Red and Green

 

Christmas is coming...

Though there's no snow in sight, there are plenty of lights!

Last Thursday, our school band (completely directed by the awesome senior Marcos) participated in the festival of lights parade called Festival Monteverde Brilla.






I've never seen so many santa hats for sell in one place and definitely didn't expect to see them for sale HERE! Kids came to school the next day wearing them too.

(Unfortunately I don't have any pictures of the parade itself but hope to upload a video soon of a snipit of our band playing at the Centro Comercial where we go every Friday for the Farmers' Market).

Rainbows on hillsides...

You know this song from the movie Sound of Music?
Rain drops on roses
and whiskers on kittens,
bright copper kettles
and warm wollen mittens...

These are a few of my favorite things here:

Rainbows on hillsides
and bright bugs on flowers,
fresh Christmasy winds
and cat-hair-fine showers...

(Yeah, that's it's for now with my attempt to write my own lyrics to match...)

But seriously, this is what it looks like here! I took this picture on my walk home from school last week or the week before.

Wildlife- don't step!

 I was walking from the Meeting room to the library at the Friends School when I looked down and saw an old rusty reddish screw-like thing. I thought maybe it was an old piece of a plastic something so I bent down to pick it up and put it in the trash. That's when I discovered it was moving and was alive! I'd give this caterpillar First Prize for the ugliest caterpillar!

Shortly after arriving at our neighbors' house for Game Night, and after taking off my rain and jacket and leaving them outside in their protected open-air entryway, their polite daughter welcomed me in and, as always, started jabbering away in her non-confrontational voice. Little did I realize what she was jabbering away about until she calmly pointed back the way I'd come to the spider that I almost stepped on! Yup, this was about a food away from my, and their, shoes and their front door - a baby tarantula. Good thing they're harmless!

Imagenes / Images

Ropa mojada hangs to dry on the line
Casas bonitas sit with open doors
Gallinas vistosos run about as they please
Bananas verdes wait to be picked
Jamaica flowers welcome you home...

(Note: Jamaica is Hibiscus. They make juice and tea out of it here and it has vitamin C and other minerals.)

Recent events

Gringo Stringo plays bluegrass at the Friends School

"Dirty" chai at the Monteverde Coffee shop/house - delicious!

Sloth mama and baby

On the day Jerry and I missed the school bus, we took a cab to school and the super nice cab driver stopped along the way to show us this sloth mama and baby hanging out on a telephone cable above the side of the main road.

Back to Blogging

My apologies to all who are/were checking out this blog regularly or sporadically.
I didn't have internet on my laptop for the last month so that's why I stopped posting for a while. But now I can get back into the habit of posting here.  :)

Recent photo:

Painting on wall of La Colina Lodge where I went for restorative yoga

Wind

​Sweet wind reminds me of home
And reminds​ ticos of Christmas
Viento navideno they call it.
This sporatic wind is like
the air of our new hair dryer,
that semi-dries the humid air,
And stirs things up and about,
that stay hidden most of the time,
Except now, tossed like a salad,
There's missing the first home snowfall,
but seeing something new each day here...

Natural foods

To eat: Squeeze to open and such insides out. They're slimy but sweet!

To eat this mystery vegetable: peel(?), then boil like a potato.

15 de septiembre (Independence Day)

gathering before the parade started

 Yes, we worked on this federal holiday. We left home at 7:30am (via taxi, which out here is a red van with yellow triangle) and didn't get home until about 1:30pm, but I had a great time! We were in the town parade, and our school (Creativa) was one of the largest and best groups in the parade, so I'm told.

We had our banner at the front (which Jerry helped carry, of which I didn't get a picture- bummer!), then our awesome* band, complete with xylophone and cymbal players, and baton twirlers, and our super mini banda group, plus students and teachers in the traditional dance group.

*Why is Creativa's band awesome? Because all the songs were composed by one (or two?) Creativa seniors, and the whole band was DIRECTED by a Creativa senior. His compositions included not only separate drum parts but also the xylophones and cymbals! Plus, the music was, in my opinion, very creative and not what you might traditionally expect of a marching band. I'll try to post a video here so you can here it, though the viewing part isn't so great (it might be upside down- sorry!).

