down the mountain I told the moto bike driver my story. I asked if it would be ok with him if we could flag down a taxi if we passed one. Five seconds later we pull alongside a taxi van. I hopped off the motorbike and asked if we’d have enough time to go up and then down the mountain before 6:30. The taxi drivers said yes and I crossed in front of the van to hop into the passengers side seat. The moto bike driver had pulled in front of the taxi to get out of the way of on coming traffic and was twisted around in his seat, looking back at me to see what would happen. I yelled, “Gracias!”, blew him a kiss and waved as I reached for the door handle.

BLEW HIM A KISS?!? Yeah, I know. I don’t think I’ve ever blown anyone a kiss in my entire life and I really wonder what it says about me that this is how I choose to express gratitude to strangers when I’m in a hurry, but I didn’t stop to think about it. If I made the bus I’d have eight hours on planes and in airports to ponder this.

5:53 a.m. – I explain my situation to the taxi driver. He taps the dashboard clock and assures me that we have plenty of time. He turns the van around and we headed back up the mountain towards my house where my giant suitcase was waiting patiently for me. The roads were muddy and broken and I understood that this man didn’t want to bust an axel, but I don’t’ if he really had to drive so slowly.

Turns out the driver is the brother of the woman whose funeral I went to the Sunday after Thanksgiving. Small world. He is super tranquillo and I find myself calming in his presence. We talk about the school, his nephew who volunteers in my classroom and the differences between living in Monteverde and San Luis.

6:03 a.m. – We arrived at my house. Fabio, the taxi driver, helped me lug my bag into the car. I climbed back in and was ashamed to see that I had left muddy boot prints on the passenger side floor. We headed back down the mountain chatting about the festival of lights, which he explained as a Welcome to the Christmas Season festival. I asked him about the devil horns and he laughed, saying that everyone has their own way of celebrating. He described to me the extravagance of the Festival of Lights parade in San Jose.

6:08 a.m. – I thought the ride down the hill would be faster than uphill, but I was wrong. I guess I should be thankful that I am with a careful driver.

6:13 a.m. – I thought that driving on paved road would be faster than dirt road, but I am wrong. I guess I should be thankful that I am with a careful driver.

6:20 a.m. – I climb out of Fabio’s taxi at the bus station. He asks for 2,000 colones but I refused and give him 6,000. I am told later that I have drastically overpaid and I am glad. This is what I wanted to do.

6:27 a.m. – the bus to San Jose arrived. I climbed aboard along with a teacher from the school, a family from the school and the father of one of my students. We left Monteverde and I actually felt a little…sad. I passed the first hour and a half of the trip not looking at the sheer cliff outside my window and taking deep breaths to conquer my carsickness.

8:05 a.m. – we stopped for a pit stop and I chatted it up with the father of one of my students.

8:30 a.m. – we reboarded. The father sat next to me and we pleasantly passed two hours chatting about life – his kids, his family, life style, education, etc.

10:20 a.m. – I got off the bus at the airport. I looked up and there is the teacher I work with who going to her son’s wedding. She kissed me on the cheek, wished me a happy holidays and flagged down a cab. I headed into the airport thinking that my travel worries were over.

10:25 a.m. - At this point I had no idea what airline I was flying with, let alone what flight I was on. I figured out that I’m flying U.S. Airways but I see no such airline at the airport. I asked and was told that they don’t open the gates to check in until 11:30 or 12:00. I sat, put on my headphones, and took out my diary.

12:15 – I closed my book, gathered my things and took a tour. There is still no U.S. Airways. I asked again and was told no, there is never U.S. Airways here. I asked again and was directed towards the airline offices, one of which is a U.S. Airways office. I asked again and they reassured me that the desk would open at 12:30. I thanked them and left.

I must admit that one of the reasons I love airports so much is because I see it as an excellent excuse to eat really crappy food. My all time favorite airport crap food is crispy, greasy Chinese food eaten with splintering wooden chopsticks. Today, in the absence of Chinese, I leapt at the chance to order a burger, soda and fries from Burger King I gawked when I saw the prices -$7 was the least expensive combo meal! I almost turned and walked out, but remembered that I had two more hours of waiting, four hours on a plane, an hour of layover, two more hours of plane, then more time waiting for luggage and driving to Brooklyn. I got the $7 combo and sat down to enjoy it.

Half way through the burger I had to stop and think twice – what the hell was I eating? It was gross. I took another bite just to make sure, and then tossed it. I can’t remember the last time I finished a burger. I can’t remember the last time I tried to finish a burger and didn’t fell like crap afterward.

And here is another thing that is total crap: A few minutes before boarding began on my flight out of San Jose they gave a reminder announcement that no liquids are allowed on the plane. If we had bought a bottle of water or any other type of beverage we needed to please, drink it before boarding the aircraft. I paused – surely they couldn’t mean I wasn’t allowed to bring water in my water bottle that I just filled up at the drinking fountain here in this fine airport. I asked and the woman kindly clarified that yes, I actually did have to drink all the water before I got on the plane. What happened in the 4.5 months that I’ve been away? What the hell am I gonna drink on the plane? Sigh…

Update – Ji says it’s a Juan Santa Maria San Jose International Airport policy. I say it’s a dumb one.

Sadness Inhibits Articulate Thought

2009-12-06T11:58:00.000-08:00

Blog update. Blog update. Blog update.

I have been sad - how's that for an update? Last Sunday I went to a funeral. Last time I went abroad I went to a funeral. I guess life doesn't stop even when you live in another country.

And, since melancholy makes it hard for me to articulate anything, here are some pictures:

Here is a close-up (macromacromacro) of granadilla seeds. I still have no idea what this fruit is.

Tedi showed me how to sneak a little bit onto this hotel property and go through the hole in the bushes to catch this killer view of the sunset. This is also the hotel that let one of my student's mom, who works there, take a bunch of banana leaves so we could make tamales for the school on Friday.

The bug obsession is less but still present. I picked up my computer off the kitchen counter one evening to find this brightly colored, flattened, dried out dude underneath. Hi.

Spikey plant on the day after Thanksgiving hike.

Leaf skeleton. So pretty. There were other, more detailed pictures of the leaf structure, but for some reason I'm partial to pictures of people holding things that shows their fingers. Those are my fingers.

At the start of the month the power went out again. This is my bedroom with maybe a six second shutter speed. The light was really pretty but it looks like some sort of crazy shrine to Ji and me.

The night of December 3rd there was a parade downtown. They called it the Festival of Lights. The entire time I was confused. What were we celebrating? This is a backhoe decorated by the local highschool to look like a dragon. What? Spectators has circus-like flashy, spinny toys, santa hats and devil horns. Please, someone, explain this to me.

This is a pick-up truck full of elves. Right after I took this picture a lady came out of the crowd and started taking kids out of the truck. I started thinking about people stealing midgets.

This was pretty much exactly what happened on September 15 for Independence Day, but with Santa hats.

You can't tell, but some of these animals are in my class. The next day we were all very tired.

Photo Update

2009-11-21T14:42:00.001-08:00

Here are some pictures that Dad took while he was here:

Dad was amazed at the size of the leaves in the Cloud Forest.

This is my school!

This is the library at the Monteverde Friends School. This is my favorite place in Costa Rica. Maybe. This is my favorite indoor place in Costa Rica. Yes. Our kids have been doing a research project and some days I take a group here to work. They sit quietly and learn in the sun lit library. Could it get any better?

This is me eating a granadilla. I have no idea what it is called in English and neither does anyone else I've asked. Any ideas? Dad thought that the packet of seeds inside looks like a brain.

Gooey, juicy and delicious. I especially like this picture because you can see my feet, and they look little and far away.

This is the steepest part of the hill on the way to Santa Elena. This is almost in Santa Elena. See how just past the intersection the road disappears? Yeah.

This is what Dad and I bought at the Farmer's Market on Saturday morning. Yummy, fresh, local produce.

Dad's feet in the mud. I love this picture and I love him for taking it. It hasn't rained this much since he left.

This picture is funny because Dad saved it as Whywasthispicturetaken.jpg

Mr. Awesome and Crew

2009-11-18T05:23:00.000-08:00

November 16, 2009

It is 5:20 on Monday night and I am sitting at my dining room table in the light of three candles and one laptop screen. There power is out. Today…today…what a day.

Monday our kids have Physical Education first. They came to us at 9:05 for math class. As they were settling down and trickling in a third grade boy came up to me with a concerned face.

“Ginna, ***** is sad. I tried to get him to come into class, but he ran behind the library.”
Now, this kid, ***** is an awesome kid, so for the sake of the rest of my blogs, lets refer to him by the name Mr. Awesome, because he is. Let’s start over.

“Ginna, Mr. Awesome is sad. I tried to get him to come into class, but he ran behind the library.”
The kid informing me of this?Another cool kid. He always comforts other kids and is the first one to want to translate if needed. Lets call him, IGotYou, since he will almost always have your back. Let’s try again.

It was 9:05, the third and fourth graders were trickling into math class from P.E. IGotYou approached me with a worried look on his face.

“Ginna, Mr. Awesome is sad. I tried to get him to come into class, but he ran behind the library.”

I said: “Thank you, IGotYou, for letting me know.”
I thought: “Crap. Now I have to go behind the library with my sparkly shoes and they are going to get all wet.”
I kept inside: a laugh. Behind the library? Bless his awesome little soul, he must be so sad.
I turned to Tedi. “Um, I’m going to…go find a kid?”
For whatever reason this did not strike Tedi as weird or alarming and she just noded her head at me and kept her eye on the conflict resolution corner where a conflict was not resolving itself.

