Travel Makes for Good Blogging

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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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

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.