From Guanajuato to Monteverde

The last few days have been a whirlwind of activity. It started on Friday, the Day of the Dead in Mexico. Weirdly, but perhaps not surprisingly, I had one of my best days in Guanajuato on my last day. I met some friends at 11 a.m., and we went to the big cemetery near the Mummy Museum to walk around and observe. There were tons of people because every grave had someone visiting it. It was really incredible. I have some photos, but I probably won´t be able to upload them until tomorrow. What struck everyone was how public the event was. In the United States, if people go to gravesites, which they almost never do, it´s very private, and people give them lots of space. But in Mexico, the whole day is about the public remberance of the dead loved ones, and it´s basically a party (unless someone has just died). Also, a lot of people are making money: ladder guys who help people put flowers in hard to reach places, musicians who travel around the grounds singing songs of mourning, people selling flowers and other paraphenalia for graves, and, of course, food sellers. Muchisimos food sellers, because in Mexico, you´re never far from food.

We hung out there for awhile, and then walked to the center to have lunch. After lunch, I bought some presents and then sat with my friend Erin in Cafe Tal, having coffee, chatting, and trying to decide what was wrong with her computer. Other people showed up, Jennifer, Shawn, Melanie, and basically it was a nice quiet final afternoon. In fact, it seemed a shame to leave.

But leave I had to, and so at 7 p.m., I took a cab to the Léon airport for the short flight to Mexico City, where I spent the night at the airport Hilton, and where I slept for a total of maybe 30 minutes. I´m not sure if it was nerves, or the fact that my hotel room overlooked the perpetual day of the airline terminal. At 2 a.m., I was hungry, so I left the "hotel" and went into the airport, where there were tons of food places open, and people just hanging out. It was like being in a perpetual mall.

The next morning, my flight to San Jose left at the god-awful time of 6:50 a.m. The flight was simple enough. San Jose´s airport is filled with Americans and other tourists, looking exhausted from weeks in the sun. But it was a funny place. There´s one ATM in the entire airport that dispenses dollars and colones, the local currency. I took out 2,000 colones, thinking that was a lot of money, but in fact it´s only $4. In Costa Rica, you have to pay a $26 exit fee to leave the country, and I had been warned that the lines are so long to leave, that it´s better to get the fee paid when you enter. I went, not realizing that my 2,000 colones were only $4, and so I had to go back to the ATM; this time I got dollars.

I had paid for a pick-up service at the airport, but what I´ve come to realize in Costa Rica is that nothing is free. The guy picked me up and brought me to this B&B, where I was to spend the night, but I had to pay the B&B, even though I thought it was covered (it was only $26 dollars, so it wasn´t a huge problem). The owner, who was really nice, took me to this traditional Tico (Costa Rican for Costa Rican) restaurant. I found out later that each trip to the restaurant was $5; it would have been nice to know that ahead of time. Restaurants in Costa Rica serve huge amounts of food. I felt silly not being able to eat most of it because I felt like I was being a typical wasteful American, but whatever. Anyway, I kept on asking locals where the center of any town was, but they kept on giving me weird directions like, "Oh, you just take this road here for awhile, but there´s nothing there". I found out later from a student at the school who took classes down there for awhile that the whole area is filled with things to do, but no Tico could explain what or how to get there.

The next day, I was picked up at 8:15 for the 4 or so hour trip to Monteverde. Now this is a good time to explain that to me, at least, Costa Rica looks a lot like Hawaii without the humidity. Basically, this is a tropical zone, and so it´s very green, with lots of trees and wildlife. Today I realized that, of course Costa Rica looks like Hawaii. They´re both places where coffee is grown, so their climates must be similar. Anyway, the trip was boring, but fine. I read in my travel book that Costa Rica, even though it´s about the size of Vermont and New Hampshire put together, has 12 climactic zones. I think we went through about 4 because the air and the fauna kept on changing. I had also been warned that the roads up to Monteverde were awful, but most of the trip, they were fine, with a few washout areas. Then we turned right to go up the mountain, and holy crap, did the roads get bad. It took us about 90 minutes to go 34 kilometers (which I think is only 20 or so miles). They weren´t paved, obviously, but also they had huge potholes, and so the driver kept on swerving to get around them. Halfway up, he need a cigarette break, so I took some cool pictures of the Nicoya Peninsula, which I´ll post at my earliest convenience.

Finally, we got to Monteverde, or what is really the series of towns that make up the area. I found out today that they paved the roads in this area in July, so the roads are a lot better here. I was dropped off outside a hotel, but, there was no host family. And the guy at the frontdesk had no idea what I was talking about. But strangely (at least for me), I didn´t panic. The address for the family was "the house behind the last entrance of the El Viandente hotel", which I found out later is typical of Costa Rica. The LA Times, in fact, just had an article about this (thanks Lydia). Costa Rica has no directions; they just describe the approximate location of the house. Kind of weird. I talked to the guy at the hotel for awhile, and described the family, and he said, "Oh, yeah, there´s a family like this that lives just behind the hotel" (Duh, that´s what the address said). So I walked behind, and there was a guy working on something, and he told me that that was the family, but they weren´t there. So I walked down to the town of St. Elena, used the internet, had some lunch, and then walked back, and there they were waiting for me.

I love this family! I didn´t want to say anything in Mexico, but my Mexican family was a little disappointing. They were very nice, but not very open to just chatting because they were all working their butts off. But this family is great. They are incredibly friendly, and they love to talk to people. The couple is in their 30s. Jairo is a tour guide, and he owns a window business, and Ruth is an "ama de casa", a housewife. They have two children, a boy Andrey who is 11, and a girl Alexandra, who is 5. Alexandra can talk you ear off, and she loves to play. We played fake dinner, or whatever girls call these things. I´ve always had a little problem playing with girls in this way. I´m never sure what to do, and she was ordering me around a lot. Today, I spent about an hour just chatting with Ruth, the mother, about stuff. Andrey´s father is actually a Canadian, and he wants to learn English. He´s been taking it in school, but it´s been tough, so I volunteered to help him. We´ll see if that happens. But basically, the family is very open and interested in chatting, which is good for my Spanish. Also, talking to the kids will be good because they´ll use a lot of slang that I wouldn´t normally hear in school.

The school itself is beautiful, in my opinion more beautiful than is necessary, pero bueno (as they say in Spanish). There are hardly any students. I think I counted 10 total. It´s their slow period, and I was doubting whether I could spend 4 weeks here. But today, I was kind of getting into the silence and tranquility of the area. Plus, they have weekend excursions, which I think I´m going to do the first two weekends I´m here, and there´s a lot of stuff just to do here. It all costs, but I figure it´s probably the only time I´ll be in Costa Rica, so it´s worth it. The classes themselves are puny. Most people have a one-on-one class because there are so few students. I have one other student, a young woman from Switzerland, who is very nice and speaks very fluently. She´s been in Costa Rica, in various sites, for about 2 months or something, and then, she´s going to Guanajuato for about 8 month in a few months. She´s practically fluent already, but I guess she wants to speak like a native so she can study Spanish in a Swiss university.

Overall, I´m pretty happy. I was worried at first. I was having such a good time in Mexico, and I liked my class there a lot, and so I was wondering if changing was a good idea. From an educational perspective, I´m not sure yet. It seems we´re going to be going pretty slowly, but we´ll be doing a lot of conversation, and that´s good for me. But Monteverde, itself, is such a nice change, and for only 4 weeks, it might be nice to be in a place of such natural beauty.