Dad's Sign

¿Puede decirme donde está la casa de música?

Fun in the Sun

So Zac is off at his first day of school! I sent him out the door with snacks, reading glasses, his new dictionary and pocket change for to-go coffee. (Okay, he really did all the getting ready himself, but I waved goodbye!)

Yesterday, we took advantage of the sun to go riding. Each Sunday, Quito closes 33km of one of the main thoroughfares of the city and rents out bicycles to all comers. Melanie, a Canadian who's been running a refugee camp in the Sudan for the past three years, and Carey, a Californian who flies helicopters in Afghanistan, joined us for the day.

Melanie and I had to take a break from bike riding when we stumbled across some sort of Zumba/Tae-Bo hybrid class in the park. The instructor demonstrated the moves by pretending to attack and beat up a member of the audience. And it all happened to the beat of loud Latin pop music.

After riding in the sun for several hours, we turned our bikes back in and took a trip through the Mariscal Artisan Market. Our best find of the market- Meat on a Stick! Yummmmm.

Zac and I took a break in the shade but it was too late. We are so. so. red. Three weeks in the Costa Rican sun has nothing on one day at 9,000 feet up. Ouch!

Como se dice, "big beer"??

Coffee in Quito, on the whole, doesn’t seem to be as good as in Costa Rica, but the public restrooms are cheaper…

…although I’m still not certain if the old women sitting at the doors, demanding a nickel per use (or a dime if you need paper), are legitimate empleadas or just savvy entrepreneurs. 

We have found one place with really good coffee, though: El Cafecito, which is conveniently located not far from our new home, Hostal Alcala. We only go to El Cafecito for coffees, usually right before or right after lunch, because their food is priced rather high, especially when we can get an almuerzo for just two or three dollars per person at any one of the hundreds of little cafes in this densely populated city. 

And smoggy. Oh lord. We met a British couple and they told us that they don’t look for a bus when they need a ride somewhere, they just look for a big black cloud that rolls down the street. This might be a slight exaggeration, but it isn’t much of one. The combination of the city’s elevation (about 3000 meters) with its anti-Prius emission controls, leave Joy and I gasping for breath much of the time. It’s beautiful though, in a big-damn-city sort of way. 

But I got off track a little. I wanted to explain that almuerzos are set lunches, usually comprised of soup to start, followed by a segundo, which is meat of some kind (beef, chicken, fish) with rice or potato and a small side salad, and then a small dessert, which usually looks a lot like fruit of some kind (and not at all like dessert should look), and served with a glass of freshly-squeezed fruit juice. I would tell you the kinds of fruits used, but I’m not certain if I can pronounce or spell any of them (e.g. guanabana???). 

Anyhow, like I said, these meals are quite cheap, which makes them the perfect lunch for a couple who is trying to stretch a meager budget into April and avoid the verguenza of having to come home early due to lack of funds. They are so well priced that we can justify them even when we know that either Joy is going to get stuck with potatoes or I am going to get stuck with chicken, or both.  We usually have no trouble justifying ice cream or cookies with our coffees afterwards either!

We don’t usually eat breakfast out anywhere, though, choosing instead to eat the free toast and eggs and fruit at the hostal; it ain’t bad, but it ain’t gallo pinto either, if you know what I mean.

Dinners in Quito can be quite reasonably priced as well- if you don’t count the ‘date-night’ dinner at the Italian restaurant last night- and often come with 20oz bottles of Pilsenser, the national Ecuadorian beer. Prior to being de vacaciones in Sudamerica, I didn’t know I was capable of drinking a 20oz bottle of beer- or two- but it turns out I am! Joy, of course, never had any such self-doubt.

Okay, so I’ve spent most of this note talking about food rather than the Spanish-speaking lessons that were the original reason for our extended stay in the city, but that’s because the dumb bastards from the school never picked us up at the airport, as planned. I believe Joy has previously mentioned that we were stood up at the dance, but I don’t think that she mentioned that our Plan B was to do self-study with the books we got from the school in Costa Rica. You don’t need to wonder how Plan B turned out if you were paying attention during the ‘20oz bottle’ section. Plan C, therefore, is looking like an extra week in Quito while I go to the organized Spanish-speaking school a block away from the hostal, while Joy goes to more salsa-dancing lessons (don’t worry, she’s already dragged me to one of those), or to more classes at Crossfit Quito, which is a great gym run by David, a really great guy. 