I stepped outside the classroom and there he was: Mr. Awesome. Lets take a minute to describe Mr. Awesome. He is a third grade boy with knobby knees and floppy brown hair that hangs in his eyes. He is skinny and wobbly. He is my brother when my brother was in third grade. He’s trying to get into sports to have someone to play with at recess and knows more about dinosaurs than any adult I have ever known. When I see him in the hallway he is standing with his head hung low, not making movements towards math class.

Action Plan #1: Try to trick the kid out of being sad. This is one of my favorite things to do. When it works, it works like a charm and makes me feel sneaky and clever, but in the name of Good. Example: Last Friday a four-year-old boy fell down and scraped his elbow. I hid behind pillar observe. He started to whimper, looked around and saw no one and fell quiet. He took a few steps towards where his father was seated across the front lawn and wound up to wail. I popped out from behind the pillar with a huge smile on my face. “Wow! Yes! You totally wiped out! Was it a real one? Is there blood? If there is no blood it doesn’t count. “
He lifted his elbow to see if there was blood and saw none. I am lucky that he is not super flexible or else he would have seen that in fact he was bleeding. He looked up at me and shook his head. Nope, no blood.
“Awww, man! No blood? You’re gonna have to try harder next time.” And then the kid smiled and I walked away.

When I saw a pouty Mr. Awesome this morning outside of math class I thought quickly and remembered that he had been on a trip that weekend. Really, wit had nothing to do with it – his cheeks were pink from the beach.

“Hey, there you are Mr. Awesome! How was Nicaragua? Did you have fun? You look like you got some sun!”
Mr. Awesome looked a little less sad. “Yeah, it was fun.” As he talked he had his right hand cupped over his mouth and kept his head down.
“What happened, did you get hurt?”
Mr. Awesome looks a little more sad and explained that during P.E. class, which was held in the meeting room due to the rain, he had tried to walk across the room with his eyes closed and three girls had run into him at once. Hm. Interesting.
“Was walking across the room with your eyes closed part of the activity?” I asked.
Here Mr. Awesome become more animated and in his roller coaster speech, explained: “Well, no. You see, I saw some of the tougher kids in class doing it and I wanted to be tough too so I tried it.”

And this is where my heart melted. Can you picture it? Skinny kid, knobby knees sticking out of his rubber boots, floppy damp hair hanging in his eyes, explaining how he got hurt, trying to be tough.
“Well, Mr. Awesome, you did it! You got yourself a fat lip, and it looks awesome! That seems pretty tough to me!” As soon as I said this I wondered if it was the right thing to say. One of the most wonderful things about this child is that he does not fit into traditional gender roles and he’s totally down with that. During a conversation earlier in the year about what boys can do and what girls can do he explained that not all boys like sports.
“I’m a boy,” he’d said, “and I don’t like sports. It’s just not my thing!” He was comfortable and confident. And then here I was telling him what a toughie he was because he got hurt trying to be tough like the other kids. Oops.

Well, he looked a little bit pleased with himself. He really did have a fat lip, and it really did look cool.
“Are you ready to come into class?” I asked, standing up from where I’d been crouched to get a better look at the swelling.
Mr. Awesome was not ready. Here enters another fantastic, intricate character: INoticed. This child is very observant and phrases his rather detailed and profound observations with, “I noticed that…” Mr. Awesome crumbled into tears. “IGotYou and INoticed called me a liar!”

“Did you talk to them about it?”
Head shaking. Hair flopping.
“Maybe after math class we can talk to them about it?”
Head nodding. Hair flopping. Mr. Awesome comes into class.

And this is the way the conversation went: After math class I asked IGotYou and INoticed over. “Mr. Awesome wants to talk with you.” Usually this is a step that we have the kids take themselves but since Mr. Awesome didn’t have time during math class, I did it for him. We sat down in a circle. IGotYou and INoticed are quiet and focused on Mr. Awesome. He begins:
“You called me a liar!”
“Now wait, Mr. Awesome”, I interjected. “We’re not accusing, we are telling what happened.”
INoticed, in a very kind way says, “Mr. Awesome, can I remind you that you’ve been calling me stupid?”
Mr. Awesome starts from the beginning and tells his experience. When he is done he sits quietly, pouting.
“And what do you need IGotYou and INoticed to do?” I guided.
“I need you to not do it anymore”, said Mr. Awesome through his fat lip.
IGotYou looked him right in the eyes and in a gentle voice said, “I’m sorry.”
INoticedspoke up. “Mr. Awesome? What did I do bad?”
Called me a liar. Eye contact. Gentle voice. “I’m sorry.” We talked for about 7 seconds about using gentle words even when we are playing and then they are off to recess, and I love my job.

In the time that I have been writing this, it has gotten darker. It is now 6:04 p.m. and I can just barely make out the fading light beyond the trees in my westward facing windows. It is dark and the neighbors have started drumming. They are recording an album of African music. Also during this time, a moth flew through the flame of a candle and careened into my face. I swatted it away only to have it circle back, fly directly into the base of the flame, crash into the wick, splash hot wax on my computer and then fall to its death inside the pitcher that is holding the candle.
Really? People have TVs and electricity? For what?

6:10 p.m. – Yay! Power is back on. Having no electricity is ok but really, only for a little while.

7:09 p.m. – I turned off and packed up my computer for the night, but cannot get my mind off Mr. Awesome and his awesome-ness. I feel the need to make a list.

Other Wonderful and Hilarious Things That Mr. Awesome Has Done

1. Last week at Wednesday meeting Mr. Awesome was sitting in the front row. It was a chilly day but Mr. Awesome had on only a t-shirt, shorts and rubber boots. To keep himself warm he pulled his arms into his t-shirt, tucked his knees up under his chin and stretched his t-shirt over his knees, down to his toes. Now Mr. Awesome was just a head, a t-shirt and a pair of boots. I tried to catch his eye to give him a gentle headshake so he would stop wiggling and fidgeting but he was a man with a mission. He pulled his head into his t-shirt and reduced himself further to just a grey t-shirt and a pair of boots. I started to laugh, which is just as distracting as a kid disappearing into his shirt and boots. I sighed and looked away. He was quiet, but he was cold. I opted to not look his way for the rest of meeting and remind him afterwards to bring a sweater.

2. A few weeks ago Mr. Awesome was in a three-person book group with two girls, one in fourth grade, and one in third. I was circulating among groups and stopped next to their table. This was the update that I got from the fourth grader: “I’m drawing what happened in chapter four, and she is drawing what happened in chapter five and Mr. Awesome”, here she paused and looked at him with half contempt and half confusion, “is drawing a monster.” I looked down. Mr. Awesome had drawn a marine animal leaping half out of the water with a long neck and a set of fierce teeth. Mr. Awesome sneered back across the table at the fourth-grader, “Its not a monster. It’s a Reallycomplexnameasourus from the Wordstoobigformetoremember period.” Duh.

In a Rhythm

2009-11-14T14:41:00.000-08:00

I have finally slipped back into my happy, solitary routine here in Monteverde. An exciting change has come to Monteverde these past few weeks: the cold. I love it. My house has no insulation and no heating, so when the sun drops into the Nicoya Gulf at night, so does the temperature. I sleep with my wool hat, sweatshirt and down vest every night. I am always bundled and snuggly (Also, I don’t sweat during the day and I my clothes don’t smell).

Yesterday was a clear, sunny, cool, breezy day. It felt like fall in Rochester. The air was crisp and clean. The wind passing over my skin is cleansing and makes it sound like fall in Rochester but the smell is different. Yesterday was a rare day that made me want to stay in teaching forever. Because:
-I got to work early, like always. At 7:20 a.m. I was not so quietly cursing out the copy machine in the main office when I heard, “Hi Ginna.” Oops. It was one of my fourth graders. He hadn’t heard anything. Phew. I feel like I could write a ten-page essay on why this particular student is so awesome, but I will not. I will just say that I was glad that he was the first person that I spoke to on this crisp, cool Friday morning.
-The second student to show up to school on Friday, at 7:25 a.m. was another one of my students. This is the kid who wakes up at 5 a.m. on Saturdays to make brownies, then wakes up his mom, and they eat brownies together. Need I say more? We had a long conversation about his new bike. This is the first time I have noticed a real difference between the students here and the students in NYC. In NYC students were smart and knowledgeable and articulate, but here the students are smart and knowledgeable and articulate about things that actually interest me: frogs, bikes, how to harvest coffee. They could care less about hip-hop, shoes, celebrities.
-At about 7:30 I headed into the classroom and continued to prepare for the day. A small group of students followed me inside and continued to talk to me about things that interested me: a book called When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, a book I have not read. Then we sat around on tables and came up with a multiplication word problem for the class. This is what we wrote: “Andy is moving to Jupiter. He is bringing seven suitcases. In each suitcase he has nine alien friends. How many alien friends is Andy bringing to Jupiter?” After we solved and discussed the problem in math class that morning a native Spanish speaking students raised his hand and asked, “What is suitcases?” and I love working with English language learners. I love watching them find words and make connections and push themselves and find voice and translate for each other.
-In Assembly we sang a song about not washing your black socks. It was great for two reasons: 1) It had a fun, upbeat melody that put me in a great mood and 2) it was about NOT washing clothes.
- Math class was fun. On Fridays the kids have independent work and Tedi and I test kids on their multiplication tables. Do you know that there is nothing more satisfying that sitting next to a child on the steps, asking them their seven times tables and having them calmly and confidently master them? It all starts from the moment they leave their seat and walk over to you. They get this twinkle in their eye, which makes me smile, which makes them smile. Yesterday, my cheeks hurt from so many smiles during math class.
-After school I sat with a fourth grader who had not completed his math work during class. Watching a kid do work is fascinating. Watching them think, seeing how they grip the pencil, sitting so close that you can hear their breathing, noticing how they position their body, boggles my mind. And makes me happy.

