I DID IT!!! Not only did I successfully accomplish making the elusive @ sign (@@@@@! (Thanks Conor!!)), but I was also able to sign in here for the first time in 11 days. Wow, life is good.
Really though, life is fantastic here. I am assimilating, learning, growing, laughing and making tons of mistakes every day. Too much has happened in the last week and a half for a normal post, but I`ll run through the basics:
My job has been going really well. As long as the students are still in school (their vacation starts at the end of November), my job has been focused on working with them. I have become known as TEECHER and although I`ve never really been a huge kid fan, I have to admit that when 15 of them run up to me, scrambling for one of the two coveted spots holding my hands, I feel great. The school has grades K through 12, so while I get to enjoy the goofiness of the little ones, when I feel like talking to someone my own age, there are about 20 really cool classmates of my sisters who accept me as their own. So far, I have designed 3 murals to be painted outside the school and over the recycling center, planned the beginnings of Environmental Week, and made posters and worksheets. On Tuesdays, the English teacher has to go to professional development, so he asked me if it would be alright if I taught his classes once a week. Uhhh, ¿si? So the disorder of my placement has come full circle, and now I really am teaching English.
Tuesdays are by far my most tiring days. Last Tuesday, the first time I taught, I had a miscommunication with the English teacher, and never received any lesson plans. Luckily (not) I was teaching 5th, 6th and 7th grades for an hour and a half each. I ad-libbed my way through lessons about the difference between future and present conditional to classes of 30. There is a huge construction project going on outside the school, and the machines make it impossible to teach or hear hardly anything, my dry-erase markers refused to write, and for the grand finale, a huge, gorgeous Harry Potter-style bird landed on the window sill right when I was making progress with the 5th grade, erupting the class with screams of glee. For any teacher who I have ever distracted or bothered, I am receiving my karma in full. ...Sorry.
I love the staff of the school. They are all super understanding and laid back. From all sides, I am accepted as an equal. This is because my age is somewhat ambiguous here. The students think I`m their age, but the teachers think I`m well into my twenties. Just like the mix-up with my job, I don`t see any advantage in clearing the confusion. I was surprised and delighted to be invited to the English teacher`s wife`s baby shower last week. The gym teacher drove me to his house and we celebrated with the same dopey baby shower traditions and games we have in the States. The funniest thing that happened was when the mischievous Social Studies teacher found an alligator toy and scared one of the nuns out of her mind.
My social life is picking up as well as my professional life. Last weekend was hands down the craziest in my life. My sister, Katerina, told me that it was a tradition to serenade the boys of the senior class on Saturday. I thought that sounded stupid and like fun, so I got ready to go around dinner time, assuming that we would leave around 7 (so far, assuming has only made an ass out of me!). I was awkwardly hanging out in the street with my cousins` rat pack waiting for Katerina to make a move. But when 10pm rolled around, Katerina went to bed. I followed her, utterly sick of the mass of social confusion I constantly harbor. I made my way to bed. Two hours later, Kate woke me up and told me to grab my swimsuit. At this point I resigned to be at her mercy because trying to figure out what is going to happen next is impossible here. So I downed a cup of coffee because it seemed like a good idea, and hopped in the car with her.
We pulled up to a bus downtown with all of her female classmates inside sporting guitars, cymbals, kazoos, drums, whistles, boom boxes... whatever noise makers they could find. It was about 12:30pm when we set off. These girls were screaming like I couldn`t believe. It`s totally acceptable to just scream your head off here... all the time for no good reason. I can`t say it`s something I enjoy. We pulled up to a house and scampered out to the front lawn. We yowled songs (and when I say we, I mean me yelling the syllables in the chord progression) and beat the instruments until Bernardo, a boy from the class opened the door in his PJs. We kidnapped him, threw him in the bus and pulled out to go to the next house. Because El Colegio de la Madre del Divino Pastor is a private school, some of the boys lived as far away as the Panama boarder, and it was 4am when we finally collected every chico. I thought Well that was weird and fun, going home and sleeping will be so nice. Wrong again!!
We proceeded to stop at several teachers` houses (by now fairly inebriated) belting out the Mariachi songs and they would come out, laughing in their boxers. Like I said, these people are LAID BACK. When we had finished and the bus started heading in the opposite direction as Neily, I knew there was more that I didn`t understand. It was 5am, and my thoughts were interrupted by Yazmin crying, A LA PLAYA, HERMANO!!!! and my limp bathing suit in my bag finally made sense. I asked which local beach we were going to, and my friend Ronny turned to me and said, Baby, we got a two hour bus ride! These kids drank themselves sick, opening beer bottles with their teeth and screamed the latest club music all the way to Zan Cudo beach on the other side of the Gulf. As a testament to the party culture of Costa Rica, we were in the middle of nowhere surrounded by rice farms and somehow the bus driver found a station playing Love in this Club at 5am on a Sunday morning. With the sunrise silhouetting our partied out stupor, we piled out of the bus and into a private beach resort house. Our smelly, stinky party felt entirely odd juxtaposed against the innocence of the country`s dawn.
The house was nicely furnished with an outdoor bar, 4 bedrooms, a hammock-filled lawn, and a beach front. I excitedly ran out to where the horizon dropped off and could not believe the view I saw. This place is paradise for sure. The beach could have been on any magazine cover: mountains stretching up on all sides, fresh clear water, fine black sand, and the brilliant sunrise poking up over the palms. It was a great moment to be alive, and an even greater moment to sleep for a few hours on a towel. When we went home at 4pm, if you can believe it (I couldn`t), we stopped for an entire new crate of beer, and the Sunday afternoon raucous party lasted all the way back to Neily.
Today I brought cookies to the school for the staff to celebrate Rosh Hashanah. I told them that it was the celebration of Jewish New Year, but they didn`t seem to hear the Jewish part, and the nuns exclaimed how Oh that`s RIGHT! Today is New Year in the United States! and happily munched away on the cookies. I try my hardest not to laugh in such situations, but the imagery was too good.
In other news, to work off my new cookie fat, I have joined a daily workout class with my aunt and her cousin. It`s basically like my mom`s water aerobics class sin agua. Everyone is over 30, really nice and super jazzed about getting some buns of steel. It only costs about a dollar per class.
Talk about buns of steal!!
Pura Vida,
Elaine
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