Suicide Shower

It looked like a bad idea, even before I knew what it was called. Yes, that's electricity, connected to water; two great tastes that usually do not taste great together. However, I have been assured by my landlord and the internet that this is simply how things are done, throughout Central and South America. There's no hot water anywhere else in the house- not for the sinks or the washing machine. Water for the shower gets heated right inside the shower head and requires so much current, it has to be connected directly. For the past 3 days I've been unable to get mine to work so I've had to make due with cold showers. But tonight José came over and made some adjustments and sure enough I saw the initial blue spark and dimming of the lights that signals the water is being heated. So tomorrow morning I hope to start my day by surviving a warm shower.

Cena con los Morales

Last night our landlords made us a welcome dinner and they and their 3 kids joined us in our dining room. Michelle is 11, Daniel is 9 and Paolo is 18 months old. Like many kids his age, Paolo is very excited about his newfound ability to walk and spent most of the dinner exploring the apartment before climbing up onto the couch and falling asleep. At one point he proudly pushed the rolling dehumidifier into the dining room, just to show us he could.

Dinner was arroz con pollo, bean paste and ensalata de papas. All very good, especially the potato salad. I've never seen potatoes so white before, I thought at first it was jicama. Costa Rican's don't like things too spicy, in perfect accord with my own spice preferences. José and María told us they have been renting apartments to UPEACE students for the past 10 years. They started off with one apartment and one Italian student back when the school was much smaller. Since then they've added more apartments onto the building, which accounts for its piece meal layout. They've had many good experiences and look on it as an opportunity to meet people from all over the world and learn about different cultures. They also seem very pleased with their own country and happy to share it with visitors.

Benjaman and Mai (totally guessing about the spelling) both say they like to cook so I look forward to seeing how they adapt their Thai and Vietnamese recipes to the local ingredients. And Ben promises she won't make things too spicy. I, however, once again find myself without an oven so I won't be able to show off the greatest of my own culinary talents by baking for them. Fortunately, at least one of the studio apartments has a slow cooker and since I figured out how to make Tuna Hotdish in my crock pot when I was in Kansas City, I WILL be able to share some quintessential Midwestern cuisine. They have no idea what they've been missing.

Settling in

Now that I've been in Costa Rica for a full 24 hours and have had a little time to settle in, I can tell you all something about where I'm staying.

I flew out at an insane early hour of the morning on Sunday. Many thanks to Marty & Mele for volunteering to pick me up at 3:45am so I and my 4 bags could get to the airport. I really do have the most awesome friends. All the air travel went very smoothly, everything on time, all my bags arrived and nothing adventurous at all happened until my taxi got to Ciudad Colón. The thing you need to know about rural Costa Rica is that there are no street names or addresses. So the directions I gave to my driver were- 'de la Casa Cural, 400 este, mano izquierda porton verde, casa beige al fondo'. Basically- 400 meters east of where the priest lives, on the left a green gate, beige house on the bottom. What are you supposed to do with that? You drive to Ciudad Colón and ask the first person you see where the Casa Cural is. You follow the first step of his directions. You ask the next person you see, where the Casa Cural is, you follow the first step of her directions. You find the Casa Cural, drive 4 blocks east and start looking for a green gate. The first one we tried was locked and no one answered our honk. My driver then tried calling the numbers I had for my landlords. No answer. Then he drove around a bit and just started asking people if they knew Jose Morales or his wife María. Eventually someone pointed us in the direction of another green gate and once it was opened, I recognized the patio of my apartment from the photo I'd seen online. All was well.

I'll be living in a 3 bedroom apartment with a nice living room, dining area and small kitchen. My two flatmates arrived today after traveling 27 hours from Asia. They are both part of the Asia Leaders Program and so have been studying together elsewhere for the past 4 months. Our apartment is at the bottom of a jigsaw complex that includes two studio apartments; the living quarters of our landlords, their kids and extended family; María's beauty salon and some kind of construction business. Most of our windows look out on stairways or outdoor storage areas but I do have a nice little window looking at the green field next door in my room. The view from our patio is currently a small cement mixer and a pickup truck filled with dirt. Not far beyond our house you can see steep green hills with the occasional fancy house nesting in a valley. I believe somewhere further up those hills is where UPEACE is located.

This morning I walked into town, a short 4 blocks, mostly downhill. I crossed over a little stream at the bottom of the hill and all along the way there's green everywhere and many different kinds of butterflies. Town is quite small, at least by my American standards. The area of shops and banks and etc. is about 6 blocks long by 2 blocks across. Lots of little storefronts selling fruits & vegetables, meat, baked goods. Two grocery stores. Two banks. I passed a pet store that in addition to puppies and a kitten had crates and crates of chickens (on the way into town I saw a lot of chickens roaming among the houses and into the street). The center of town is the Catholic Church with the football pitch in front of it. And by football pitch I mean of course, soccer field. I bought groceries at both supermercados plus a panadería and a frutería. Our landlords are making a welcome dinner for us tonight, so I'll soon get my first taste of Costa Rican cuisine.