Pero ya. Now it is right before 10 a.m. on Saturday morning and I am sitting on the porch under my brightly colored laundry and sipping tea. Wearing a sweatshirt and wool cap. It has been misting for hours and my clothes will never dry and my house smells like mildew but I don’t care.

Here are some pictures from when Dad was here:

This is when Dad and I were trying to stay out of the rain. He was taking pictures of the workers across the street in the downpour working on the roof of the mall, and I was taking pictures of dried up flowers in the flower box.

When we finally made it to the Ranario we had this great view of a Rufus Eyed Stream Frog. In San Gerardo on a night hike I got to see one of these in the wild. Either way, pretty cool.

When we went back to the Ranario at night these Glass Frogs came out and hung out on the glass. After some experimentation with flashlights and camera setting, Dad and I got some pretty cool shots. The white is the little guy's lungs.

Hour glass frog. I can't figure out for the life of me why they are called that. Supposedly they have an hour glass shape on their back, but I'm not convinced.

Hour glass frog belly.

This was what welcomed us out into the night. This is what we walked through to watch the Phillies watch game 4 for the World Series. It was so worth it.

Alone Again

2009-11-05T13:27:00.000-08:00

November 4, 2009

The morning that Ji-Soo left I came into my house after dropping him off and saw that his shoes were not next to mine in the entryway and cried. Today at three o’clock the bell rang for dismissal and my dad was not in the library waiting to tell me about his day. I found my way back to my classroom and let myself cry a little. I got home tonight and saw the mound of dishes that he had washed for me before heading back to San Jose and my heart dropped. Loving people and missing them is hard, but worth it.

Here are some highlights from my dad’s visit:

-Dad introduced me to the beauty that is boiled cabbage. Try this: toasted freshly made whole wheat bread, spicy Dijon mustard, two slices of cheddar cheese and a few pieces of boiled cabbage leaf. You should try it, and then you should thank my dad for telling you about it.

-Dad and I had a great Sunday. We played in the kitchen trying to get something presentable for potluck, showed up late and then hung around chatting. Really, I sat watching the downpour and let Dad mingle and chat. He was happy and I was happy. We didn’t want to walk in the rain so we planned to sit in the library and read until it let up. Just as we were about to execute our Library Plan, the rain let up and we headed downtown to the Frog Pond. The day before we had gone to the Snake House and had a great time and learned lots of useful things. After about twenty minutes the rain picked up again and we ducked into a shop and chatted with a student who is a senior at the school and listened to the downpour. The rain let up again, we started our journey again, it started to pour again, we ducked out of the rain again. This time we were under the awning of a small craft store that was closed. We waited and played with our cameras and cringed at the workers on the roof of the mall in the downpour. We realized that we could spend all day waiting and decided to just suck it up. We zipped up and headed out into the rain. We arrived at the Frog Pond at 3:30 soaked to the bone. We had left the school at 2:00. It should not have been more than a thirty-minute walk. I have no idea what happened. I guess waiting for the rain to stop during the rainy season in the cloud forest takes up a lot of time.

3:45 – we enter the frog exhibit. It is still pouring. The exhibit is in a large warehouse with a tin roof. At times the rain is so loud that our guide has to raise his voice and we have to lean in close. 4:45 – the tour ends. We are cold and sit in the café and drink hot chocolate and watch a Michael Jackson special tribute in Spanish. It is still pouring.
5:30 – we realize that if we sit for just fifteen more minutes it will be dark and we can re-enter the frog exhibit and see the nocturnal frogs. We decide to kill time by reading books in the gift shop. It is still pouring.
6:00 – we re-enter the frog exhibit, this time with no guide. We play with the flashlights and cameras and try to stay out of the way of large guided groups. It is still pouring.
6:45 – we exit the frog exhibit, return our flashlights and stand staring at the pouring rain. We have no choice but to zip up and head out. The road into Santa Elena from the Frog Pond is short, but windy and dark. We get soaked to the bone and do not die.
7:00 – we get to Santa Elena. We find a store where Dad tries on a raincoat since his left him soaking wet. The rain stops. We put the raincoat back on the rack and leave.
7:10 – We find a restaurant that will let us watch the World Series. The man who works there tells us in Spanish, “No one in this country understands this sport. Here we just watch soccer.” About every ten minutes he wanders out from his nest behind the cash register and asks up a question about the game. Dad and I eat even though we are not hungry.
8:55 – we ask for the check because we know the restaurant closes at 9. Our waitress says, “oh, no, we usually close at 9:10 or 9:15”, and does not bring us the check. I think we amuse her.
We returned to the restaurant the following night to watch the game again. As soon as we poked our heads in the door the man behind the register put the game on. I guess this is what happens in a small town. I like it. We left early that night because I felt sick, but the Phillies won. Tonight is the next game in the Series. The Phillies have to win to stay in. I am in my pj’s typing this on my bed because dad is gone and I have no one to go on a wet adventure with.

Returning to my list of highlights:

-My dad spent two days in the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve. He took tons of pictures. He sat at my computer at night renaming the pictures so he wouldn’t forget.

-Every night when Dad and I met up I would ask him, “What did you do today?” and waited to hear his adventures. He always has adventures.

-Periodically during his visit, Dad would have to stop by my classroom for some reason. Maybe this was my favorite part of having him here. I would look up and there he would be, standing in the doorway, wincing a silent apology for dropping in during work and handing me my cabbage and mustard sandwiches or, today, miming “Where is the umbrella?”

-Last Friday I went for a run after work. On the way back to the school I ran into Dad on his way from my house to the school. I stopped running and walked the last little bit with him.

-The first Monday he was here Dad helped the library committee organize, file and shelve books. I popped into the library after school and there he was, happily stamping away and chatting it up with the library ladies.

-Last night Ben called and I talked with him while Dad made dinner. This is the amazing thing about dads (and moms). They make dinner for you. And then the next day, when they have left, you find a little Tupperware container with leftovers in it in your fridge. It tastes delicious.

-One day, I don’t remember which, I came home from work to find my father in the hammock, reading. He had been at the reserve for hours that day and had gotten drenched on the way home, which he thought was delightful. He had changed his clothes and stretched out in the hammock, reading and listening to the rain.

Something about the book I’m reading:
I’ve finished The Motorcycle Diaries by Ernesto Guevara and still plugging along with The Happy Isles of Oceana by Paul Theroux. I decided it was time to read something by a woman, so I picked up Nothing to Declare by Mary Morris (I’m on a travel kick). On the inside cover of this book someone has written, “The author truly has nothing to declare. Read at your own peril.” On the title page, in different handwriting: “Book club selection read 2/14 – 2/17. Well written, interesting, but the author whines a lot.” I am on page thirty-eight and I have found no whining. I have found that it can be refreshing to read something by a woman. On page thirty-five, where the author describes living in Mexico and having two other Americans and a Canadian over for dinner:

…Jerry kept putting his hands on me and finally I asked him not to. He said, “You’re so uptight, baby. This is Mexico. Cool out,” and he raised his glass. “Peace, happiness.”
He put his arm around me again and I said, “I can’t eat with your arm around me.”
Then Jerry announced, “I’m a good judge of people and Mary is a real New Yorker.”
“I come from Illinois,” I said.
“Well,” he said smugly, “you’re sure different from the down-home folks here.”
I said, “I just don’t like to be touched by people I don’t know.”
And he said, “Look, I’m simple, I’m not complicated. I just put my arms on you to comfort you. You need comforting.”
He was going to drive me nuts. “If I need comforting,” I said, “I’ll ask for it.”

This is not whining. This is, unfortunately, what happens to a lot of woman and I was glad to read someone who actually talks about it. This makes me think of an AniDiFranco song. I don’t know the name of it but it’s track seven on a live album. I think it’s worth putting all of the lyrics here:

Me and all the kids from the neighborhood
We’d play out in the street all summer long
The rule was we had to go home at night
When the street lights came on

We were oblivious to the rest of the world
We’d hold up the cars in the street
We’d always play boys against girls
And both sides would cheat
Strange men would stop their cars at the curb
Say, “hey sweetheart come here”
And I’d go up to the window and they’d have their dick out in their hands
and a sick little sneer
I’d say, “here we go again. Yeah ok this time you win.”
And I would feel dirty and I’d feel ashamed but I wouldn’t let it stop my game
We would play hide and go seek
Territory would be the whole block
Sometimes the older boys when they’d find you
they wouldn’t want to tag you they’d just want to talk

They’d say, “what would you do for a quarter?
Come on we don’t have that much time.”
And I’d think a minute and I’d say “ok.
Give me the quarter first.” “Fine.”
This time you win. Here we go again.
And I would feel dirty and I would feel ashamed but I wouldn’t let it stop my game
And I remember my first trip alone on the greyhound bus
A man put his hands on me as soon as night fell
I remember when I was leaving how excited I was
And I remember when I arrived I didn’t feel so well

I remember the teachers at school got me so sick
Yeah I went into the broom and I threw up in my hair
And I could go on but you know it just gets worse
And I’d probably just stop there
Girl next time he wants to know what your problem is
Girl next time he wants to know where the anger comes from
Just tell him this time the problem’s his
Tell him the anger just comes, it just comes

For the record, this last tidbit was not inspired by something that happened. The men I’ve met here in Costa Rica have been respectful and non-assuming. Maybe it is the culture; maybe I’m learning to choose my path carefully. I’ve just found it super refreshing to read something by a woman and thought I’d share. Heck, I put everything else on this blog, right?

