My favorite thing in the world....tequila!!!

This weekend was kind of fun and kind of sad at the same time. I had two goodbye parties to go to for friends who were leaving Costa Rica. Firstly was Eleanor's party on Saturday night. Eleanor was here for about a month, living with us in Heredia and studying Spanish. She had to take a taxi at 5.00 am so she decided that going to sleep and resting up for the journey was just a silly idea. So me, Eleanor and Christina bought a bottle of guaro and a pinata instead (Guaro is like the local spirit made from sugar cane and pinatas are those papier mache things filled with candy that you hit with a stick..definitely a winning combination). We also went to a bar with Oscar, the mexican guy we live with, Hector, Christina's boyfriend (and our Mama Tica's grandson and therefore also her Tico nephew!!??!) Jonathon (another grandson) and his girlfriend who is lovely but I can never remember her name, and another Oscar who I'd never met before and I only have a vague recollection of. The details are sketchy but I think we all had a great night, Eleanor got her taxi ok and me and oscar finished off the guaro listening to the mexican version of Metallica!

Things weren't so great when I woke up the next day, however. Hangovers and a tropical climate dont mix well. I slept most of the day but heroically dragged myself out of bed to go to San Pedro to meet Brandy for her birthday/leaving do. (Brandy moved into Raquel's daughter's house after I moved out)She was also here to study Spanish and became my favorite tequila drinking partner. We had a nice meal at my fave restaurant, Betania Picante which turned out to be free thanks to Brandy shamelessly flirting with the waiters. Then we met a girl from Austria (who's name I cant remember... I really am going to have to start writing these things down)and we went to El Pueblo. I think I have mentioned it before but it is really a cool place full of lots of little bars and clubs that you can wander in and out of at will. We found the best bar that had two tequila's for 1000 colones and my memory gets hazy from there on... but there was lots of drinking and dancing salsa and merengue(with a cute guy called Martin, if you say it with a Spanish accent it's a lot sexier).

Monday was a holiday and I was invited to visit the countryside with my Tico family but I was too hungover to trample up any mountains so I spent the whole day in bed....ooops.

Frazzled hair...

There are lots of problems that come with living in tropical countries...every day It takes me about an hour to decide on an outfit. Does it look profesional enough? Will I be cool enough if its sunny? Will I be warm enough if it rains? And a new criteria that I discovered during one of my first classes....If it pours down with rain and I get soaked waiting at the bus stop, how see-through will my clothes be? Anyway my biggest problems, as always, is my hair. Since I discovered the joys of 'magic straightuh' in Korea my hair has been a dream. I could just wash it and let it dry naturally and it would just go straight and shiny. But it wasnt to last forever, and I ended with curly frizzy roots with straight ends...it really wasnt a good look. So I decided to visit the hairdressing school that my Mama Tica runs. This probably wasnt the best idea I've ever had. When I walked in the room was full of girls combing those doll heads with hair and chatting away...but when they saw me they all crowded around me and fought with each other to see who would get to do my hair. In the end three girls decided to share the job and it was pretty obvious they hadn't ever done this before because they kept referring to the instructions on the back of the straightening cream!!! In the end it wasnt that successful...my roots are still frizzy but at least now the ends are frizzy too as my hair is now as dry as straw. Also an alarming amount seems to be falling out in the shower...but what the heck it's only hair...i'm sure it'll grow back!

Fun at the dentists...

I had toothache a couple of weeks back and was a bit confused as to what to do about it. In Costa Rica there are about twelve orthodontist on every street but its impossible to find your ordinary, run-of-the-mill, deals-with-toothaches kind of dentist. So my co-worker 'Crazy Lou' (that's a whole other post) took me to see his high school friend who is such a dentist. I pointed to the problem area and he decided to give me a filling. To be honest, I was in so much pain I didn't really care at the time but looking back I think he may have been a bit dodgy. For a start I don't think he was into new-fangled modern technology like...for instance...hygiene or sterilization. There was no dental nurse so I had to hold my own instruments and do my own suctioning. But the most alarming thing was that he did the entire proceedure whilst chatting to his friend on the phone and at one point disappeared for 10 minutes to go and talk to some guy at the door. Now I'm pretty sure that the problem was my wisdom tooth and I probably didn't need that filling anyway but nevermind...it was another experience to add to the list!!! And the toothache didnt matter after I discovered how easy it is to get really strong painkillers from the chemist!!!

Time flies...

Sorry about the delay in posting. This 'actually working' lark is a lot harder than I thought! I'm up every morning at 5 am running around on buses (unfortunately for the people sitting next to me I cant possible wake up any earlier just to have a shower!!!) and I'm on the go all day until 7ish. Its a good job I am acually enjoying myself cos otherwise I'd die. I think I may have been a bit over ambitious with the number of classes I can teach in a week but after a month of teaching I am totally in love with all of my students and couldn't possible drop any of them... So I'm just going to have to completely change my personality from the easy going, relaxed girl you know and love, to one of those rushing around busy people who actually get things accomplished!!! Any tips???

Also teachings a little more difficult over here than in Asia. For a start, people can actually already speak English. Which is a bugger because they don't just blindly believe me when I make up my own English words and grammer rules. Although I am the first English girl most of them have met so I am writing a lot of things off as British English. I may have to buy on of those grammar books although i guess I could just ask my students...

Photos

My grand plan of putting lots of pics on this site have been slightly hampered by most internet cafe computers not having USB ports, my forgetting to bring the drivers for my camera and the speed of most computers being about the same as a geriatric snail...but slowly (and I mean very slowly) I am trying to upload them. So some of them are now in the photos links to the right of this page. They are not all there yet and they haven't been given names (because that would take another 50 hours) but I will keep trying until they are all there. Then I will figure out how to post a few pics on this page!

