What’s past is prologue

Yesterday was a rough day for me in Spanish class. We had what should have been an easy written exercise where we had to conjugate the verb “estar” as a helper for a participle or an adjective. That simple exercise created an epic crisis of confidence for me. The exercise was to fill in the blanks on 27 oraciones (sentences). I did just fine on the conjugating for the verb tense I answered in, but I got the tense wrong on about half of the sentences. It was made worse by the fact that I couldn’t explain in Spanish what I was having trouble with. Profesora Maria kept patiently trying to tell me in Spanish how the participle relates to the verb and I couldn’t get the point across that my problem was way more basic than that. Bottom line is that I was having a really difficult time picking out the tense cue in the sentence and I couldn’t explain what I couldn’t understand. For example, I was missing that the word “ya” implies present tense. I had a similar problem two weeks ago until I finally realized that “si” without the accent over the “i” means “if” (where “si” with the accent over the “i” means “yes”). It was like a real life version of one of those dreams where you’re in school and you know you have a test, but you can’t find the classroom. We finally sorted it out, but it was a non-trivial speed bump for me. It was bad enough that I had no energy left for blogging yesterday.

Jill, on the other hand, is killing it in Spanish.

We went for a walk yesterday afternoon and saw some cool stuff.

I wasn’t able to get a picture, but this morning at 6AM, while I was making Jill’s coffee, a toucan flew right by our living room window. We have learned their call from hearing them at Spanish school. They make a kind of croaking sound. The first one I’ve seen at the house. The colibris (hummingbirds) are becoming more frequent at our feeders.

Today’s Spanish class was much better than yesterday, which is to say I didn’t lose my mind in today’s class. Neither Jill or I have had two bad classes back to back. We have a theory that our Profesoras let each other know when one of us struggles and they make sure the next day is a confidence builder 🙂

The hardest part of this adventure for Jill is that we are heads down learning Spanish for three hours every morning, then she has to turn around and find the energy to be a good therapist in the afternoon. Since she has a long afternoon of counseling today, we stopped on the way home from Spanish school to fuel up with pupusas and our favorite cas frescos at La Fiesta de la Pupusas.

It’s hard to believe that we head back to Austin on Saturday for our intermission. Our grand adventure is almost half over. Jill and I are culling through the stuff we brought to Costa Rica, but haven’t used. We will take that stuff back to Austin on this trip to create more headroom in our checked bag weights for our final return to Austin. I may take an inventory of the stuff we didn’t use for a future blog post.

One thing that I will be fetching back to Costa Rica from Austin is my iFixit Mako Driver Kit. I’ve needed to tighten the screws on 2 pairs of eyeglasses since we got here and do not have the proper tools with me.

Today’s bonus photo: You may have been dying to know what our traditional souvenir-hunting exercise yielded in Tamarindo (Playas del Coco did not rate a souvenir). Your wait is over. I give you The Giraffe of Tamarindo…