Random thoughts from weeks ago

2009-11-05T13:22:00.000-08:00

October 20, 2009

Ernesto Guevara in The Motorcycle Diaries says,
“I now know, by an almost fatalistic conformity with the facts, that my destiny is to travel, or perhaps it’s better to say that traveling is our destiny, because Alberto feels the same. Still, there are moments when I think with profound longing of those wonderful areas in our south. Perhaps one day, tired of circling the world, I’ll return to Argentina and settle in the Andean lakes, if not indefinitely then at least for a pause while I shift from one understanding of the world to another.”

This paragraph jumped out to me as if it had been highlighted (by me and not by someone else because I bought the book used, which I did not, it was a gift from my father, and I don’t highlight in books anyway but you know what I mean). This is what I wonder:

-“fatalistic conformity with the facts” – what does that mean? It sounds pretty, but I’m a little lost as to how to apply it to the bigger picture.

-”while I shift from one understanding of the world to another” – I love this too. It seems intricate and complex and wonderfully exciting.

I wish I were in a book group with the book. Any takers on an international forum?
On a less meditative note: There was an interesting article in the Tico Times recently about discussion on teen sexuality in Costa Rica. Some interesting facts:
-teenage pregnancy statistics have only been kept since 1984 (in Costa Rica? Is this different from the States? I feel like we have this data from way back in the 50’s, but could be completely fabricating that)
-between 1984 and the present the number of pregnancies for girls under 15 has nearly doubled to more than 500 each year
-between 1984 and the present the number of pregnancies for girls 15-19 has risen 12% to almost 14,000 a year
My question: is it normal for percentages to increase so much during the first few decades of data collection? Especially when the topic is so taboo? Where are all of my social scientist friends? Help me out here.
And here are some interesting tidbits from the article about the Catholic Church:

-the sex ed. Curriculum taught in all Costa Rica schools if reviewed by members of the culture and education commission of the Episcopal Conference of Costa Rica
-thechurch is not down with condoms, believing that they are not actually as effective as they claim to be and interest in selling them is just for business
-the church is not down with birth control
-the church is not down with alternate forms of sexual satisfaction as an alternative to intercourse. Deacon Federico Cruz, executive secretary of the curricular revision group mentioned above said, “The church isn’t going to promote that. It doesn’t help a person grow as a human…It’s training them for prostitution.”
-the church is down with abstinence only although all of the data shows that it is not only ineffective, but failing miserably
Really? I’m not saying we should push our youth out the door to go get jiggy, but maybe we could try to think outside the box a little?

10/25/09
This morning I left the house I am house sitting at 6:55 a.m. I had been up for an hour and half feeding dogs, eating breakfast, throwing sticks and reading and was getting bored. I called Dad, who was staying at my house, and told him I was coming over. The house I am house sitting is way off the main road, down a dirt road that turns into a dirt path that turns into a walk along a fence past a pasture. This morning at 6:55 a.m. the morning sun was just cutting across the sky, sending bright light to sparkle on wet leaves. I have not yet learned to bring my camera with me everywhere I go so I stood for a moment at the edge of the pasture just looking, and then moved on.

I heard a voice from a neighboring house and looked up. It was a second grade boy from my school, the same one who spent time in meeting one Sunday scratching his back with a stick. He looked up as he heard me. “Hi”, he called, recognizing me. I don’t think he knows my name, but it doesn’t matter.
“Good morning”, I replied as I passed. He was standing on the porch of his house, next to a bike.
“This is my sisters bike”, he said. I kept moving. To be honest, I wasn’t particularly interested in having a conversation with an eight year old at seven a.m. about a bike. “I’m gonna go give treats to dogs”, he called from behind me. I guess there was no escaping this conversation. I looked back and he was walking his bike towards me. In the basket of the bike was a bag of dog treats. His dog, he explained, did not really eat the treats. He had found them in his house and was now going to go give them out to the neighborhood dogs.
He gave me a quick story about how his family’s car had completely run out of gas, and then hopped on the bike with a little “oh!” as he realized how high the seat was.
“Have fun!” I called after him as he pedaled away.
“Thanks!” he called back. I wondered: Were his parents awake? Did they know where their son was? Did they know what he was doing? Does he always get up before seven on Sunday? Where was I?
And then, on the way home, cutting through the woods, I asked myself again: “Where am I?” I looked around and saw nothing but trees and early morning sunlight and dark brown earth and sparkle. I heard only rushing water off to my right. “This is my home”, I thought, amazed.

10/26/09
Last night I did not sleep well. I dreampt of robbers. I drempt that I knew who the robber in the community was and I pointed him out to my landlady. The robber climbed down her terraced garden and she smashed him in the head with a cast iron frying pan. Blood started to trickle out of his nose, but he still stumbled towards us. She smashed him in the head again and he fell down. I felt safe. But then, later in the dream, I was running, running, running for my safety.

I woke up in the middle of the night because the dogs barked. Sitting straight up like in the movies, blood running like electricity. I fell back asleep.

Again I woke up in the middle of the night, quickly and suddenly, but not sitting up. I saw a red light out the window and was convinced that there had been an emergency and my father had wandered from my house down to look for me and was wandering around disoriented in the yard. I crept out of bed and crouched near the window, trying to see who had the light. My father? The robber? Why weren´t the dogs barking? The dogs, I decided, had been gassed. I looked around the room. The red light followed my gaze and I realized that there was no one outside. My pulse was so loud I could hear it. I held my hand out and it was shaking.

I did not sleep well.

October Break Entry III - finally this is done

2009-10-20T16:33:00.000-07:00

This is getting old. Can you tell? Does my writing seem a little less passionate? Work started up again today and I’m supposed to be planning for math and science and pre-meeting and social studies. I am distracted. I am sitting in my pajamas eating leftover soup and listening to the rain and wishing lots of different things. The soup, by the way, is delicious.

Phase IV: The border by ourselves (continued)

With my unhappy tummy I wandered into the back of the restaurant to find a restroom, but quickly wandered back out again. Sometimes it is just not that serious. I found Ji perched outside the restaurant doing a stupendous job of ignoring the man who had earlier tried to sell us half a carbon copy. We were directed to a little booth to pay a few dollars to exit the country. We were directed to a large gate and showed our passports to a man in a uniform. We trekked through mud and around semi trucks to find a line to stand in. We were directed to a different line to stand in. A new man tried to give us papers to fill out and asked only for a voluntary fee. We declined. We got our passports stamped and paid four dollars and received a hand written receipt of payment. We trekked through more mud and gave our passports to more uniforms and started to sweat. We were passed by an elderly man with a huge smile riding a small pink bicycle, his knees up next to his ears. We arrived at the Costa Rican border. We stood on another line. A man looked at my passport and super looked at Ji’s, but we were let through. We found the bus station, we bought tickets to San Jose, we waited again.

Phase V: The bus from the border to Chomes

I will skip the details but it was now 12:30 p.m. and we were in a line on the sidewalk waiting to get our bags checked by customs. The bag revision process consisted of a man glancing at us and then waving us on towards our bus. The plan – take the bus part way to San Jose, get off at Chomes, hop on the bus to Monteverde. Well, that is sort of what happened. After getting mocked by our bus driver (I told Ji, “I can’t tell if he’s joking or just an asshole” and Ji replied, “Then he’s an asshole”) we arrived in Chomes at 3:30 and asked at a restaurant where the bus to Monteverde stopped. We were directed across the street to find out that the bus had just passed but that another would pass at 4. At 4:30 we asked again, “What time does the bus to Monteverde come?” We got blank stares. Monteverde? There is no bus to Monteverde that passes by here after 3:30. Our options? Pay $10 for a cab to Sardinal where a bus may or may not pass at 5:00, or pay $60 for a cab to Monteverde. It is now 4:40 and Sardinal is 10 minutes away. We have to decide quickly.

Phase VI: Taxi from Chomes to Sardinal.
That is what we decided to do.

Phase VII: Bus from Sardinal to Monteverde
The bus to Monteverde did pass by the Sardinal gas station a few minutes after 5:00. We saved tons of money. We sat in the growing darkness in the back of the bus to Monteverde and talked about the economic history of South Korea and I was happy. As we stood on the side of the road, next to the telephone, in front of the gas station, waiting for the Monteverde bus, I had apologized again and again to Ji.
“I’m sorry that I don’t know about the bus schedule.”
“I’m sorry that we almost had to pay $60.”
“I’m sorry that this is so hectic and random and last minute.”
He laughed and hugged me and assured me that he was having a great time and that he loves to travel by “winging it”. I remembered a conversation we had weeks ago about where to stay in Nicaragua. I had started talking about hotels and he said, “Can we walk around and decide when we get there?”
“Yeah. Of course.”
“That’s a little more my style.” So chill.

