We got Jill’s sister Stephanie safely to el aeropuerto Juan Santamaria yesterday morning and she made it safely home to Frisco. Stephanie was our last scheduled visitor until my sister Mia and family come on April 18th.
Over the next three weeks we have two priorities:
- Study Spanish
- Enjoy weekend field trips to lugares differentes (different locations)
As far as studying Spanish goes… We’ve loved having all of our guests over the last 7 weeks, but we are at the point in our Spanish lessons where we can really benefit from steping on the gas. We ideally want to spend at least two hours every day outside of class reviewing what we’ve learned and learning new vocabulary. That’s easier to do when we’re not boozing it up with guests 🙂
We’ve got five more field trips on the books:
- Puerto Viejo de Talamanca
- La Fortuna
- Ojochal
- Santa Teresa Beach – with Team Mosher
- Playa Potrero
Puerto Viejo (Old Port) is first on the docket. Puerto Viejo is in the Limon province in the far southeast corner of Costa Rica on the Carribean just north of the frontier with Panama. We are excited to experience Puerto Viejo because we’ve had multiple people tell us that Limon is culturally totally different than every other part of Costa Rica. Everyone says it’s more Carribean than Spanish, with rasta influences including creole and reggae. Why, yes please!
We’ve been told that the downsides of the Carribean side of Costa Rica are that it gets hot and humid and there are more mosquitoes. Having seen exactly zero mosquitoes in Atenas (to be fair I may have had a mosquito bite, but I wasn’t certain that’s what it was) we still have our full complement of Deep Woods Off.
Puerto Viejo is 112 miles as the crow flies from Atenas, basically equivalent of going from Austin to Waco. However due to the mountains between here and there it’s 158 miles of road and the Waze lady says it’ll take about 5 hours. With that in mind we will hit the road right after Spanish on Jueves (Thursday) and hopefully get there with a couple of hours of daylight to spare.
Here’s where we will be staying:
https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/19366039?s=51
I know what you’re thinking…
You’re leaving on Jueves (Thursday) right after Spanish, but isn’t Jueves date night?!?
Never fear. I’ve already scouted suitable date-night venues in Puerto Viejo on Trip Advisor. Here’s where I’m leaning at this point:
We will spend three nights in Puerto Viejo, eating jerk chicken, listening to reggae, and hitting all of the beaches. We will come back on Domingo (Sunday) en la tarde (in the afternoon).
As for today’s update…
Spanish school was heartening today. During our break we heard the distinctive croaking song of a toucan. Jill and I stealthily slunk as close as we could to see if we could catch a glimpse of him. We got to see him through the trees, but didn’t get a great look. Toucans are pretty much the coolest thing you can see here and it is universally true that if you tell a local that you saw a toucan they will say “Buena suerte!” (Good luck!) or “Por dicha!” (For happiness!).
Diego, the owner of the school stopped by to chat with us during our break and we managed to have a full-fledged conversation with him in Espanol. We also talked with Profesora Maria for two of the three hours of class, with the remaining hour being dedicated to drilling on los verbos irregular in preterito (past tense of irregular verbs). We continue to get glowing reviews and encouragement from our profesoras. As an insecure over-achiever that’s just what the doctor ordered 🙂
I’ll admit that I’m not looking forward to tomorrow’s class because Profesora Maria telegraphed that we will be spending the day tomorow with Profesora Ana on verbos reflexivos (reflexive verbs). Reflexive verbs give me trouble because I can’t seem to get the hang of when to use the reflexive form and when to use the standard form.
Example:
The verb “dormir” means “to sleep” but there is both a regular (dormir) and reflexive form (dormirse).
Both of the following are appropriate
- Jill durmio con dos alomohados. (Jill sleeps with two pillows.)
- Jill se durmio despues de ver World of Dance. (Jill fell asleep after watching World of Dance.)
My sentence structure isn’t currently good enough for me to know when to add “se” (or “me” or “nos”) in front of the proper conjugation of “dormir.” I’m sure I’ll sort it out over time. In case you’re wondering if Jill is struggling with verbos reflexivos, the answer is no. Jill’s already got it down.
Will report back tomorrow on how it goes with los verbos reflexivos.
Poco a poco.
Jill and Todd in Costa Rica 