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.