On the cozy bus to Monteverde I was experiencing this strange sensation that I was not prepared for. I was excited because…well….I was going home. We were so close. We were, for all intents and purposes, home. Until we saw the flashers on the road. Three cars, lined up ahead of us, not moving. Our bus stopped. In the darkness people craned their heads to see what was causing the delay. The little girl two rows ahead of us slid out of her mother’s lap and lay down in the aisle. A few minutes passed. Our bus drivers opened the door, stepped off of the bus, ran up the road and disappeared into the darkness. This had the potential to make me extrememly cranky. We were in our twelvth hour of travel, less than an hour away, and now we were stopped on a dark mountain road with an A.W.O.L. driver.

When the driver returned to the bus, closed the door and started backing down the dark, windy, muddy mountain road I did not feel better. I have been doing a lot of hard work on keeping my nerves and anxiety about travel under control. When we were groaning and rolling uphill I was feeling great. This was pushing my limits. Just for clarification, just to paint you a clear picture, just so you really understand, there was no back window to the bus and there were no streetlights to light the way. I don’t care how many mirrors the driver had, you can’t see what’s behind you in the dark.

Maybe I started to cover my ears and moan and rock back and forth because Ji said, “I have utmost faith in our driver.” I felt a little better.

Phase VIII: Taxi from Santa Elena to my house

I had never been happier to be in Santa Elena. Usually, for me, Santa Elena is a sweaty chore, but not on Wednesday night. I wanted to bend down and kiss the ground, but Ji was hungry again so instead we walked around looking for a restaurant. We ate casados, watched a bit of international soccer, hopped in a cab, went home and fell asleep.

The Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve

Thursday morning I somehow convinced Ji to get up early and go running with me. I believe Ji when he told me that he had a good time as he borded the bus to the airport on Sunday morning, but as I retell the story now, I wonder how that could have been possible. Running, showers, laundry, bacon and eggs and toast. I learned quickly that running the washing machine and the hot water heat and the coffee machine and the toaster and the electric stove will blow my circuit. Ji came out of the shower in a towel. “Um, I don’t think you have power.” He explained later with a laugh, “I had just gotten into the shower when the power went out. I thought, ‘I’m tough, I can do this.’ But I’m not that tough.” The exciting part is that now I know where my circuit breaker is and just about how far I can push my little cabin’s capacity. I also know how delicious local organic bacon and eggs can taste.

I don’t remember a lot about the next few days because I stopped being sick and we were not as sweaty or in danger of being ripped off or robbed. The reserve was fantastic. We stood and watched a family of four or five playful howler monkeys until our necks hurt. We saw hummingbirds and spiders and centipedes. We stood on the continental divide and looked out at mile after mile of protected cloud forest. The one time I had been before it had been covered in clouds and battered by winds. Thursday it was clear and calm and sunny. We walked over the hanging bridge and Ji did not cry or soil himself, which was more than we had hoped. We checked our email at the café where we got dinner only to find out that the world did not miss us and we did not mind. Ji seems to think that no one from work has even noticed that he had been gone and I had an email from my mom telling me to get offline and go hang out with Ji.

And Beyond

We slept in. I made Ji coffee. We cooked pasta and veggies and had Jonathan and Heather over for dinner and cards. We washed dishes. We watched No Reservations the New Jersey episode. We listed to Eryka Badu and Ji played me Common songs and we talked about his musical transformation after meeting Eryka and how he can’t sell albums anymore. Saturday morning we went to the farmer’s market and bought local veggies and ate fried cheese. We played Frisbee in the afternoon and then moaned and groaned around the kitchen that evening as we tried to use our tired bodies to make pineapple juice and adobo(the adobo was delicious, the pineapple juice would have been better if I had remembered to rinse the cutting board after chopping onions and before slicing pineapple).

And then, at 6:30 a.m. on Sunday, I said good-bye to Ji as he climbed aboard the bus to the airport. And I walked home trying not to cry because this is a small town and people know you and if they see you crying on the side of the road early in the morning they would probably stop and ask you what was wrong and if you tried to say “Nothing” they would know you were lying and if you tried to tell them the truth you would just start crying harder and probably get snot all over yourself or, much worse, them.

And now break is over and I have work to do.

October Break Entry II

2009-10-19T15:05:00.000-07:00

Upgrading

I should take this opportunity to mention that the accommodations that our travel weary selves hastily fell into that night were less than ideal. The floor looked wet with what Ji guess was insect repellent similar to what he had witnessed in Thailand. The room smelled like mothballs. The bathroom was dingy, the shower stall stained and a wall of mildew was creeping up the shower curtain from the bottom. We decided at dawn to upgrade, but first we had to eat.

I have known Ji-Soo for seven months and he has been very honest about one thing from the start: if he gets hungry, he gets cranky. I had never seen this fully manifest itself and was beginning to doubt the truth of it, until that morning in Moyogalpa. I’m sure spending the night in a hot, stinky, mildewed hotel room did not help the matter, but Ji was intent on one thing: getting food in his belly. NOW.

The first place we stumbled upon was a little sign outside a gate advertising rooms for rent and a restaurant. We looked inside. There was a short path between two buildings that let to a covered area with plastic tables and chairs. Beyond that was an outdoor kitchen and beyond that a large dirt courtyard with chickens running around and a pigpen in the corner. Did I mention that Moyogalpa is one of the two main towns on Ometepe Island, and that we were on one of the central streets in the town? Welcome to Nicaragua.

We paused, looking into the courtyard, deciding whether or not to enter, when a voice from the kitchen called. “Come in, come in! Have a seat!” So we did. And we ate. And it was awesome. Gallo pinto (rice and beans) with scrambled eggs, fried cheese and ham. Ji had coffee and I had some sort of delicious, freshly made juice. Chickens ran around our feet as we ate. In the kitchen behind us a woman was cooking a huge pot of something on an open stove. By huge I mean I could have taken a bath in it with little trouble. The pigs happily squealed in their pen. We wanted to ask if we could take pictures, and I wanted to ask if we could check out the pigpen, but I got shy and so we just paid and left.

(Ji with his instant coffee at breakfast)

We sat and digested awhile in the park, grabbed our belongings, checked out of our dingy hotel and hopped on the 10:20 bus to Playa Santo Domingo, which, according to our guidebooks, has the nicest beaches and accommodations on the island.

(Ji with his belly full in the dilapidated town park in front of the church)

Playa Santo Domingo

Up to this point Ji’s “vacation” had consisted of early mornings, long hot bus rides, sweat and mildew. Playa Santo Domingo was a change of pace. We spent that first day, Monday, just relaxing. We found a comfortable lavender colored hotel room with a screened window open to the lake, which gave a steady, cool breeze. After that I don’t remember much since it was such an uneventful, pleasant day. I think we ate lunch and then sat on the patio for another hour, enjoying the breeze. I’m sure a nap found it’s way in there, and I know that instead of renting bikes late in the afternoon we went for a walk. We ate dinner and sat around reading the Smithsonian magazines that Ji brought me and he started on a new novel. After dinner we sat on the steps leading to the beach and watched the stars come out and then fell asleep in our lavender room with a sweet lake breeze and gentle, continuous roar of waves breaking on the black sand beach.

(Ji in our lavender room)

(Uracas)

(our evening walk)

(laundry drying in the lake breeze)

When we almost killed ourselves

The next day we got a relatively late start, and were at breakfast enjoying translation errors in the menu before nine in the morning.

We decided to rent bikes and bike around the smaller of the two volcanoes. We estimated that this would be about a twenty mile ride, which is rigorous, but we are both in pretty solid shape and we calculated that if we biked four miles an hour, this would take us five hours. It was before ten in the morning and we had plenty of time.

The hotel we were staying in did not rent bikes, so we went next door. Bike rental prices there were $2/hr or $10 for the entire day. Not bad. After a lot of butt sitting we were eager to get some exercise and be out in the sun.

First of all, bike quality was not just bad, but dangerous. Both of our bikes were missing cables and could not shift correctly and my bike had minimal braking capacity. We thought: “$2/hr, how bad could it be?” and headed out. The road, in case it is not clear from the photos, was in crummy condition. The paved section of the road on Ometepe Island was completed about two years ago, and had not yet reached Playa Santo Domingo. Monteverde has a dirt road, but it is a well-maintained dirt road. There was a noticeable difference. Going was bouncy, our bums were sore, we were soaked in sweat, but we were having fun. I know this because I checked in with Ji as I began to suspect that our relaxed beach getaway might soon get a little less relaxing.
After a few minutes of bumping along on broken dirt road Ji looked ahead and exclaimed, “Finally, a paved road.” Unfortunately this paved road went straight uphill and neither he nor I could shift down to make our work any easier. Ji, a pretty avid biker, soon passed me. This was hard! I stood up on my pedals and was glad to notice that Ji too, had to stand. Halfway up the hill I reminded myself that biking was supposed to be fun and this was not, so I got off and walked. I was relieved to see that Ji, too, had gotten off his bike and started walking the last few feet up the hill. At least I wasn’t the only one who was struggling with this. After another minute caught up to Ji at the top of the hill.

“Wow. That was hard. I had to walk”, I gasped, as I got closer.
“Yeah.”
“How are you?”
“Um. I feel a little lightheaded.” And then he sat down. This was not part of the plan. As the day progressed and Ji recovered bit-by-bit, more of the true story came out. He had not just been light headed. He was also sweating more than usual, a cold sweat, and had started to see yellow. He suspected that if he had not sat down in that moment, he probably would have passed out. This is when I suddenly realized that I don’t know what to do if someone passes out. Ji said, “Put my feet up, make sure I’m breathing, and then rub my belly.” I wonder what course he learned that in.

