Saturday, September 03, 2005
Weekend Update: I'd love to have some interesting photo or picture here to give you an idea of things I've seen or done this week & let you know whether it's me or Ellie posting (she posts her pictures to the right by the way), but I don't so sue me.
So anyway, in no particular order here's some stuff...
So anyway, in no particular order here's some stuff...
- Work: So I'm teaching 4 classes now, working 14 hours a week and enjoying it. Most of my schedule is late afternoons & early evenings so I can sleep in late or do whatever most mornings, except for Tuesdays when I have a class @ 7am! Which means I have to be out the house by 6am, & up around 5am, which doesn't make me a happy boy, & despite what I may have said about this trip "is not a vacation" & how we were "just continuing our lives in a different place," I haven't been getting up before 9 or 10am since we left Spanish school & I don't want to any more than I have to till I return to the states.
- Play: So, I'm searching for a Capoeira school. I've wanted to learn more for a while now & my most of my mornings are free so I'm hoping to find a school down here that works with my schedule. I haven't had much luck so far, I know there were a couple schools in the area a few years back, but haven't been able to find any current information
- Food: This weekend I discovered why there aren't many Ticos in the supermarkets (but I almost always see gringos shopping!), they're shopping @ the weekend markets. Not the organic market like the one we've been going to, but apparently there are multiple open air markets around San José on Saturday & if the new one we visited was any indication they're all way cheaper than the grocery store (about 1/2 the price) so that's where we'll be shopping from now on. You can buy 2 liter bottles of fresh squeezed juice for a little over $2 (¢1000). We got some tamarind juice (a new fav) & orange juice for this week, next time I'm thinking about getting some sugar can juice, if for no other reason I want to watch them use the machine (it's gas powered & looks like a small wood chipper, you feed sugar cane into the top & juice comes out the bottom).
- Weather: I still don't understand rainy season, downpours sometimes, no rain other days occasionally a shower, whatever happens there's no humidity, go figure?!
- Travel: Lately we've been trying to sort out the rest of our travel details for the year, this is what we've got so far: Before the end of this month we'll be going to Nicaragua to renew our visas, visit Lake Nicaragua (the only freshwater shark habitat on the planet) & Granada. Around 90 days, later towards the end of December when there isn't likely to be much work we're going to Bocas del Toro in Panama, it's a little out of the way beach town & a nice place to spend a 72 hour vacation (our tourist visas are good for 90 days, after which we have to leave the country for @ least 72 hours). In March or April we'll leave Costa Rica by bus for Panama City, we'll look @ the canal, visit a few people we know if they're around, & maybe a little sightseeing before we fly out, next stop: Ecuador (I have yet to find a convincing reason to go to or through Columbia, even if Ellie wants to go. If she gets kidnapped I can't afford to buy her back. I'm not so worried about anybody abducting my broke ass.). Ellie's research tells us that prices are always cheaper outside of major cities (which should be a no brainer, it's that way in the US too, no?). The other downers in the major cities are crime, overcrowding, & pollution which I'm happy to sidestep, especially if it will save me money. Anyway, from Ecuador we start what I suspect will be the longest part of our trip, traveling through South America by land. From Ecuador to Peru to Chile, possibly through Bolivia (depending on how well we tolerate the altitude among other things). Ellie has more details about how & where we're going places, she's been doing the research, but doesn't post unless I harass her & has yet to tell me everything. The rest of what I know is Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Portugal, Spain, then NYC.
- Us: Ellie keeps everything! Which @ first I thought was cute in a bag lady kinda way, but when I needed a soap dish, who happened to have the lid from a coco butter jar I was gonna throw out? So outside of fighting over stupid things like that we're doing well. We're still not practicing Spanish as much as either of us would like, which I suspect will bite us in the backside once we're traveling all the time. We've made some new friends, Omar & Lea a couple from the US here studying Spanish & teaching English like us. We hang out together about once a week, practice Spanish, go out, etc., they've been here about year & speak Spanish pretty well so they're a great help. We've also been hanging out every now & again with our neighbors, playing cards or having dinner. There are many cool peeps in our building
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Kepfram & Ellie, 1:53 PM
1 Comments:
Anonymous, at 11:11 AM GMT-4
When are you going to get an RSS feed for your blog? I'd follow your stuff more closely if I knew there was a posting.