Costa T+3 Tuesday
Ok, so Tuesday began with a damn rooster crowing around 4am. Then a HUGE jet buzzed the town causing all the car alarms to sound. Not just with a simple woop, but with the woop, woop, e-ah-e-ah-e-ah sounds.
My host family learned that I avoid caffeine, so Claudia picked up some decaffeinated coffee yesterday. The entire family has been unbelievably kind and open. They have only a slightly simpler life that we in the USA. Their kitchen is basically the same as mine with the exact same equipment. I haven’t seen any boxed food, it is all fresh made by Claudia and tasty.
Class begins later today at 720am, beginning with a test (written and oral). The sun has been up for over 2 hours. Costa Rica is on Central time, but they don’t have Daylight Savings, so it is Mountain time now. The country’s longitude places it almost on Eastern time – so the sun comes up very early indeed. It takes some getting used to. Also, since I’m located in a valley surrounded by mountains, the sun has to get fairly high before you see it, but not before the light and clear blue sky is seen.
My classmate was sick today, I don’t know why, so I had 1 on 1 training. That is until 3 other much more advanced students were brought in. It must have been by mistake, since they had already had 4-6 years of Spanish training. It turned out that another person in that other class of high school students had gotten lost on the way to school and had gone home. A few of the teachers and her adult escort went searching until they found her. She was from the Bahamas – like most of the students here, perhaps 30 in total.
Anyway, after class was over, I took a dance class in meringue and salsa. I suck, as expected. The class consisted of me and 2 retired ladies – just a few years younger than my mother. We had fun and sweated a bunch. My pedometer showed over 5 miles after the 1 hour class.
I was given so much homework that I had a quick bite to eat at the diner across the street – just a pollo burro con no mucho case – a chicken burrito with just a little cheese. See photo.
Back at home the studying began. Describe about 20 photos as interactions between people AND be polite. The other part of the homework was to memorize about 100 regular verbs (-AR, -IR, -ER). I haven’t been a student in years, so I was only able to memorize about 30 of them before my brain said enough, but I did look up and understand the present tense conjugations for each of those types of verbs. Since I’m a visual learner, having my teacher tell me the words doesn’t help very much.
Dinner was spaghetti-like and tasty. I took photos.
Then back to memorization – that didn’t get anywhere, so I listened to a Pimsleur lesson that I’d already heard, but found too difficult. It was very easy this time.
The wind was really blowing here all day, but really picked up over night to where a corner of the roof became loose and banged around. Jorge was up at least 3 hours doing something to stop the noise. By that time, the 5am airplane and damn cock started. No car alarms this morning, so I guess the plane wasn’t really that close today.