Not knowing the full severity of the situation in that moment, I thought it was a great idea to continue with our ride. We walked the bikes up the rest of the hill and then hopped on again. After a few more uphill’s that we have to walk, a few more downhill’s that freaked me out because it took all of my strength to brake, a few more gallons of sweat and more dizziness, we decided that this is no longer fun and we wanted to go back to the hotel.

On the way back we stopped by a hotel restaurant to get Cokes, dry off and relax a bit. I am eternally grateful for the clean and comfortable bathroom at this restaurant because the combination of physical exertion, intense heat, stress of Ji being sick and sugar from the Coke was a recipe for disaster.

(My savior)
When we got back to the hotel we took a quick dip in the lake. It was not until then that I realized why the sound of the waves breaking was continuous. The water stays shallow for a ways out, which means the waves break and then keep breaking, rolling in noisily towards shore. I counted one wave that rolled, white and bubbly, into shore for seventeen seconds. It was a loud beach.

We dried off in the sun, showered, and then did nothing else for the rest of the day. I was careful to not eat much and be gentle with my stomach because we knew we had a long day of travel ahead of us. The goal was to be back in Monteverde by Wednesday night.

From Ometepe to Monteverde (an experience that could have been straight-up hell if it were not for my relaxed and calm travel companion, which actually applies to the entire Nicaragua experience)

Phase I: Bus from Playa Santo Domingo to Moyogalpa.
The waiter at the hotel told us that there were morning buses at 4:30, 5:00 and 5:30. The next one was not until 9:30. We paid our bill Tuesday night, woke at 5:00 Wednesday morning and crept out, leaving our key in the door as we had been instructed. This was yet another early morning for poor Ji, who loves to sleep in.

I had not eaten dinner the night before and did not eat breakfast, hoping that fasting for the day would guarantee an problem-free stomach situation. I grabbed a sip of water as we headed out the door to wait for the bus. Unfortunately, by this point, Ji was fully tuned into all of my bodily functions. That morning he came to the conclusion that my stomach problems are all emotionally triggered as my stomach lurched and clenched with only water in it. We had no idea if this bus would actually come, at what time it would come or if we would make it to Monteverde in one day.

The bus came at 5:29 a.m. How is it that a beat up bus on a busted up road can be so punctual? Greyhound should take notes.

As the bus filled up Ji gave his seat to an older woman with whom I chatted with for the remaining hour of the ride. She had lived outside of Los Angeles for over forty years. When she was twenty-three she had left Ometepe with no electricity and no running water and headed for California. There she met a Peruvian man, they married and had three kids. Her husband wanted to live on the island, and they returned two years ago. She misses the convenience of the southern California suburbs and the decorative cabbage plants she saw everywhere, but her husband is content and she is on the island to stay.

Phase II: Ferry from Moyogalpa to San Jorge
A few minutes after seven we were on a much smaller ferry then the one that took us to Moyogalpa. To board we filed one at a time thru a door in the gate while a man with a clipboard took down everyone’s name, age and nationality. Ji and I were about fifty or sixty people down the list and the first foreigners. I don’t know what this data is for. We were passengers with an old woman with failing health who spent the entire trip with her head on someone’s lap and a bright red towel over her head. When we got off the boat she moaned and groaned and was let off first, clutching the elbow of the young woman who accompanied her. We were also with two Spanish speaking but not Nicaraguan backpackers who were very affectionate with each other and, Ji is convinced, a little malnourished, and a group of eleven school kids with a blanket covered building model. The school group leader was a wide woman in a denim jacket who looked like a truck diver. Ji and I immediately liked her based solely on her thickness and sailor’s gait.

We got to San Jorge almost exactly one hour after we pulled away from Moyogalpa. How do they do that?

Phase III: Taxi from San Jorge to the border
Once again, taxi drivers approached us as soon as we got off the boat. One man agreed to take us from San Jorge to the Ticabus agency in Rivas for three dollars, which is the same as we paid last time. On the way to the car he mentioned gently that you have to buy your Ticabus tickets one day in advance. Shoot - we had forgotten that. He offered to take us to the Nicaragua – Costa Rica border for $20. From there, he explained, you can buy cheaper tickets to San Jose on a bus that leaves more frequently. We agreed.

The ride to the border was interesting. Our driver played a wide range of great American love song classics from the 80’s and 90’s. He, much like the other people we met in Nicaragua, was very patient with my questions. We drove past a wind field that he said was put in recently by an American company. They produce electricity and then export it to other countries like Costa Rica. He admitted that there is some resentment on the part of Nicaraguans that a foreign country has come in to export energy. He showed us the old Nicaraguan border and explained that all of the trucks were waiting to be inspected. He offered, for an added fee, to contact a friend of his that works in immigration who could expedite the process for us. We said thanks but no thanks. We’re going to try to navigate the border by ourselves this time. He smiled, pointed us in the direction of the immigration offices and dropped us in front of a place to eat breakfast.

Phase IV: The border by ourselves
As soon as we stepped out of the car we were swarmed by people trying to “help” us cross the border. Ok, maybe “swarmed” is a bit of an exaggeration. There were only two men, but it was still a big overwhelming. They were trying to sell us the papers we needed to fill out to go through immigration, but they had only the yellow copy of a carbon copy. I’m not sure what their plan was.

We “No gracias”ed them and sat down to eat. My stomach had been solid for hours and I was hungry. The food was mediocre and expensive. Needless to say, little time passed before my stomach started to flip. The entire operation was a little skeezy. I brought down a can of Pringles for snacks later that was labeled 35 cordovas. The lady, who seemed like the owner of the place, went to ring me the purchase as 45 cordovas, but the waiter corrected her.
“It’s 35 cordovas.”
“No, it’s 45.”
“Well, it says 35 right here”, he said, pointing to the price tag.
“What? 35? No! What kind of crazy person put that? It’s 45.” Looking at me: “I’ll give it to you for 40.” I agreed because I wanted to leave and it was a twenty-five cent difference. I paid and as I walked out I told her,
“The other can of Pringles is also labeled as 35, in case you’d like to change it.”

(real time update: there are many more pictures but they are taking a long time to load on the slow school connection. The will be added some time in the future.)

October Break Entry I

2009-10-18T12:01:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow October break will be over and I will go back to work. This morning Ji-Soo and I woke at 4:30 to walk him to his 6:30 bus to the airport. We walked down the mountain as the sun rose and heard howler monkeys in the trees behind us. We saw a coyote cross the street in front of us in Cerro Plano. It was big and lanky and shiny and nimble. We thought that maybe this is why there are not chickens everywhere like there were in Nicaragua. I realized that I live in a very special place and am very lucky to be here.

October break was exciting and wonderful and I will present it to those of you who are interested in chapters (a la Ernesto Guevara in The Motorcycle Diaries) but first, this:

Dear Ji-Soo,
This is what you missed on the walk home: I saw that lady running again. It really was her this time, not some old man. The view by the gas station was amazing - steel blues and grays layered on each other and melting into the clouds. As I passed in front of the school I heard noise in the trees and looked up to see a group of ten or twelve white-faced monkeys crossing the road, way up in the branches. They crossed one at a time, and then were gone. This was particularly exciting because I have not seen white-faced monkeys in Monteverde before. I saw a bright red bird but did not get a good look at it before it flew away. I got home at 7:35, which is interesting because I walked slowly and uphill and it only took twenty minutes longer than it did for us to walk quickly downhill. When I walked in I was pretty sure that you had never been here at all, but then I changed out of my sweaty clothes, took a deep breath and sat down on the couch. I saw the coffee maker in the kitchen and your towel hung out to dry on the porch and I knew that you had been here, but were now gone, and I was sad. Then I ate the curry chicken and the banana bread, but did not drink the coffee.
Love,
Ginna

Meeting Ji in San Jose

This was pretty uneventful. I left my house last Saturday (10.10.09) at 5 a.m., walked to Santa Elena and got on the 6:30 San Jose bus. I was at the airport by 10 a.m., which was…early. Ji’s flight got in at 1:30. I had a book recommended from a student that lasted me about an hour. The remaining three hours I spent wandering around and trying to avoid the taxi drivers who kept wanting to talk to me. My favorite part was the American family who sat next to me on the bench while they waited for the Budget rental van to arrive and kept commenting on the make of the cars.
“Paul, I haven’t seen a single American made car.” Pause. Pause.
“They are all Toyotas.” Pause. Pause.
“Well, there’s a Chevy.”
Ji-Soo got in around 2, we hopped a cab to the hotel, dropped our bags and headed out to get bus tickets to Nicaragua. Why Nicarauga? Because I am horrible at paper work and had not jumped through the proper hoops in time to get my working visa, which expires at the end of the month. I had to leave the country. We made a stop at El Mercado Central for casados con chuleta, “typical” Costa Rican food (rice and beans, salad, veggies, pork chop). We got soaked in the rain even though we broke down and bought an umbrella, and the market food started me on a days long bout of tummy problems. Here we were, Ji had been in the country for less than 12 hours and already we are wandering around down town San Jose in the dark trying to find the bus station, soaking wet, with me dragging him into gas stations to find a toilet RIGHT NOW. I began to wonder – was he having fun yet?

Travel to Nicaragua

Our TicaBus bus left for Rivas, Nicaragua at 7:30 a.m. on Sunday. We had to be there one hour early and left the hotel a little after six a.m. This was now the second day of his “vacation” that Ji had gotten up before six. Maybe he thought this was fun? Doubtful.

