Panama

Heather, Jason, and Jen left Costa Rica on Tuesday. At least they tried to. One of the engines on Jason and Jen's plane malfunctioned about 30 minutes after takeoff and they had to return for an emergency landing. Since there were no other flights to the states that day, they got to spend an additional night in Costa Rica.

I just made it into Panama City on Wednesday afternoon. It was an 18 hour bus ride from San Jose, counting about 1.5-2 hours at the border crossing. The cost of the trip was about $35. I could have gotten cheaper, but I opted for the executive bus which cost $10 more. I'm not really sure what I got for my $10, but for 18 hours, I was willing to take a gamble. When I got to the border crossing there was a big sign on the window stating that you are supposed to have proof of onward travel (bus or plane ticket out of Panama) and proof of solvency (at least US$150 in cash) to enter Panama. I had neither, but I was not asked to show either despite many Nicaraguans and Salvadorians in front of me having to do so.

I'm a little unprepared for Panama. I haven't bought a guidebook or really made any plans. All I had was a recommendation from a friend for a place to stay.

Panama is very modern with many tall skyscrapers. I'm a little disappointed however, that there is no Club LaVela (Just kidding). It is very reminiscent of Miami. But I'm staying in the Casco Viejo neighborhood - the oldest part of town. It's a handsome, but still a bit shabby part of town with many old buildings. It fell into ruin over the years, but has recently been declared a UNESCO World Heritage sight and efforts are underway to restore it. It looks a lot like Havana, Cuba (or at least what I imagine Havana, Cuba looks like).

It's funny how we never appreciate buildings until they get old or until we're in danger of loosing them. All over the US, downtown areas and older neighborhoods that were fled by the middle and upper class in the 50's and 60's have been or are being restored and are trendy places to live, eat, and shop. It makes me wonder whether in 50 or 100 years middle and upper class people will flee the suburbs. Will Cool Springs or Bellevue fall into ruins? Will there be community efforts to restore them to their former glory? Will we ever feel nostalgic about strip malls, big box stores, and office parks?

I bought a camera on Amazon, had it sent to Heather, and she brought it down to me. The screen didn't work. So she is going to send it back for me and I am off to buy camera #4. I've had the worst luck with cameras on this trip. Luckily there is a pretty big mall near the bus station and prices on electronics should be cheaper here than in Costa Rica. I'm also going to try to find a dentist. I'm overdue for a cleaning and for some reason I can't get floss between two of my teeth. I hope I can get an appointment soon.

Leaving Samara

Everyone has an exam on Friday to measure our progress. Yet they tell us not to worry about it. They actually encourage us to go out on Thursday night by giving us tickets for free drinks at Bar Olas. So everyone is usually hungover on Friday for the test. Seems kind of counter productive. There is also a gradation where the students finishing classes are recognized.The male to female ratios in bars is a bit lopsided. Locals seem to run about 80% men and about 20% women. The tourists run about 60% women and 40% men. The local women stay home and the men go out and dance with and hit on the foreign women. They're a little old school here. A local bar not frequented by tourists is even more lopsided. This is more of a small town thing. In San Jose, women go out to bars and the ratio seems to be about even.

I'm going to miss Samara, but I'm really ready for a break from classes and to get to the next phase of my trip. I'm a bit burned out on classes. Eleven weeks is a long time to be constantly inundated. If I had it to do over, I would have taken one or two one-week breaks in the middle to let my brain rest.

The addresses here, as well as in the rest of country, are kind of funny. Landmarks and directions are used in lieu of street names and numbers. I don't even think street numbers exist. For example, the address of my family in Heredia was “200 Meters West of the Plaza Fatima, Heredia, Costa Rica, Central America”. The address of my family in Samara was “Road to Congrejal, First Entrance After the Bridge, 150 Meters to the Right, Samara, Guanacaste, Costa Rica, Central America”. So if you wanted to mail me a letter, that is how you would address it. (don't send me a letter because I'll be long gone by the time it gets here). It could be one of the reasons my absentee ballot never made it down here.