What is mini banda? This means band of little kids. I, along with 6 other wonderful women of Creativa (teachers, directors, and interns) had word with 30 students grades 1-4 since the beginning of school every day for 45 minutes at the END of the day OUTSIDE on preparing drum beat rhythms and marching while drumming. Let's just say it was sometimes chaotic, especially considering there were 28 boys, and only 2 girls. But the kids did really well in the end; it was exciting!

flag ceremony before the parade

And of course we all wore our red Creativa shirts and blue jeans, so as to be patriotic. (The flag is red, white, and blue! Sound familiar?)

Women Leaders of Mini Banda (and one drum player)

Name the Bug!

What names would you give these bugs?

Prices of things non-food related

Here are approximate prices of things in US dollars that we have found nearby.

land nearby:  1.something acres = $100,000.00 (approximately)
toaster oven:  $60
taxi from school to Centro Comercial (distance = ???): $2
taxi from Centro Comercial to our home: $4
pressure cooker (one year warranty): $27

sunscreen (small, about 8-10 oz): $20!!

Food prices

 Conversions from colones to US dollars are approximate.

5 mangos (ripe) = $2 (Super Vargas)

16 oz jar of peanut butter  = $6 or $7

1 bunch of fresh basil, 1 bunch of lettuce, 1 bunch of arugula, 2 squash, 2 small eggplant, 3 huge tomatoes, all organic = $9 (Ferria / Farmer's Market)

1 banana at pricey corner store called, "Whole Foods" = $0.10

15 brown eggs = $3.20 (Ferria / Farmer's Market)

Civics Week

 
Costa Rica's Independence Day was on Sept. 15th. Therefore, every morning LAST week, for the first half hour of school, all students and staff assembled in the 1st and 2nd grade classrooms (that can become one large room, the ONLY space on campus inside large enough for everyone) for presentations related to celebrating Costa Rica. Each presentation is called, "Acto Civico" (civic act?) and all presentations are a culmination of work done by students each afternoon for 45 minutes since the beginning of school.

Each morning started with everyone standing silently with right hand on one's heart while the Costa Rican flag was proudly paraded into the room in proper flag-holding style, with one person holding the flag up so that it wouldn't drag on the ground. The school's flag was also carried in, and both were put in stands for the duration of the presentation.

Then we all sang the Costa Rican national anthem and song of the Puntarenas province in which is Monteverde. Luckily they provide the words by means of overhead projector. After the presentation (which I'll get to), at the end we sang, "O, Costa Rica!" (like a national patriotic song that isn't the anthem).

At first I wasn't sure if I should put my hand on my heart while the flag parades in, or if I should sing the words, since it isn't my country. But I saw other "international" (non-tico) teachers putting their hands on their hearts and trying to sing along as best they could, in order to provide a model for the students I'm sure, so I joined in of course.

The presentations included:
1. animals of Costa Rica - monkey, manatee, butterfly, some sort of deer-like thing...
2. sayings (dichos) of Costa Rica (I'm hoping to get this from the teachers soon)
3. Kindergarteners in traditional Tico costumes danced to typical music of CR
4. traditional clothing of the various provinces of CR
5. famous people of Costa Rica - (I'm waiting for the list of who they presented)
6. Dances by teachers and students with traditional clothing

kindergarteners prepare to dance

students and teachers perform typical Costa Rican dances

Toad

toad found just off our deck/porch

Learning the Language

Here's word learning in action! I imagine those in the TESOL field, or anyone who has taught or learned a second language, would appreciate this!

1. Out of the blue, while walking to school up the tiny windy dirt trail on the coast side of the main road, Jerry asked, "What does tienes mean?" How cool that he had heard it already so often in the last three days that it was rolling around in his brain! "It means, 'you have'" I responded.

2. The boy jumped from tree to rock to ground, and ran around the grassy grounds with the other kids. As a native English-speaking eight year old who has been here less than five days, he has already picked up some Spanish. "Guys, come check out this pizote!" he yells, as a coatamundi (or pizote, pronounced pee-so-tay) wanders carelessly nearby. Here's proof of how important it is to learn vocab with CONTEXT!

3. I learned in Spanish class in high school that tierra means dirt, soil, earth. Every time I heard this word, I pictured the actual brown tangible stuff in which kids like to play and worms make their home. However, I asked one of the maintenance guys at school what the metal-looking stick was that sticks out of the ground next to a power line. He explained that it's a tierra, and how it works during a lightning storm. Then I realized that he meant the stick grounds the electricity in a lightning storm.

4. What's the most difficult thing about the language here? What I have found to be tricky so far is that my Spanish doesn't yet enter into the realm of p.c. pragmatics; I don't know how to speak about special education without saying something offensive. Luckily for me, my main support person, a Tica, is patient, she speaks Spanish clearly, and she doesn't mind repeating things for me.