Weekend fun

Well I´ve finished my first week of actual work. It´s not as much fun as you would think. First of all, none of my classes are actually in Heredia they are in the offices of businessmen near Heredia. They are actually near (ish) but getting to them invoves picking a random bus that seems to be heading in the right direction and hoping.... Suprisingly this method doesn´t seem to be too successful and inevitably I will panick and grab a ripoff taxi to take me to the office that costs about the same amount as I am being paid for the class. Hmmm... oh well! on the other hand I´ve been seeing a lot of the local scenery. And my Spanish is improving especially the "Donde esta....?" questions. Unfortunately I can´t understand any of the replies unless the person points.

Did I tell you I am translating a botany book from Spanish into English? Yes indeed, soon there will be a little obscure book about the Trees of Costa Rica out in the publishing world with the words ´translated by Bethel Smith´ and at last I will be immortal. Now, I´m hoping that it will be a little obscure book that noone reads because I haven´t got a clue what I´m translating so I´m just making it up as I go along. All the words I can´t find in the dictionary I am assuming are Latin. Anyone who knows anything about botany (in particular, what on earth a 'ligulate' is)
please help!!!!


I went back to Raquel´s house on Friday night to go out with Shelly. We went to Tobogan, another latin dance bar, but it was full of old people so we left and returned to the mother ship..Planet Mall. Now weve been going there for weeks and as always the dancing was amazing to watch. But the problem with latin dancing is that you have to have someone to dance with... we could´t find anyone to dance with us and came to the conclusion that we need boyfriends, quickly. So my new mission is to find myself a man... I´m not fussy, just someone who will ask me to dance occasionally and that I can practice my spanish on will do. I´ll let you know how it goes....

My new home... Heredia

So...I packed everything I own back into my backpack (actually my backpack, a new book back and about 20 plastic bags....I swear to god my belongings just multiply everytime I leave the room!!!), flagged down a taxi and waved goodbye to Raquel and her crazy ways. 20 minutes later we pulled up at my lovely new home. As far as I could tell everything was perfect until I went to check out the bathroom...NO BLOODY TOILET PAPER! I dont get it! Maybe theres some kind of huge tax on bog roll in Costa Rica. sigh! I guess thats god's way of telling me to get my arse down to the shops and buy my own!!! On the bright side though I do have an industrial sized fan that takes up half the room and if I turn it up to full blast, feels like sitting in a wind tunnel. I also have a tv that is constantly on the ear bleeding top volume setting and a delapidated fridge that tips up everytime I open the door. But I'm happy to have my own little space to settle down in for a while.

As well as housing foreigners, the lady who owns the house (whose name I cannot remeber properly or even begin to spell) also runs a kind of hairdresser's training school (could be handy for a free cut if I'm feeling brave). She seems lovely but this morning at breakfast, when i told her I didn't like milk (hoping for a selection of lovely fresh fruit instead), she just gave me a bowl of dry frosties. oh well.

oh and by the way I got an email from INBio telling me that the botany department is very excited about my arrival and would I be interested in translating one of their books into English...Well I have had a months worth of Spanish lessons. What the hell! I'll give it a go...............

The plan.....

Ok, so I'm staying at the school for one more week. Partly because I needed a bit more time to figure out what I'm doing next and also because we are starting the intermediate book this week...so exciting!!! Next week I will move to Heredia. A really nice small town only a 20 minute bus ride away from San Jose. But it's a lot calmer and safer. I found another homestay close to the centre of town with a nice old lady and her grandsons. Heredia is close to INBio too. So the plan is to work at INBio Monday, Wednesdays and Fridays and to teach English on Tuesdays and Thursdays to help cover costs. I had an interview with a language institute last Friday who want teachers to teach business English to office workers in Heredia. So I'm moving on Saturday and will start work on Monday. I'll probably stay about 4 months until the rainy season is over and then I'll move on.

Spanish is such fun.........

Can I just say if I ever meet the guy who invented Spanish with its silly pronunciation, verbs that mean the same thing, stem changes, irregular verbs, pronouns, reflexive verbs, 1001 tenses all with the same endings but swapped around a bit...I'll break his neck!!!

By the Way...............

Happy Birthday Daniel!!!

Of Course, My Horse!!!

It was all going so well, we were eating healthy food, we went to the gym everyday, we were being studious. Then in a moment of madness we went to the internet cafe and forgot to call our Mama Tica earlier on to tell her we wouldnt need dinner. When we did call, around dinner time, all hell broke loose. Actually that is an exageration but she wasn´t pleased.

Since then me and Shelly have been living at the mall. After school we go straight to the mall, we go shopping, we eat, we study, we watch a movie, I even selflessly sacrifice my kidneys and order some beers at the bar so that we can sit there and wait til shes gone to bed before we get home.

Now Raquel is lovely, most of the time, but we are begining to suspect she is a manic depressive schizophrenic going through the menopause. She speaks hardly any English apart from her favorite phrase "Of course, my horse". She treats her poor little dogs like toys. She cleans our rooms everyday but leaves food out in the kitchen to attract bugs. If we open the door she will come along behind us and shut it complaining about letting insects in, but if she opens the door and we try to shut it to stop insects from coming in she´ll tell us there are no insects!! Shes obsessed with switching all the lights of in the house. Now this is a very worthy energy saving cause, but just not when I´m in the room studying. And worse of all, she wont give us toilet paper!!! Why??? She already buys us the cheapest sandpaper kind. But when it runs out she wont give us anymore for a couple of days. Yesterday it was raining and she was out all day, we used up all the toilet paper and then used all of the serviettes in the kitchen. We are preparing ourselves for a huge battle when we get home.......I´ll let you know how it goes.