In another quick side-note, this one hopefully more interesting than smog, on the first day we went to Crossfit Quito Joy was our sole communicator with David, all in Spanish, including interpreting for me when I had something to say more complex than, “where is the bathroom?” or “can I have another beer?” On our second day at Crossfit Quito, David walked over to me right before the starting gun sounded for Joy’s workout (I’m still on shoulder surgery injured reserve), and said to me, in perfectly enunciated English, “The altitude’s going to destroy her.” Dirty bugger. Sometimes I feel as if I’m the only person around who can’t speak both Spanish and English. And though I know that I won’t learn the complete language on this trip, and that this adventure is about much more than me learning how to verify with meseros that they are bringing me a 20oz bottle of beer and not one of those wimpy American 12oz bottles, I really would like to learn some while I’m here, and we think that another week of brain-crushing, fire-hose training will be beneficial to my four-month learning curve. Besides, maybe I’ll learn to understand Joy a little better when she’s signing me up for more salsa lessons! 

Zac's Sign

Díme otra vez, más despacio, ¡por favor!

Llegamos a Ecuador

Heeeeeeere's Quito! Notice the jackets- we're 9000 feet up and after our weeks on the beach, our blood is THIN! We arrived in Ecuador Sunday night. We had planned to spend the week at a Spanish-speaking school and with an Ecuadorian family, but when we got through customs at the airport, no one was there to meet us as planned. So, we defaulted to plan B and went for a beer instead (we call it Doing the Morton- thanks Russ and Iris!). Now we're staying in a sweet little hostal in downtown Quito and studying on our own. Our new friend, Carmen, has promised to take us salsa dancing this week and we've managed to sign ourselves up for a dance lesson tonight down the street. (Zac's pretty excited.)

We're off to dance class now, but will check in later this week!

Gallo Pinto

So before we get into the rest of this story (if I could remember how Paul Harvey began his preambles every afternoon while Grandpa and I sat listening and eating whole tomatoes like apples and arguing over whose was the best- he and I had a tomato-growing contest one year- I would rip it off, en totale, and use it here, but I can’t, so I’d better just move on), I need to clarify up front that I am fully aware that it is extremely foolish for one to believe that they can learn to speak a foreign language simply by taking a one-week course in the relative foreign country, but for some reason, the link between full awareness and full comprehension didn’t connect in my brain…and now I want to cry. 

 

But our teachers, Marco and Gloriana, at the Montana Linda Spanish-speaking school in Orosi, Costa Rica, are extremely kind and never fail to wait patiently as I struggle find words behind my eyelids, or forehead, or nasal cavity, or wherever those buggers go to when they disappear- usually whenever someone asks me a direct question. Marco and Gloriana have taken us on some beautiful walks during our classtimes, when we’ve all set our books aside in lieu of a daily three-hour long conversation in Spanish. The teachers and Joy, all of whom actually understand these conversations, speak slowly enough for me to be able to pretend to understand. I smile a lot, too. 

When we aren’t in class (i.e. on our walks), we spend a good part of our days in the school’s cafeteria, where Joy reads a lot- or looks at wedding pictures on the internet- and I study my Spanish homework; I’m studying diligently right now, as I’m sure you can tell. 

Our evenings this week are spent at the home of our ‘homestay’ family, a small two-bedroom, one-bathroom, red concrete-walled, tin-roofed, cozy abode located in a small neighborhood that could serve as an alternate example of a “gated community”: every house is surrounded by its own steel-spiked, and sometimes razor-wire topped, protective fence- an attribute that runs in direct contrast to how nice everybody in the neighborhood seems to be. 

Especially our family. Living in the house are Adriana, the mother, her two daughters, Meilyn and Hazel, and her son, Jordan. Adriana’s first daughter, Diana, lives in the house that is directly behind, and inexplicably attached by each home’s open-air kitchen, with two small children of her own. The girls’ bedroom, in three shades of pink, currently serves as the guestroom, complete with two separate twin beds that have steel frames and spring-metal mattress supports. They almost certainly won’t support two people at once, so Joy and I have remained in our neutral corners all week.  Hazel and Meilyn, room-less at present, are bunking in the home’s other bedroom with Adriana; we think Jordan might be staying with Diana. 