I'm feeling pretty good about my adventures in Spanish so far. There are whole sentences where I know exactly what to say and I find I understand the gist of what people are saying to me even if I don't always know the words to answer them. I bailed into English once at the bank though if I'd taken a moment to think about it, I did actually know the words I needed. It's both funny (peculiar) and wonderful to think that the Spanish conversations, which now wash over me in line at the bank, on the radio and so on, in 11 months will be concrete images and ideas. I'm looking forward to that.

The weather was exactly as has been described to me. Warm and sunny in the morning, then just after noon light rain intermittently turning to heavier rain for a few hours. Now in the evening, overcast. It's quite humid but out of the sun the temperature is pleasant enough that I was far more comfortable today than I have been for the past sweltering week in Chicago. I think I see my first mosquito right now but it's staying safely out of my way at the moment.

I haven't seen many people biking, only two or three and maybe the rain has something to do with that. I'm still hoping to get a bike for myself here, both to explore further and to free myself from the UPEACE bus schedule. Once I've made the trip a few times by bus, I think I'll know enough about the route to determine how safe and ridable the roads are. I've just gotten the schedule for Orientation starting on Wednesday. Wish it were tomorrow. Listo. I'm ready.

Buenos Días, Costa Rica!

Buenos días rooster. Buenos días dehumidifier. Buenos días little stream I cross on my way into town. Buenos días butterflies. Buenos días hablando español. Buenos días todos verdes. Buenos días montañas y colinas. Buenos días lluvia en la tarde, cada tarde. Buenos días streets without names and dogs without collars sprawled asleep in the middle of the road. Buenos días handfuls of coins. Buenos días nueva vida.

Good night room

Good night sideways closet. Good night alley light. Good night wall of books and reading nook. Good night writing at Kopi and ice cream at George's. Good night puppet bike. Good night LFP. Good night Foster Beach. Good night Printer's Row, Bughouse Square, Magnificent Mile. Good night Jabin & Tate's pillow corner. Good night Griffin's curly hair, Wednesday lunches and Friendly dinners. Good night getting walked in. Good night winter, fall & spring. Good night, Chicago. Good night.

Closure

Now it's getting very close. I've already marked off my last Sunday, Monday and Tuesday in Chicago. I've gotten all my visa/student permit paperwork in order. My room is sublet. All that's left is packing and a lot of saying goodbye.

I said goodbye to my capital F Friends at Evanston Friends Meeting this past Sunday. They've been a wonderfully supportive community for the past 3 years and I owe so much of my inspiration and fuel for this new chapter to them. I said goodbye to my Lookingglass family last night over a delicious meal, enlivened by stories from the days of old, including 2 I'd never heard before, a thing I'd not thought possible. I bid farewell to my other theatre company, New Suit, on Monday at our last Company Meeting, officially downgrading my status from Tier 1 (Willing to put in a lot of time and be in charge of stuff) to Tier 4 (Out of town, in grad school, in a coma or any combination thereof). And every time I see one of my close friends I ask, "Will I see you again before I leave?"

One of those friends recently observed that I've been talking as if I'm leaving forever. Or dying. Things like, "This is my last Monday." Or, "This is my last chance to eat Ronnie's mom's delicious falafel." Or, "This is the last time I'll forget to see if there's a day game before biking down Clark Street." It's not that I don't think I'm coming back. I'm planning to come back. I have a return ticket. It's just that I like closure, marking the moments and acknowledging, "This has been meaningful to me." I think of it as if I'm leaving a party that Chicago and various communities within it have been hosting for the past 15 years. The courteous thing to do before leaving the party, is to thank my hosts and say good night.

Note to self and others

When you are at the library looking for Spanish language tapes, do not write the call numbers on the outside of the folder containing the important document you just had certified by the Secretary of State. The one you need to get your student visa. You will set it down on the shelf while searching through bags of book/CD packages and you will forget it. Later, as you are waiting in line at the DMV thinking about how you will reward yourself with a DQ dipped cone in the food court after all this is done, you will look in your bag for your 2 proofs of address (also in the folder) and you will be distressed. You will then pedal madly back to the library, all the while thinking that you may have accidentally ruined your own life. Even though you will find the folder right in the stacks where you left it, this is not behavior you will want to repeat. Because many pedestrians are now mad at you and you are lucky you didn't get doored by that cab. Still, buy yourself a dipped cone anyway and try not to be too disappointed that they don't have butterscotch. It could be worse. You could have just ruined your own life.