To date, my absentee ballot has not arrived. I requested it before I left. It know it left Nashville in late September. The trail goes cold after that. I knew that the Davidson County Election Commission and the Central American postal service both working smoothly was going to be iffy at best. The time has long since passed that we should be able to vote by the internet. If the internet is secure enough for banking transactions, it should be secure enough for voting.
The Spanish is improving. The old saying “The more you learn, the less you know” definitely applies to learning a new language. There are still a few subjunctive verb tenses I need to learn, and my vocabulary could improve, but I have the basics down and what I really need to do now is to practice. You just have to throw yourself out there and not worry about getting it exactly right. I can get my point across in many situations, even though I may not be speaking perfectly. For example, a phrase I hear often from people whose native language isn't English is “Yesterday Night”. It's not proper English, but I know what they mean. I probably say a lot of things like that when I speak Spanish. You really just need to talk and have someone around to correct you.

I'm spending one night in San Jose and will leave tomorrow to go to Manuel Antonio. I'm looking forward to Heather, Jason, and Jen coming down. I hope their trip down here is smoother than the one my absentee ballot experienced. Although they are catching a 6:00 am flight the morning after a Widespread Panic concert.

It Was Bound to Happen Sooner or Later

Things that I don't worry about:

1. Getting sick.  I have not had any kind of illness since I've been here.  I know I will need to be a little more careful when I get to some of the poorer countries, but I've eaten pretty much everything and have not been sick at all.  The only times I haven't felt 100% has been due to alcohol and not the food.  If I do get sick from the food or water, I may be out for a few days, but I'll just deal with it.

2. Getting shot, kidnapped, or being drugged and having my kidney stolen. Statistically, these things are just not going to happen.  And I don't think anyone has ever had a kidney stolen.  I could be wrong, but if anything like that happened 10 years ago Greta Van Susterin would still be talking about it.

3. Shark Attacks. Again, statistically, this is just not going to happen.

The things that do worry me are more mundane:

1. Getting a sunburn.   That would suck.

2. Falling coconuts.  This might sound silly, but the trees are really tall and when a coconut falls about 10 feet away and cracks open on the sand, it kind of freaks me out.

3. Irregular verbs and indirect objects.  Frightening.

4. My backpack getting stolen.

Check #4 off the list.

It was bound to happen sooner or later, I just wish it had happened later and somewhere else. I woke up Wednesday morning and my front door was open and my backpack was missing from my apartment.  They came in through the second floor kitchen window, which I had left open, and stole my backpack, which I had left in the living room.  The backpack contained an Ipod, camera #2, sunglasses, my sneakers, a Spanish dictionary, and my notes from class.  I can't believe that they got in and did it all without waking me up.   Samara feels pretty safe and it's easy to get comfortable.

Since Samara is pretty small, and shopping options are limited, I took a bus into Nicoya on Saturday to go shopping for replacement items.  Nicoya is a city of about 50,000 people and is about an hour bus ride from Samara.  People from Samara go to Nicoya to shop, like we used to go to Paducah when I was growing up.  I bought a new backpack, and Ipod, and a memory stick. Electronics and other imported items are kind of expensive here.  The camera I bought in Heredia cost $120 more than it does on Amazon.  I'm going to go without a camera for a few weeks.  I know enough people by now that I'll put up some pictures on a Picassa album titled “Other Peoples' Pictures”.

I am living with a family for my final three weeks in Samara.  I really like my new family.  The father is the town mechanic and his garage is attached to the house.  The house is bigger than the earlier house and the walls go all the way to the ceiling.  So the noise level is more bearable.  They have two teenage sons (Ernesto and David), a boy and girl that are both five years old (Esteban and Kamilla) and a baby (Alexandra).  The kids adorable.  They are very well behaved, but demand attention.  I can only understand about 30%-40% of what they say.  If I don't understand something I just nod my head and say Si.

Living in a small town is almost as strange as living in a foreign country.  Everybody knows everybody and knows everybody's business.  I hardly get out the door before I run into someone I know, whether it be students or teachers/staff from the school, waiters in restaurants, random people I've met, or the town drunk.  It's kind of nice, actually.  The mother in my new family knew my landlady and already knew that I had gotten robbed.