It’s amazing to Joy and I both how little this family has and how well they get by. The kids are all happy, friendly, patient with the red-headed gringo who struggles to say “good morning”, and Adriana is a model of the tough good-nature only found in mothers.  We hope that our week-long visit will help with family expenses a little, but we suspect the girls might just be happy to have their room back. 

The breakfasts and dinners that Diana and Adriana have been making for us are excellent! I’m excited to see the various types of food that we encounter among the many cultures we’ll visit during this journey, and interested to discover what is each group’s ‘mainstay’: it’s most common dish. 

For Costa Rica, it seems to be gallo pinto, or maybe just rice and beans in general; almost every lunch or dinner we’ve eaten in Costa Rica can be described as “something, something else, rice and beans”. But most breakfasts can be described as “gallo pinto plus something (eggs, cheese, beans, etc.)”. This morning- I think today is Thursday, but I’m unemployed and homeless so I don’t really know or care- while Joy and I were eating our two-mounds apiece of gallo pinto with some scrambled eggs that Diana had prepared (Adriana catches three different buses to get to work, so Diana has been making our breakfasts) I was trying to think of how best to describe gallo pinto, but my gringo sensibilities just can’t tell if it’s really anything other than more rice and beans- just mixed together before being served. As we’ve discussed earlier, Joy knows a lot more than I do about Spanish, and Spanish-speaking cultures, and well, just about everything, so I thought I’d ask for her insight into the secret ingredients of gallo pinto that sets it apart from other rice and bean dishes and makes it the desayuno staple for Costa Rica. 

“I think the beans have to be black,” she said.

Se Habla Espanol

Here we are at Spanish-speaking school! Despite what you might hear later from Zac, I think you all should know that his profesor listened to him for all of five minutes before taking away his Level 1 book and replacing it with Level 2 (and they only have two levels).

They didn't take away my book, but Gloriana, my profesora, has decided that instead of re-learning various Spanish tenses, we should just walk and talk. So each day we take a three-hour hike around Orosi with Zac and Marco, hablando-ing espanol as best we can.

Orosi is located in a small river valley and we're surrounded by low, green mountains on all sides. I can usually find a puppy to hold along our way. Sometimes a man trains horses in the street outside our school. Each time a car passes us on the road, I ask Marco if it's his uncle. About half the time, he says yes.

We'll finish classes tomorrow and leave on Saturday. I'm still not sure I won't turn into a black bean first.

Hotel Kekoldi

We spent an idyllic couple of nights in San Jose before making our way to Orosi for Spanish-speaking school. Gregg, a man I stopped on the street to grill about hotels (and who ended up being our breakfast/bar buddy for the remainder of our stay), convinced us to check out Hotel Kekoldi even though I was convinced it was waaay out of our price range. The owner, Patsy, charmed us from the start and then sealed the deal when she agreed to wash (for free!) all of our dirty laundry. What a perk.

San Jose is packed with people, which is a tad disconcerting after our days in little beach/rainforest towns, but we just grab each other and run across the streets and through the parks, dodging cars, kids, and one odd group of actors dressed in sliced-bread costumes.

We'll be back in a small town, taking Spanish lessons all next week. Will check in with all of you then! 

Sunforest!

I think we were always expecting to be hot during the Central American start of our journey, but we were a little surprised at how wet everything (sheets, blankets, pillows, clothes, etc.) is, and stays, todo el dia, todos los dias.  It takes a minute or two to get used to sleeping on a wet pillow, but, you know, an extra beer before bedtime or an hour on the beach during the day help sleep come ever more easily. (Yeah, I’m sure this one’s going to garner a lot of sympathy.)