My office (1)

My office from the outside (right-most window)

View of the Necoya Gulf from my new office!

Agouti

It's a guinea pig! No, it's an earless deer-rabbit! No, it's an agouti! (The thing in back is a tree, not its tail. It seems tail-less.)

more plants

cool spherical seed (?) pods

weird yellow plants

School

1. Students wear a school t-shirt, but they get to choose which color, and they can wear whatever pants/skirt they want. Staff members don't have a uniform.

2. Students call teachers by their first names, without "Miss" or "Teacher," etc. Therefore, I am "Abby" and Jerry is "Jerry." Funny thing too. There are more than 19 teachers at school, and only 2 are male, and BOTH have the name Jerry, or Gerry (pronounced the same).

3. The school bus that takes us to school is actually the same mustard yellow that's in the U.S. The difference is that the inside looks nicer (each seat with it's own seat cover) and each seat has a seat belt. Our driver, Hernan, was telling me that it's the law in Costa Rica that children must be seat belted when on a bus. Those who are not children do not have to be seat belted, by law.

4. The school rules are pretty much the same. Be respectful of self, others, and property, don't chew gum, don't use profanity or offensive language, be/act safe, and no running in the halls (all halls are outdoors though).

5. The school rule that is not the same as the U.S. is that all students must take OFF their shoes at the door to their classroom, mostly to avoid tracking in dirt and mud, especially during the rainy season.

Just photos

Gulf of Necoya way out there at sunset (Aug 27)

bug on fuzzy goldfish plant (at school)

Laundry

No wonder the clothes pins are plastic and not wooden! lol It rains too much here for wooden ones to stay looking as clean...

It seems the trick is to start laundry early enough on Friday or Saturday that there's time for it to get the beat of midday sun to dry it well before the afternoon rain falls, and with time to get three loads done each weekend. Yeah, our clothes seem to get dirtier sooner here...

Bugs Inside

4 scorpions so far
2 water bugs, that look like cockroaches
1 weird large brown beetle with two legs missing half their length each*
1 fuzzy cool spider
1 mustard-yellow large beetle*
the usual small spiders, moths, flies, and mosquitos

* Pictures below

large brown beetle missing half of 2 legs

mustard yellow beetle

Mystery #2

What flower or type of plant is this?

It grows fairly tall (blossom above my waist), and I noticed it on the way from the high school classrooms walking down to the middle school area. Sometimes the blossom gets taller (3" tall) and the blossom/colored part seems very sturdy.

First meals

- July 28:  Dinner on the airplane from Texas to Costa Rica (American Airlines) - not Costa Rican but instead American. (first picture)

- July 29:  Breakfast at Hotel Eskalima (FREE!) - Fresh blended-in-house passion fruit juice, fresh blended-in-house orange juice, fresh blended-in-house mixed fruit juice + gallo pinto* + egg(s) + toast with guava jam/jelly, fresh cut pineapple, papaya, and watermelon. (second & fourth picture)

- July 29:  Lunch at a soda (meaning small mom and pop hole-in-the-wall eatery) in Alajuela - one hamburger each + freshly homemade french fries + tap water (potable!) (third picture)

Dinner on the plane- chicken & rice

Breakfast at Hotel Eskalima

Lunch ($3.50 for 2 hamburgers)

Hotel Eskalima- freshly blended fruit juices and milk

Mystery #1

We noticed bird poop on our kitchen table yesterday. It was definitely not there before, we definitely closed the doors at night, and we definitely have not seen a bird fly overhead inside, nor have we heard a bird.

Any ideas as to how the fresh bird poop got on the table? (We had previously cleaned the room QUITE thoroughly.) And yes, it DOES look very much like bird poop, and Jerry would know given that he had a pet bird for quite some time in the past...

First Impressions

My first impressions of here (Monteverde, Costa Rica) were:

Wow,  this is surreal because:

a. It's so incredibly green,  biodiverse, unusual (tropical yet high elevation so not hot), beautiful and nothing like anything I've seen before so seems like we're on a movie set or in another world

AND

b. It's like Nederland (CO) except with a HUGE influx of one group of people that all speak the same language so much so that many signs in town are in both languages (so imagine if Ned had  a significant larger number of Nepalese with more money than locals living in town causing changes like signs to be in English and Nepalese).