Let me pause here to mention that I had never traveled across boarders by bus in Central America, and had no idea how to do it. I had heard from multiple sources that TicaBus and other international bus lines (TransNica) were professional and trustworthy and I should not hesitate to fork over my passport to a stranger and let him walk off the bus and into a building with it, but I was still a little unsure. Thankfully, Ji is completely comfortable traveling in foreign countries in which he barely speaks the language and has no idea what is going on. More on that later.

The first international bus tidbit that we learned was how to check our bags. Luggage theft on buses is quite a large problem and this process was very organized. As you hand in your bag they attach a paper tag to it with a number. This tag has a detachable section with a matching number which is ripped off and given to the bag owner to be used when they claim their bags at the end of their journey. I was beginning to feel more relaxed. I should not leave out that it was Ji who figured this system out. I didn’t even know that we could check our bags. Checking our bags was also nice because the man who did it for us mentioned that we had to actually check in with our ticket at the counter. Good to know.

We hopped on the bus and travel was clean and comfortable. Except for the gasoline fumes. I found them quite overwhelming and was a little worried about the fact that our bus reeked of gas, but Ji seemed pretty calm and I tried to follow his lead. I was worried at first about the state of my stomach, but am getting quite good, out of necessity, at willing my stomach into submission. With no stomach clenches to distract me, I was able to enjoy our trip. The ride to Rivas would take six or seven hours we were told, and that gave us plenty of time to chat, nap, listen to music and smile at the three year old boy who stood quietly on his mom’s knees and looked out the window for hours at a time. We watched an episode of No Reservations on Ji’s iPod (isn’t it interesting as I type this on my Mac that “iPod” is not recognized by spell check?). No Reservations is this hilarious and interesting show on the food network. Anthony Bordain is an ex-chef who travels the world and eats. Ji brought his two favorite episodes that interestingly enough correspond to the two places he considers home: Korea and New Jersey. On this bus ride we watched the Korea episode, and I loved it. Anthony Bordain is a grumpy old man, which is hilarious, especially when he gets dragged to karaoke in Seoul by a young, upbeat, cheerful Korean co-worker.

How to Cross the Border in a Bus

We arrived at the Costa Rica – Nicaragua border what seemed to be two hours ahead of schedule, until we spent two hours at the border standing in lines.

Step One: Get off the bus
This seems simple, but there were no directions given. We suspected that we were nearing the border when we started passing miles of semi-trucks waiting on the side of the road for inspection. (Ji says, “Um, I think we are at the boarder.”) The bus stopped and everyone got off, so we got off also. There were no signs explaining what to do or where to go, so we just followed the other people who had been on our bus, hoping that they knew what was going on. It was hot and I had to pee.

Step Two: Some guy stamps your passport
After about twenty minutes in a line we were allowed inside to stand on another line. There were two lines in this room, one labeled “Entrada” and one labeled “Salida”. We were not the only ones confused. Were we leaving Costa Rica or entering Nicaragua? This was the Costa Rican border and we were leaving the country, but I still don’t remember what line we were in. It was the line next to the windows, does that help?

Step Three: Get back on the bus
Seems simple, huh? Not when you are traveling with an Asian. We waited in another, shorter line to get back onto our bus. This line, however, was in the midday sun, which made it quite uncomfortable. I boarded the bus first and showed my passport and customs form to a man from the bus company who was seated in the driver’s seat. He informed me that when we entered Nicaragua I would have to pay $8 and that I had to redo my customs forms with a specific address. I had put “Ometepe”, the name of the island we were going to, but this was not good enough. When I explained that we still did not know where we would be spending the night he told me, “Put Hotel Ometepe, even though there is no such place. At least you’ll have something.” I ended up putting a random name from the guidebook. As I moved onto the bus and headed back to my seat, the man called me back. He had Ji’s passport in hand.
“You need to go inside and make some photocopies of this passport. “ He showed me three pages to copy – 1) the first page with the picture 2) the page with the stamp when Ji entered Costa Rica the day before and 3) the page with the stamp when Ji had visited Guatemala in 2003.
“What? Why?”
“We have to have photocopies of anyone who is Chinese, Japanese or Korean.”
“But why do you need a copy of when he went to Guatemala? That was in 2003.”
“This is what they ask for.”
“Even though he is a citizen of the United States?”
“It doesn’t matter. Even if they have a north american passport, that is what they ask for from anyone with a Chinese last name.” This is funny, because Ji is not Chinese and it clearly says so on his passport. Also, his last name is Park. But, we had no choice. The man assured us that the bus would not leave without us and gave us directions to where to get photocopies. I looked at Ji. He did look mighty suspicious.

Now is a good time to mention that I was having a lot of difficulty understanding the Spanish spoken at the boarder. So when we went back into the immigration building to try to get photocopies made and the lady at the photocopier had no idea what I was talking about I was doubly lost. The following is a rough guess of what happened.
“Do you need to make photocopies?”
“Yes.”
“Is it for your car?”
“No, they told us that we needed to make three copies from this passport.”
“Oh, you’ll have to ask over there.” I walked over to the counter but she called me back. “What do you need the copies of?”
“His passport.”
“Oh. You have to go to the room down the hall to get your passport stamped.”
“We already got them stamped. Then, when we went to get back on the bus-“
“The buses are out that door.”
“But the man on the bus told us…” I paused here looking for correct conjugation. She laughed, exasperated.
“I don’t know who the man on the bus is!” This was not working.
“Since he is Korean, (pointing at Ji) we need copies.” I guess these were the magic words.
“Oh! Ok.” She took the passport and made the copies. We paid and headed back to the bus. We got on the bus. We drove to Nicaragua.

Step Four: Give up your passport
Yup. He worked for the bus line. He charged us $8, shoved our passports in a small plastic bag and walked away.

Step Five: Nicaragua customs
The Nicaraguan border is about half a mile from the Costa Rican border. Once again we got off the bus only because this is what everyone else was doing. This time there were directions: we were to take everything with us off the bus and claim our luggage from the belly of the bus. People filed off the bus and into a disorganized mass, waiting to see and grab their luggage. Remember that organized system of matching numbers and tags? It did not go into affect here. It was a free for all. Anyone could have grabbed our stuff and ran, but no one did. Once we got our luggage we waited in line, again, to have our bags checked by Nicaraguan customs. I left my bags with Ji for a bit to find and chat with an American exchange student from my school that we had run into at the Costa Rican boarder. She and her mom were running into some passport/visa issues, but all seemed to be working out well so I returned to where I left Ji standing. The line moved slowly and brought us to a man at a worn, rickety wooden desk outside. I handed him my customs form, he looked at me and waved me back towards the bus. Ji, next in line, handed the customs official his form. The man turned to me and asked, “Are those his bags?” I replied that they were and we were both waved back to the bus. I’m not quite sure where the confusion came in since Ji was wearing his backpack and shoulder bag, but I guess that man could not be too sure.

Step Six: Get back on the bus
The TicaBus man with our passports had not yet emerged from the office where he was hopefully not losing my passport, so we hung out around the bus with the other passengers. I couldn’t help myself and bought fried chicken, cabbage salad and fried plantains in a plastic bag for 35 cordovas (US$1.75 US$1 = 20 cordovas). Ji looked at me, astonished. All day I have been trying my best to keep my tummy calm. “If you get sick, you get no sympathy from me.” I can’t say that I blame him. I nibbled a bit and then tossed it in the trashcan, feeling spoiled and guilty to throw away food in such an impoverished nation.
The man with the passports returned and started calling out our names, checking us with our passports, handing back the passports and letting us back on the bus. When he got to Ji’s he didn’t even attempt his first name, just calling out “Park”. We got on the bus. Thirty minutes later we were in Rivas.

Our First Night In Nicaragua

We got off the bus in Rivas, Nicaragua and had to show our numbered tabs to get our luggage out of the belly of the bus. The man who gave us out luggage spent a long time checking the numbers, too, which makes me wonder if I could have gotten my bag without the tag. We had planned to take a cab to the neighboring town of San Jorge, where we would hop the ferry to Ometepe Island. As soon as we had bags in hand a taxi driver approached us.
“Taxi?”
“Yes. We’d like to go to San Jorge.”
“Ok. Five dollars.”
“Really? We were told that it would be $1.50.” This is true. This is what it said in the two Nicaragua travel guides we brought with us. I do not like to barter, but I also do not like to be ripped off.
“Hm…I can give it to you for four dollars. Two dollars a person.” I looked at Ji. I don’t like having to do this. Ji suggested three dollars, $1.50 per person and the driver agreed. I asked how far it is to the San Jorge port and the driver told us 15-20 minutes. This is roughly what the guidebook says. In reality, it took less than ten minutes. Hm.

When we arrived in San Jorge we walked towards the port and passed the two chained up monkeys in a tree that I had been warned about. It was 3:30. A man approached us as we poked around the gate to the port. He said the ferry to Ometepe left already, at 3:30, but there was another one leaving at 4:30. I looked at the four-foot high ferry schedule next to him and didn’t see a 4:30 departure. “There is a ferry that leaves at 4:30 even though it doesn’t say it here on the schedule?” I asked, obviously skeptical. He looked at me for a second and then spoke to me slowly, as if I would have trouble understanding the complexity of his answer: the 4:30 ferry is from another company. When I learned that we didn’t have to pay until we are on the ferry I felt less defensive and forked over two dollars for an island entrance fee. Or something. Ji looked at me as we walked away and asked about the validity of the little Ometepe tourism tickets we now held in our hands. We were one hour away from leaving for Ometepe and had a solid day of successful travel behind us and I was in a good mood. “Well, they looked official enough”, I said.