I also think that we were expecting more sunshine and less rain; turns out, this is a common mis-expectation (wonder if that one’s going to get past the grammar police?) among visitors to the southern Costa Rican Caribbean coast. Niko, the neighborly bartender/hostel manager/dog-rescuer/temporary rice-cooker (when everywhere else is closed for the night and your favorite ‘two fools’ are starving because they are less-than-adequate planner-aheaders) can attest to this. In fact, he has. On our second or third trip to his bar-within-a-hostel, that is located literally right next to Pachamama (our host for the week), Niko, who was in a special state of BAKEDITUDE (if this one isn’t a word it probably should be; definition: funnily f*cked up but still fully functional), and who had become acquainted enough with Joy and I to leave his bong on the bar when we showed up, expounded about a couple of guests who had been staying at his hostel earlier in the year. Guests he wasn’t very fond of, you’ll see.

"Dumb bastards say to me," Niko starts, “'Niko, why does it rain so much in Punta Uva? Why isn’t there more sun?'"

I says to them, ‘Because this is a f*ckin RAINforest you dumb sh*ts, not a g*ddammed SUNforest!!’ Stupid idiots,” he went on, “I wonder if they ever even read anything in that stack of guidebooks they carried around with them."

“Yeah, dumb bastards,” Joy and I affirmed in unison, sharing a quick glance that relayed our relief at not asking Niko that very question- as planned- and our gratefulness that we’d left both of our guidebooks back on the damp bed.

“Besides that,” Niko continued, providing more insight into how such an easy-going (trust me, it would be very difficult to be both more easy-going than Niko and breathing air at the same time) person could become so perturbed at two patrons. “Motherf*ckers signed up for two weeks- blocked up my best room- and then left after two DAYS! Screwed me straight out of a week and a half’s worth of lodging.”

“All because of a little rain?” we asked- I can’t remember if it was Joy or me who asked, but it’s always safe to assume that all smart, thoughtful questions come from Joy and that all stupid or juvenile ones (e.g. “Did you see all the naked ladies suntanning on the beach today, hehe?”) come from me.

“Nope,” Niko said, breathing in through the mouth, out through the nose, and setting his lighter back on the bar, “it was because of the howler monkeys. They asks me, ‘Niko, don’t you have any “monkey-spray” you can use on your monkeys? Their howling is keeping us up all night.’”

“Monkey-spray?” Joy asked (relevant question)

“Yeah,” Niko said, “for my monkeys. What the f*ck? They think I own the g*ddammed rainforest? If that was the case I’d have turned this mofo into a SUNforest a long time ago- I promise you that.”

“So what did you tell them?” Joy again.

“I told them dumb damn cheeseheads that they should take their stupid asses back to Michigan, sit on their fluffy f*ckin couch with their cheap-ass wine, turn on The Discovery Channel, and pretend they’re in the Caribbean!”

“So it’s not a huge surprise that they left early?” Joy said.

“Not really. No,” Niko said as he handed us each another Pilsen to help with our slumbers that night. They did help, too. As did the three-inch-tall shot glasses that Niko poured full of tequila for us all as he toasted our new marriage.

We stumbled back to our bunk that night, taking turns asking each other if we knew why there seemed to be more rain than sun in the area, and if we’d remembered the monkey-spray. Then as we climbed through the mosquito net onto the sponge of a mattress, Joy asked me if I had been coughing lately. The cough and cold I had had during Christmas was a doozy; in fact, I had coughed non-stop, and completely in lieu of sleeping, during the night before we got on the plane to go to Costa Rica.

I told her that I actually didn’t remember coughing at all since we had been on the Caribbean coast. Pretty funny thing about being down here: your swimsuit may never dry until you FedEx it back to Alaska, and your feet may stay in a constant state of prune-ness, but the natural humidifier can knock the stuffing out of a king-sized cough! 

Scenes from Panama

The Bull's Mouths

  

After a week in Puerto Viejo, Costa Rica, we decided to take a quick trip down to the Bocas del Toro islands of Panama. (Look! Panama beer!) 

The two-day whirlwind voyage included:

•  Four bus rides: some bumpy, some worse
•  Two border crossings, both hot and slow 
•  Two longer-than-advertised boat rides (neither one of them very smooth either) 
•  Two spare barf bags in Zac’s daypack 
•  Four Dramamine pills to help keep those barf bags empty 
•  One twenty-year old hotel manager who accommodated our meager budget- and threw in
   air-conditioning, too(!) 
•  Three ice cream cones that tasted like Grandma’s homemade 
•  Seventeen street vendors trying to sell us any drug we could think of 
•  One Hemingway-esque afternoon on the pier at a table for two, with our pens, books and beers... 