Also strange is living without a cell phone.  I had my cell phone disconnected.  So for the first time in my life, I don't have a phone number.  It's kind of liberating, but I obviously miss the conveniences of having one.  It is difficult to organize things without cell phones or text messages, but it's a little easier here, since there are only three bars in which people are likely to be: Bar Olas, Tutti Frutti, and The Gondala.

I guess my Spanish is getting better, although I still have a long way to go before being able to converse with locals at their speed.  I'm finding out that becoming fluent in a language is a long process.  I can read a newspaper article as long as I have a dictionary.  If it's a subject I'm familiar with, I can comprehend most of it without going to the dictionary.  I went to the police station to file a police report on my backpack.  I later found out that I was using the wrong verb tense to describe my backpack and it's contents.  But the police officer knew what I meant.

Two weeks ago I had to give a presentation on a current event.  This involved reading four Spanish language newspaper articles during the week and presenting on Friday.  I chose the credit crisis in the US because I was pretty familiar with it from reading the news in English and I also wanted to learn some finance terms.  It was pretty rough, but I got though it.  This past Friday, we had to give presentations on how to prepare dishes typical to our native countries.  The Swiss guys presented on Fondue, the Canadian on Chinese Pate, the Dutch guy on Beer (it's pretty common knowledge in Europe that traditional Dutch food is terrible).  I presented on Barbecued Ribs.  I think I did a pretty decent job.  It was videotaped.  If I'm able to get it electronically, I'll post it.  But I might not be able to.

Maria Jose came in second on Latin American Idol.  She was beaten by Margarita from Panama.  I really wanted her to win, but I'm glad she beat out Pako from Mexico.  He was cheesy.

It rained heavily for 48 straight hours this week.  Many secondary roads were knee deep and the main roads were also under water in places.  They are on track to have the rainiest rainey season in 60 years. (http://www.costaricapages.com/blog/travel/rainfall-record-breaking/1552 )

It's hard to believe I've been here for nine weeks!  I have two more weeks of classes, one week of traveling in Costa Rica, and then I will head down to Panama.

Pura Vida!

LIfe is Good

Life is good here. I hope everyone back home is doing well. The news sounds bad with the financial system on the brink and hurricane warnings in Maine.

Last weekend I took a weekend trip to La Fortuna and Santa Elena to see Volcan Arenal and Monteverde. Volcan Arenal is one of the most active volcanoes in Central America. Monteverde is a cloud forest, one of it's main attractions being canopy tours, or zip lining. On a canopy tour, valleys are connected by cables and you slide down the cable using your dominant hand as a break. It makes more sense to see it in pictures. I have posted tons of pictures on Picasa. I posted both the pictures I took as well as the pictures taken by the guides. It was a lot of fun. The guides tell you how much and when to break depending on the length of the line. On one of the longer lines, they told me not to break because it was a really long line and you needed a certain amount of momentum to get to the end. I thought I was using my right hand to keep from twisting sideways, but what I was really doing was breaking. So I didn't have enough momentum to make it all the way to the end of the line. I came to a stop about 100 feet short of the platform. The line was pretty high up. They didn’t list the heights, but it was probably about 300-400 feet. I have to admit I got a little freaked out. A little guy about 4' 10' and 100 lbs came out and dragged me to the platform. It must have been a sight.




Classes have still been going pretty well, although I seem to be a little over my head at the moment, but I keep advancing to the next level each week. We had a culture lesson this past week covering the differences between family life in the US and Latin America. Latin Americans are a lot closer to their families than in the US or Europe. People live with their families until they get married. So single people, whether 20, 25, 35, 45, etc., still live at home with their parents. This can seem a bit odd to Americans. We generally can’t wait to move out and get our own places (and the parents generally look forward to having their houses back). Here, the parents actually like and insist that their kids to live at home. It would be strange for a single person living and working in the same city as their parents not to live at home. Family comes first here. In the US, I think, to a certain extent, work come first. We are much more likely to pull up and move to another city for a few thousand dollars a year more. When they do pick up and move to another city or country to work, it's a really big deal and they do it for the express purpose of sending money back home to the family.