We ducked into a small restaurant to sweat uncomfortably and kill an hour. Ji was excited to have a grape Fanta until he decided that the bottle was reused and had been washed in gasoline.
The ferry ride was pretty uneventful. Did I mention how unpleasantly hot it was? I get cranky when I’m hot and sweaty and Ji gets cranky when he’s hungry and we were both pushing the limits. Ji had purposefully dehydrated himself so as to not have to pee on the bus and was now parched. Luckily the ferry sold cold bottles of water for 11 cordovas. The trip had magnificent views of Ometepe Island, which is an island of two volcanoes and got much better when we mustered the energy to lug ourselves up to the top deck and sit in the breeze.

(Ji-Soo being sweaty and gross at the restaurant. I only post this picture because Ji said it was his favorite one.)

(Ji-Soo being insanely cute with his gasoline Fanta)

(waiting for the ferry)

Almost exactly an hour after pulling away from the dock in San Jorge we arrived in Moyogalpa, Ometepe. We dropped our stuff at a hotel and went out to grab a bite to eat. The waitress where we ended up was patient and kind and answered all my questions. She said they had pitaya juice, and I didn’t know what that was. After much guessing and an obvious hint that I missed but Ji got, (some people call it fruta de dragon) I ordered dragon fruit juice and ate and played with the puppies and went back to the hotel and fell asleep.

(jugo de pitaya - yum yum yum)

(real time update - I have not slept since 4 a.m. and am tired and hungry and going home. The rest of the story will come later)

No hubo invierno

2009-10-04T13:17:00.000-07:00

So, I've been away for a bit. Last Saturday a student's father, who is a naturalist, invited all of the teachers on an overnight. Sunday internet wasn't working so blog updates did not happen. So here I am. Two weeks later. And here is my favorite story: This morning my landlady knocked on my door. I thought, as I always do, that I was in trouble. Was I washing clothes too early in the morning? Was there a leak somewhere? Was I making too much noise with the blender? Nope. She just wanted to show me the hummingbird that had crashed into her window. It was too dazed to fly away, so it sat quietly on her finger with it's thread like tongue (is it even a tongue?) flicking in and out. I took some pictures, but they will not appear here for awhile. This made me extremely content for two reasons:
1. Hummingbirds are beautiful and I am glad to have them in my daily life.
2. My landlady is wonderful and thoughtful. I was touched that she would bring me such a treat. Sometimes she brings me cookies or fruit. I am lucky to live where I do.

My trip to San Gerardo, which was amazing, told in photos:
We drove about 30 minutes to the Santa Elena Reserve and then had to hike down to the station. What kind of station? I don't know, it seemed like a hotel to me, but they call it the station. Our guide, Mark, is wonderful and patient and kind and took his time to explain plants along the way in a useful, clear way. This is the first plant he showed us:

He taught with questions, which I really like. Knowledge sticks better for me this way. He asked: What kind of animal do you think feeds off this flower? We were silent. What do we notice about this flower? We were silent. Is it wide or skinny? Does it have bright colors? We determined that this flower gave food to a bat. Wide for a big bat with a wide face and not brightly colored because it doesn't need to grab attention during the day. This flower is in the African violet family. I think.

The walk down on the main road. About halfway down we took a trail that looked more like, well, a trail.

And this is where I realize that some pieces have fallen out of my head in the last two weeks. This is an orchid. You can tell orchids are orchids because they all have these two bulbs at the base. The word "orchid" in Greek translates to "testicle". Orchids are testicle plants. The woman next to me leans over and whispers, "That's funny, because orchids look like vaginas."

This is the only carniverous plant in the area.The top part is a flower and this is a bulb in the roots. Somehow, it convinces ants to burrow into it (the promise of food?) and then it keeps the ant in the bulb and digests it to get nutrients.

How do they do this without rulers???

Dark and foggy in the afternoon forest.

Arrival at the station was magical.

Our view from the balcony that evening. Can you see Lake Arenal? Volcano Arenal?

Chillin' before dinner.

The view the next morning. You can just make out Lake Arenal on the left.

Yummy breakast.

This horrendous beast was there to share food with us. You could watch him munch away on the fly. I did not gag, or vomit, or cry, even though I thought about doing all three. At the same time. I just took some pictures and then walked away.

Monkeys up in the tree.

Seed packet.

Blue morpho butterfly.

Hibiscus fruit tastes like...nothing.

Blue morpho wings on my knee.

Butterfly that didn't fly away.

The cool thing about this little dude is the bright orange patch of skin he has under his throat. We also learned that most lizards need to move according to climate to survive, but this guy can stay in one place and regulate himself to different temperatures. This means he can have territory that other lizards like himself will not occupy. The trade off is he can't move as quickly or as agilely as others.

At last, right before we left, we got to see the volcano! You can see it smoking. It lay dormant for hundreds of years and then in July 1968 erupted and has been active ever since. There were changes in the land in the years leading up to the 1968 eruption. The lake on the top of the volcano dried up and all the fish died. Cows would not drink out of streams that they had been using for decades.

Little boy boots.

Ant Attack

2009-09-20T11:18:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I talked with Raquel online. I asked her my moth question, but in different words. She said, “What kind of liberated woman are you if you are trying to fulfill someone else’s idea of what a liberated woman is?” but in different words. And then she cursed me out, which was refreshing, because no one here in Monteverde uses curse words, and I’ve come to miss them. In Frisbee, when I miss a catch or make a bad throw and say, “Shoot!” I feel like some sort of morally corrupt person. Plus, Raquel curses like a sailor, and it’s wonderful. We had this agreement last year: I strung together the nastiest, most vulgar curse words I could find and put them on the fridge. If I started to stress out about work Raquel was to use those words on me. She only had to use the system once, and it was a wonderful wake up call. I love work, but not enough to stress continuously about it.

Another thing that happened yesterday: I did laundry. As I brought in my dry clothes I noticed a swarm of ants on the wall of the porch. I leaned closer to see what they were so excited about and I noticed that the swarm was slowly leaking across the railing of my porch and onto the floor next to my feet. This was new. I carefully sneaked a peak down the wall of the balcony. There were ants everywhere, swarming from the grass, up the landlady’s wall and towards me. I shut the door and went inside. As I readied to leave I peeked outside for an ant swarm update. They were all over the floor of my porch now. I shoved a towel in the crack of the door and left the house.

I asked later, at the yoga place (I was there to drop off a reading group book for Daniel, who works with us in the classroom on Wednesday) what was up. I think I said, “Should I be worried about the swarm of ants that were taking over my house when I left?” Daniel said they had been doing the same thing there. Both he and Rise agreed that having ants swarm your house was a great thing to happen since they will clean out all of the carcasses. Yes, they used the word “carcasses”. “Do they bite?” I asked. “They bite HARD”, Daniel replied. Cool. I remembered feet so swollen from ant bites in Nicaragua that my puffy skin pushed on the sides of my sandals. “It’s best to just let them be”, he added. “Yeah”, Rise agreed. “You’re lucky you won’t be home until later tonight.”

And then I left and on the way out I got bitten by one of these ants and it turned bright red, but did not swell.

This makes me think of two things:

1. Mutant Message Down Under. A woman is crossing the outback in Australia and some kind of insect swarms them. She, naturally, freaks out until her guides tell her to just relax and let the bugs do their work. She closes her eyes and tries to remain calm as they work their way into her ears and nose, cleaning and eating. And then they are gone and she feels like she has gone to a spa.

2. Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. An American family is living somewhere in Africa and ants swarm the village and leave nothing in their path – only skeletons. They have to run and submerge themselves in the river to save their lives.

When I got home last night there were no ants anywhere on the porch. I know because I turned on the outside light and checked. There was one tired and lost ant on my bedroom floor. I gave it two feet of space as I put on my PJs.

A few more pictures from Independence day:

This was towards the end of the parade. These kids had been marching and standing in the sun for a few hours and got tired, so they sat down. Maybe my favorite part of parade was the kids dressed up with green crosses who went around giving water to parade participants who looked hot and tired.

I already have a picture of this kid in yesterday’s post, but he was adorable. His sunglasses where so huge they stuck out from his face on both sides and he is wearing those super cool cut off gloves. He saw me trying to take his picture and turned and looked right at me. I think this is my favorite picture from the entire day.

A beautiful flower on the walk home, which was 5km uphill in the hot sun. This flower makes me think of skin. I think if I could choose any skin color, it would be this, but then I’m sure the bees and humming birds would be a real bother.

This cow had slipped out of the fence at my favorite spot on my walk home from work. My father has passed on to me an obsession with cows and I simply had to take some pictures. This picture does not do this munching lady justice. Her dark brown faded to light brown further down her back. She made a surprising amount of noise ripping up roots, grinding and swallowing. She was beautiful.

These are the flowers at the gate to my house, and my house. See that corner there? That is my kitchen. See my corrugated tin roof? That is why the rain sounds so lovely. No, the rain would sound lovely regardless. The roof is why the rain sounds especially lovely.

Something interesting about life in Monteverde: It has not rained here in at least a week, even though we are in the middle of the rainy season. This means there is no water in the streams and that sometimes there is not water at the school and if you have to use the restroom you have to use the out house with the spiders. I wonder whose job it is to get rid of the spiders in the out house but don’t want to ask because I fear the answer will be “yours.”

Apparently, during the dry season, sometimes there won’t be water for two days at a time and people can’t shower. This is on my List of Things I Wish They Had Mentioned in the Interview, right next to “There are spiders and scorpions everywhere”. I still would have taken the job - I don’t like to shower.