Costa T+9 Monday
Monday was my first day of school at the Monteverde CPI campus. My teacher, Jose, has a great sense of humor and we spoke in Spanish getting acquainted. To be clear, it was just simple sentences that we both used and I had to ask him to repeat himself a few times.
There is another student in my class named Roger. Oddly, he is retired from Telcordia/Bell Labs and worked for PAC Bell et al. We briefly discussed out telecom background in English as Jose listened. Roger has picked up Spanish in his home from both his wife who teaches Spanish and is fluent and a housekeeper. He’s not had any training, but has a significant vocabulary – well beyond mine. However, he is lacking in grammar and verb conjugation. I suspect he’s already caught up tonight with what I learned last week. Anyway, the class will be very good with both Jose and Roger.
After class got out, I checked the activity board and signed up for 1 tour. I plan to do the skywalk/cable zip-line tour. My afternoon flight on Saturday will force me to leave Monteverde on Friday to ensure I can catch the flight due to the 4 hour (2 on dirt) excursion. This means I’ll spend Friday night in another B and B near San Joaquin.
Ok, so after checking email, catching up on a minimum of web sites, I strapped on my backpack for a walk around town. Monteverde is a very hilly place. The hills are windy and steep with fast moving traffic always coming around a corner too fast, so pedestrians need to pay very close attention. Anyway, after eating pure Tico meals for a few days, I was starving for some non-Tico food. My new Tico family’s address is relative to Johnny’s Pizzeria – sounds like a plan for lunch. Except Johnny decided to renovate the place and wasn’t open. I walked further down, up then down the road and came to a place marked Steak House and Pizzeria. I had to search for the entrance since there were 4 other businesses in the same building and the restaurant entrance was around the side up a set of unmarked stairs with no name at the top. It was mid-afternoon and completely empty. I yelled "Hola" and the owner came out from around a corner looking very American. Fresh from my Spanish class, full of confidence, I was slightly disappointed in finding a gringo owner and spoke to him in English. He responded in extremely broken English – BONUS! He handed me the menu and started talking about how good the steaks were today. I had pizza on the mind – a different menu. Beer and Di Kaye pizza ordered. I figured $10, which is VERY expensive for lunch. Last week, my lunches were usually $2 at a soda. The pizza was pretty good and the Imperial beer was similar to Michelob in taste. $17 later, which I complained about to the girl working the register. The price was because I’d specified the brand of beer and I’d had 2 of them – I guess. I sipped the 2nd beer and worked on my homework for about an hour before heading home.
At home, I searched for a Spanish book to practice reading aloud, but only found a TU magazine. I’m not certain, but I think I understand what boys like in a girlfriend now. Very helpful in getting the current lingo down as used by teenage girls. The hints on makeup – guys prefer natural looking girls according to the article – will really help me. Sure.
A short siesta before the family arrived at home and my tico mother – who is 2 years my junior cooked rice and lentils with some stew meat. At least it wasn’t beans!
My job for the evening was working with 6 and 7 year olds on their English vocabulary. The 6 yr old girl new it all. The 7 yr old boy appeared to know the first 3 answers, then didn’t know any of the rest. At that age, boys are very restless as you know, so getting him to concentrate was impossible. It ended with them quizzing me on my colors in Spanish. I’d not studied them at all – only looked over them 5 days ago briefly. Girls see 200 colors. Men see 8. Pink is pushing the color spectrum for men. Within 10 minutes with lots of laughter over a few of my answers, I had the 8 colors down. Next we were onto animals.