 ...oh, and one Panama hat, bought from the sweetest old lady on the Isla de Colon.

 
Keith, we took the pirate picture for you. 

Costa Rican Fauna

As far as we know, these are (left to right from top): a sloth, three sand pipers, a spider monkey, a...lizard?, a tree full of howler monkeys and a "watch out! monkey crossing!" street sign.

Perdido

Beach-walking in the movies is graceful. It is light, fun, frolicky and romantic. But beach-walking in real life is sometimes more congruent with a twenty-minute, turned-to-eleven, hard-core Stairmaster workout- the grace and glamour sinking into the three-inch deep sand divots left behind each trudging step. But sandy beaches are long distances and degrees away from offices and cubicles, both farther and further from that type of sinking, so grace or no, beach-walking is hard to beat.

Especially yesterday, as Joy and I took advantage of the sky’s blueness, and the sun’s brightness, in a three-mile beach walk down to Manzanillo: a small town at the southern-most edge of Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast. The walk was fun and fantastic, though Grace got f*cked, and the freckles on my face- for once- multiplied faster than the bug-bites on my legs. 

Not too long after we started out, a new friend joined our camino: his tag said his name was Bassam, but we called him “lost dog”, or “perdido” for short. He trucked along with us all the way to Manzanillo, sometimes ahead of us, sometimes behind or in parallel, but never far enough away that Joy and I could avoid the glares of other beach-goers as they associated the dog directly with us as he trotted through their picnicking places and sabotaged their sunbathing setups. 

Nor were we able to avoid such association as Perdido followed us up two flights of stairs, into the famous Maxi’s Restaurante, and sat right next to our table as we ate lunch and drank a beer, and as all the patrons and employees glared at us like the grace-less gringos we surely appeared to be.  As we were finishing one of the waiter gruffly asked, “¿Es suyo?”, to which we honestly replied that no, it wasn’t our dog, and then tried to keep from both bursting into laughter and dying from embarrassment as Perdido dutifully kept to our heels as we walked out of the restaurant and back up the beach.

 

He went swimming in the ocean with Joy and peeing in the forest with me, and , not surprisingly at this point, came all the way back to our bungalow in Punta Uva and made himself at home on our porch- it was a lot cool and a little heartbreaking to have found such a fun new friend for a day. But alas, with the name and number from Perdido’s tag, our neighbors helped us contact his owner. Perdido’s slight hesitation to go home with the owner when he came was a little cool and a lot heartbreaking… 

…but tomorrow’s a new day and another walk down the beach.  

La vida es bella

1) Our breakfast table 

2) The view from our breakfast table 

3) The spider monkey watching us as we eat breakfast

We've been at Pachamama for about a week now. It's situated right in the heart of the Costa Rican rainforest. The only walls in our bungalow surround the bedroom. Other than sleeping and bathing, the rest of life is lived al fresco. Bill brings us pots of coffee and home-cooked breakfast every morning. We walk and bike along the road (singular) and the beaches. At night we head to the bar next door for a beer and a cheap dinner. Life is good.

Oh, sometimes it rains all day and we spend it reading indoors.

We don't mind at all.

Bienvenidos a Costa Rica

:

We made it! Whew. After a 3:30am wakeup call, 6 hours on a plane, 7 hours in the Atlanta airport, and waaaay too much money spent on airport food and books, we landed in Costa Rica! Customs let us through (ha!) and we managed to find ourselves a taxi driver who knew where our hotel was located.

We stayed at El Cacique at the recommendation of Bill, the man we're renting a bungalow from in Puerto Viejo. Jon, a thirty-something tico (that's what the Costa Ricans call themselves), rents out a spare room in the house he shares with his mother and father. He was very hospitable and sold us Costa Rica's finest (read: cheapest) beer almost immediately upon arrival.

The next day we hopped on a bus- after hopping Zac up on Dramamine- and rode six hours to Puerto Viejo and our home for the next week, Pachamama.

More later- we're off to walk the beach! Hasta pronto, chamacos!