Heads down

We are busy with Spanish in the mornings and Jill is working in the afternoons. So there’s not much to report.

Today Profesora Ana told us that we are to meet her in front of the iglesia (church) in Atenas at 8AM Thursday morning. Diego, the director of the school, has arranged for us to interview a friendly who works in the municipal government in some post related to tourism. The goal is to give us practice asking questions and then formulating followup questions on the fly. Should be interesting.

To that end, Jill and I spent time at the end of class with Profesora Ana today formulating starter questions for Thursday morning.

Atenas bills itself has having the best climate in the world. That’s pretty much the tagline on everything official and even on some of the businesses. After two months here Jill and I are hardcore fans of Atenas, but we now know enough about the climate to understand that the marketing message around the climate is a mentira blanca (little white lie) designed to attract expats looking for a place to land in Costa Rica. On days when the weather it good it is indeed fantastic, but if there’s no breeze it gets Texas HOT in the afternoons as we approach the end of the dry season. And there are days when the winds blow at gale force. We have been told that the tres meses (three months) we picked to come learn Spanish in Atenas are the dryest, hottest, and windiest months of the year. Supposedly the rains will come toward the end of April – but that may also be a marketing message.

To that end, one of the questions I formulated for the interview on Thursday is who was the Marketing genius behind Atenas’ PR campaign around the climate 🙂

We continue to see cool stuff every single day. Today on the driveway between our house and the street we flushed a tucan (toucan) from a tree. We’ve seen tucanes multiple times now and it always gets my heart racing because they’re so cool. Por dicha!

We also noticed for the first time that there are aquacate (avocado) trees at school. I just happened to look up and saw an avocado hanging off of a tree.

On a more sobering note, this weekend while we were Puerto Viejo, Jill read that Costa Rica uses more kilograms of pesticides per acre under cultivation than any other country. She’s been digging into that topic since we got back and has learned that Costa Rica uses about 35 pounds of pesticide per year on every acre under cultivation, which does indeed put it at the top of the list. It appears that the main crop that the pesticides are used on is coffee. Jill also read that Costa Rica has a high incidence of occupational stomach and bladder cancers in agricultural workers. We are not sure what to do with that information, other than to be more diligent about washing the beautiful produce we buy here before consuming it. It’s a troubling data point for sure.

On Thursday after Spanish we will head to Ojochal on the southern Pacific coast for a three night stay. We chose the Hotel Mono Feliz (Happy Monkey Hotel) instead of an AirBNB because it’s a fairly sparse area and it will be nice to have a restaurant handy. We’ve experienced the heat of the Pacific coast at Jaco and Tamarindo and one of the reasons we picked Ojochal as base camp for this field trip is that it’s a few kilometers off the coast and about halfway up the mountain. We’ve heard that just a little bit of added altitude keeps the temperatures quite pleasant through the day. We will report back on that subject.

It’s hard to believe, but less than a month remains for our adventure in Costa Rica. We head home on May 1. Jill did the math earlier today and with all of the field trips we have planned in April, we only have 8 more Spanish classes left. We have become very attached to our profesoras and it’s going to be hard to say goodbye.

That’s all for now. I’m making Morroccan chicken stew for dinner and I need to get it started so that it will be ready for when Jill wraps up with her clients at 6!