I also thought:

1. We are in the middle of nowhere!

2. The school is more "on the map"  than I thought. It seems to be well-known and well-connected. Two American  teachers whom were on the school tour with us today (who are in CR for a month's vacation) are linked to Putney and the private school world...

3. As everyone has said,  Ticos (Costa Ricans) are super nice! This includes all the hotel staff where we stayed for two nights in Alajuela (5 minutes from the airport). They were very helpful, friendly, informative, and accommodating, and the front desk staff are quite proficient in English. If you need a place to stay near the Costa Rican airport, stay at Hotel Eskalima!

4. This is an incredible place to be if you're into nature and art of many kinds! (duh)

5. It's like home in that it's a super small town, (surrounding area population is 7,000 but Monteverde is about 300 people) and there are lots of grass roots efforts. Plus, people are SUPER into protecting the environment here, there's a lot of wind, and you can drink the water and eat the raw produce! Oh, and it's very clean; this is the first Latin American town I've seen without trash in the streets!

There has been little rain so far and with the wind, it doesn't feel that humid for CR. The weather is like home, including a bit chilly at night (65 degrees F last night at 2 am), and just a little more humid than home. I'm sure once it starts raining a lot every day it will feel less like home weather-wise.

Here is the "Centro Comercial" where we first 'landed' when we got to Monteverde.

Flora

As I'm sure you know or can imagine, the plants here are INCREDIBLE! There are bananas growing outside the kitchen at the school, and dark blueish black berries that grown on a tree at school that you can eat called marias. They taste sweet and apparently the kids often eat them.

There are tons of beautiful flowers, ferns, bromeliads, orchids, palms, stick plants, moss, philodendrons, etc. all over the place. The dirt road on the way to our home is lined with bright pink hibiscus, and there are plants growing naturally outside that I grew up knowing as indoor fancy house plants!

ferns, bromeliads, and more

pink hibiscus



Huge ficus tree, or higueron

Fauna

The first morning here at our new home, I saw a toucan, parrots, other birds, my first coatamundi, many hummingbirds, and the two horses that graze very close by.

Within the next few days, I saw tons of colorful butterflies that I'd never seen alive before, including a metallic-like blue butterfly, a few agouti, MANY more coatamundis (called pizotes in Spanish), a red-brown parrot, interesting shiny beetles, and not so new things such as dragonflies, leaf-cutter ants, centipedes, caterpillars, moths, spiders, etc.

Here's the pizote outside our kitchen digging for food. (We named him JC, for Johnny Coatamundi.)

New Home

Here are pictures of our new home.

We are quite lucky to live here! It's spacious, well-lit, and came with a clothes washer, full stove, full fridge (and freezer), and microwave, and even more luxurious, a clothes dryer (stored outside the back/'mud room' door in its own locked space). The kitchen came too with lots of pots, pans, dishes for eating off of, baking with, and storing things in, and utensils including a blender, potato masher, peeler, grater, TWO garlic presses...

We even have a porch swing, camping chair, and an adirondack-like white wooden chair out front!

The shower is pretty 'normal' and same with the toilet and sinks. The only thing different is that we have a side red washroom/laundry room sink too. Guess what?!? We can drink the water here!

living room looking towards kitchen

bedroom (clothes are in open closet)



view from living room and bedroom of clothesline and forest

Beforehand

The month or so before coming down here to beautiful Costa Rica (and indeed the country is rica in beauty!) was spent getting documents ready and trying to pack without knowing entirely what would be available in the small town we're now living in.

The most difficult was trying to get a "Police Letter of Clearance" which, by law apparently, Arizona cannot issue, unlike most states in the USA. This meant we opted for getting the super official FBI Background Checks in hopes that that would trump the AZ-state-only Police Letter. It was also tricky because we have Arizona state driver's licenses (which we needed to update our passports), but I had to get a certified copy of my birth certificate which had to be obtained and apostilled in Colorado, and the FBI Background Checks we had to get through DC, and apostilled in DC.

We luckily got everything together just in time and made an appointment to go to the Costa Rican consulate in NYC to get our official "provisional" (temporary) work visas. After two hours of copying documents and running to the Bank of America to direct deposit money to the consulate office for the visas ($32 per person), we had our visas!

It's still not clear to me what good these temporary visas do given that we still have to apply for permanent work visas, or else we have to leave the country in 30 or 90 days; (the amount of days is not clear). I'm guessing it makes the process faster, hopefully.

So here is a pic of the CR consulate in NYC, and pics of fun had in NYC and upstate... Thanks to my parents, Jerry's family, and P&B!