A rough day in paradise

The volcano Poas has been having minor rumblings for the last few days, letting off sulfuric steam. Poas sits in one of Costa Rica’s many national parks. We were thinking about taking Jill’s parents to see Poas late last week, but it’s a longish drive and they (appropriately) close the park with no notice if the volcano is showing any activity. If Poas really gets going it can affect air traffic, as sulfuric acid and silica are not good for jet engines. The recent activity didn’t do anything more than create a cloud layer that made it hard to see the mountains/volcanos last night. It was kind of neat in an Eye of Sauron kind of way.

We were up extra early this morning to get Jill’s parents to the airport.

Jill and I mastered the Arrivals logistics at the airport last week. This was our first time to do Departures. One of the things about Costa Rica that’s generally nice is that they don’t have big gaudy signs cluttering up the roadways. But it wouldn’t hurt them to make the signs at the airport just a little bigger.

Sign complaints not withstanding, we figured out how to deposit Jill’s parents in the right spot and they promptly texted us that they were through security.

We declared victory at the airport and headed off to the Parque Central of Alajuela to meet Profesora Ana for another field trip. We found the pay-to-park lot behind Pops (the chain of ice cream shop that appears to have a strangle hold on the Costa Rican market). I parked and correctly deciphered that I needed to go to the booth where the attendant was reading the periodico (newspaper). She looked up from her paper, jotted down the number of my parking space, and gave me a time stamped ticket.

We did not eat breakfast before leaving the house, as we planned to grab something to eat before meeting Profesora Ana at 8AM. In the farming town of Atenas there are sodas serving breakfast as soon as people are up and around. We did not know that in the big city of Alajuela (population right around 1 million) nothing opens before 8AM. So our plan to get breakfast somewhere on the square before our 8AM rendezvous was doomed from the start. I found myself with low blood sugar. When I have low blood sugar all bets are off. I wish that wasn’t the case, but I own it. Jill spied a McDonalds on the other side of the park. McDonalds is nothing if not the breakfast venue of last resort so we made a bee-line for it. That took us directly in front of the beautiful cathedral on the square. Jill stopped to take a picture of the beautiful cathedral on the square.

My reaction to Jill wanting to pause and take a picture was less than ideal. She upped the ante with her response and just like that I had one wheel in the ditch.

Upon arriving at said McDonalds we found out they were NOT in fact open. They just had the shutters partway up while the morning crew got ready for the 8AM open. I would wager that there is nowhere else in the entire FECKING universe that McDonalds isn’t open by 6AM. Just to summarize, I had snapped at Jill for tarrying to take a picture of a lovely cathedral en route to a McDonalds that wasn’t even open. And I STILL had low blood sugar.

Profesora Ana later told us that Alajuela is referred to in Costa Rica as the City of Mangoes. True to the municipal moniker, the central park has a stately arrangement of mango trees that are about 100 feet tall. Who likes mangoes? Green parrots like mangoes. The central park in Alajuela is home to a horde of green parrots. Parrots are nice to look at, but they make a godawful racket. At this point, I’m sitting on a bench with low blood sugar, feeling like an ass for having snapped at Jill, and listening to parrots mock me while they gnaw on mangoes.

Ultimately Profesora Ana found us just before 8AM sitting disconsolately on a park bench (benches in parks and ONLY in parks are called “poyos”) staring at McDonalds, willing them to raise the shutters. She said something to the effect of “You Americans and your McDonalds…” and then led us to a nice Panaderia that opened in time for us to walk in and sit down. We got some food in me, but by that point I was in an unrecoverable spin.

Ana turned the Panaderia into a makeshift classroom and we got started. I might have been able to salvage my morning, but today’s Spanish lesson was all about conjugating verbs for the past tense. All of the work we’ve done learning how to conjugate verbs in the present tense has had my nostrils right at the water line, but I felt like I was hanging in there. Here’s my takeaway from today’s lesson: “Most of the conjugations you already learned are still useful, but in the past tense you shuffle up which conjugation goes with which performer of the verb.

What????

Case in point:

• Yo estudio Espanol – Present tense: I am studying Spanish
• Ella estudio Espanol – Past tense: She studied Spanish

The thing that made the penny drop for me (and not in a good way) is that, by convention, Spanish speakers drop the pronoun and rely on the conjugation to convey the pronoun. Boom – like a thunderclap – I’m no longer sure what “Estudio Espanol.” means. With the morning that I’d had, I pretty much threw in the towel at that point. I went through the motions for the rest of the classroom activity, but I was pretty demoralized.

After two weeks of going up and to the right this is my first big stumble in Spanish. I’m sure I’ll be up and at ’em again tomorrow, but it’s been a rough day for me. Jill, on the other hand, is killing it.

Knowing when she’d lost her audience, Professor Ana adjourned the classroom session and took us on a walking tour of Alajuela. We went to the Alajuela Cultural Center learned all about Juan SantaMaria, who was a seventeen year old drummer from Alajuela in the Costa Rican army. Juan volunteered for a successful suicide mission to drive the banditos yanquis invaders out of Costa Rica. I need to do some fact checking, but according to the Costa Rican version of events: The US wanted to build canals to allow ships to transit from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast via Lake Nicaragua. The US interests set about appropriating Costa Rican and Nicaraguan land by force for the endeavor. The Costa Rican army and one Juan Santamaria caused enough trouble that the invaders went back to the drawing board and made up Panama out of whole cloth (Panama used to be northern Colombia) to build the canal there. The international airport bears Juan Santamaria’s name and Alajuela is proud of him.

After the cultural center Ana took us to El Mercado to show us what a REAL market looks like. I think I mentioned previously that there appears to be an innate civic pride that every Costa Rican has in their hometown institutions. At that point in the day the last thing I needed was the sensory overload of what is, in all fairness, an impressive market. Where the Atenas mercado has maybe 20 vendors, Alajuela needs a map to tell you what’s in each hall of the market.

As a little parting gift Profesora Ana said that tomorrow in class we will need to tell Profesora Maria what we saw and learned in Alajuela today. Yup, tomorrow we’ll be bumbling through Juan Santamaria’s exploits in past tense. At least I was paying attention to that part.

After the market, I just wanted to go home. We walked back to the parking lot, paid our 3,000 Colones ($5) to the parking attendant and headed back to our quiet little town of Atenas.

We made it back home with no further drama and commiserated over a comfort-food lunch of Ritz crackers and $20 PriceSmart cheese.

Jill’s been upstairs seeing clients while I work on today’s post.

Jill and I are fully reconciled from our earlier discord. We are going to celebrate an early Valentine’s day tonight with frozen pizza. If anything can salvage this day, surely it’s pizza and wine with my favorite person…