We learned some social stuff as well. A popular line a man would say to a woman here is “¡Quisiera ser mariposa para besar tus petálos!” Apparently, a man can say this to a woman and it is not offensive. Then we started discussing other lines. My contribution was, “¿Tienes un espejo en sus pantalones porque yo puedo me los ver?”. I don’t think my translation was exactly right, but even in English, the humor didn't really translate to non-Americans.

Air Supply is kind of big here. Yes, that Air Supply. The 80’s Australian soft pop band. Roberto, our driver for the weekend expedition, played a medley of Michael Bolton, Chris DeBerg, and Air Supply during the trip. It played the same three songs over and over in a loop. How Can We Be Lovers if we Can't be Friends, Lady in Red, and Lost in Love. I thought his selection in music was a bit strange. When we stopped one time to take pictures of the volcano, Air Supply was playing. Another car was stopped as well. The doors were open and another Air Supply song was playing! I remembered watching one of those shows on VH1 (maybe I Love the 80's) a while back that had a segment on Air Supply. The members of the group were saying how after their popularity waned in the US, they began touring Asia and Latin America. I thought they sounded like a couple of bitter has-beens giving the “We’re huge in Belgium” bit. But apparently in the resat of the world, they are very still very popular. According to Wikipedia, in 2005 they played to a crowd of 175,000 people in Havanna Cuba.

The milk here is super pasteurized. So much so that it is not refrigerated in the store. I bought a quart of milk last week that won't expire until May 2009.

Second Week in Samara

Monday was Costa Rica's Independence day and there were no classes.  On Sunday night there was a parade of lanterns.  All the children in town made lanterns with candles and marched in a parade around town.

Below are pictures of the house I lived in for the first two weeks in Sámara plus some pics I took on the way to school. I have more pics posted on Picasa (http://picasaweb.google.com/jaygraham72)

I will be living in an apartment for at least the next few weeks. I wasn't getting much out of my homestay.  They weren't really talking to me much.  The longest conversation I had during the homestay was with a drunk neighbor.

The animal life here is interesting.  There are a lot of dogs running around. I'm not sure if they belong to people or if they are just "community dogs". The dogs here are, for the most part, intact. The male dogs tend to still have testicles and the female dogs tend to have swollen teats. It's a bit unusual to see that since in the states, most pets are spayed or nutered. I don't know if it's the Catholic influence here or the lack of a Costa Rican Bob Barker. It´s not unusual to see chickens walking around. The roosters usually wake me up before my alarm clock does. It´s also not unusual to see horses walking down the beach and howler monkeys in the trees. True to their names, they make a howling noise that's kind of hard to describe. I´ve attached a short video below with some sound. There are a lot of little crabs running around the beach. They seem to be very skittish and duck into their little holes in the sand if you get anywhere near them. A few mornings ago I woke up and saw a crab in my bedroom. When I turned on the light he saw me and just kind of nonchalantly turned around and walked away.

On Sunday I went on a tour of the Café Diriá coffee processing plant. Coffee is only grown at high altitudes in the mountains. So getting there involved taking cabs up some steep, twisty, rutted roads. It was really interesting to see how coffee beans get processed. It takes approximately four years for a coffee plant to start producing quality beans. The cherries are picked by hand during the day and are processed at night.  All of the hulls and by-products are either used the the process or treated and sold.  Almost nothing is wasted.  After the tour, we were treated to some traditional Costa Rican dances.  

On Sunday night, we built a fire on the beach. It seemed strange that we were able to just build a fire. We bought dogs and sausages and ended up boiling them in beer cans since there were no sticks suitable for roasting weenies.

Classes are as hard as ever. Last week I learned verbs in the imperfect past tense. The imperfect tense is used basically to describe actions occurring in the past without a specific reference to when the actions happened or finished.  Figuring out when to use simple past and when to use imperfect past is very confusing to me.  I don't think there is really an English equivalent for this.   Maybe there is and I just don't realize it.