Watch Out for the Gringo Holes!

VWP: con permiso (phrase)--with your permission

Let me break down my average day in Costa Rica at the Institute of Central American Development Studies (aka ICADS).  This studying portion of my three-month stay will last for 5 weeks before I adventure out into a different city to intern in a Costa Rican school.  After a night of intermittent car honking and the occasional animal noise outside, my iPhone joins in on the noise at 6 am buzzing with "Uplift," my current alarm song.  I refuse to use a song that I actually like as my alarm because I realize that I will grow to hate the tune after associating it with frequent sleep deprivation, so for the meantime a meaningless mix of electronic noises will do.  This next fact may sound pathetic, but the most exciting part of the morning is trying to predict what my Tica host mom will make for breakfast--she continues to surprise me with quite a diverse array of traditional food and more modern chow.  Sometimes I get more Costa Rican flavours, like gallo pinto, a mix of rice and beans; however, sometimes I get a little taste of home with pancakes (here, "panqueques") with Aunt Jemima syrup!  One piece of the breakfast puzzle is always a definite: fresh fruit.  In a tropical island, you can always count on the most scrumptious fruit for breakfast, even if you have no clue what to call the fruit in Spanish.  I can remember a song from fifth grade chorus (it's engrained in my memory because of how awful our young, shrill voices sounded) called "Shake The Papaya Down."  This past week I actually had my first papaya! It's a rich pink color, tinged with a bit of orange, sweet as a refreshing popsicle, and healthy as grass juice (don't quote me on that one).  Other common fruits for breakfast include bananas, mango, watermelon, carambola (literally star shaped), guanabana (said to have cancer healing powers), and

Carambola fruit

callemito (purple and impossible to get out of clothes)--who needs strawberries and blueberries when I've got those?  Then with a little peck on the cheek from my mom, an energetic head pat for our dog Bella, and an adjustment of my big North Face "Hot Shot" backpack, I'm ready for the walk to school.

Costa Rica, and Latin American countries in general, don't treat women with the same respect that we receive in the U.S.; cat calling and under-the-breath "que guapa" ("how pretty") often just need to be repelled by death stares.  Literally, if an old woman was covered from head to toe, wore a hideous mask, and smelled like rotten peppers, she would still have to deal with this outdated disrespect.  So my Tica Mama prefers that I walk with Robert, a peer of mine who lives nearby and attends Pitzer College in California back home.  At 7:15 Robert and I meet up at the corner store, characterized by a large red sign that at first pretends to be a Coca-Cola advertisement but then throws off its disguise as we walk closer and the "Pilsner" beer logo comes into focus.  At 7:16 we pick up Lily, another one of our peers who will attend Smith College next year, and then make the ten minute walk to El Banco Nacional (the National Bank).  I often wonder if the security cameras outside the bank ever question why seven or eight gringos meet on the building's steps at exactly 7:35 am every morning.  Until they start interrogating us, I think we'll keep it as our meet up spot.  Lauren, Sarah, Samantha, Will, Zoe, and a few other of my classmates meet us at the bank at our designated time, and we set out on the second half of the trip: a walk up a very busy main road that at times has no sidewalks and at other times is spotted with dangerous looking "gringo holes," which are very useful in trapping oblivious American tourists who forget to always look at where they're walking.  There are no real street addresses in San Jose, so most people just use landmarks to give directions.  For example, my house is past the park and up the street from the stadium.  Very specific, I know.  Similarly, our landmark for school is the Pop Eyes fast food restaurant (how appropriate for a bunch of Americans), and the we make a right onto a tranquil street speckled with many private businesses.  Most of the time none of us gringos actually fall into the gringo holes and we make it to ICADS by 7:55 with five minutes to spare before our 4-hour Spanish class begins.

The ICADS backyard

ICADS Patio and Classrooms

  Throughout these initial 5 weeks, we will have two different Spanish instructors.  My first instructor was Ligia, a large, boisterous, rosy-cheeked Tica whose dramatic facial expressions and energetic demeanor made it possible for us to pay attention for two hours straight until coffee break.  ICADS purposely makes classes extremely small to allow for personal attention, and at five people my class is most definitely the largest.  We rarely talk in English during my class, instead we discuss everyday topics completely in Spanish; during one class our conversation often evolves from what we had for breakfast to our views about San Jose's crazy drivers and then international gender double standards.  It's odd, but in my high school spanish classes I learned words for very heavy topics, like environmental sustainability and human rights and government procedures, but I never learned everyday words like "awkward" (torpe) or "greasy" (grasosa) or "eggnog" (rompope).  We're spared 15 or 20 minutes for a quick coffee break in the patio--a lovely open space with two big tables, plenty of chairs, and a massive white umbrella.  The patio is half surrounded by small but open-air classrooms and the other half is adjacent to a grassy area which houses fruit trees and little bugs.  It truly is paradise.  After the next two hours, we're all very excited for lunch and conversations in English. There's no cafeteria at ICADS, so instead we all either buy our lunch daily or stuff the refrigerator with food to make lunch throughout the week at school.  If you don't run out of food and need to hustle to Plaza del Sol's grocery store just a few blocks away (in the scorching afternoon heat), then the hour and fifteen minutes for lunch is very relaxing.

A political rally during a field
trip to San Jose

The second half of our day until 5 pm can vary quite a bit, but the constant is that it's always in English.  Most days we're in the same room, a brown classroom with a traditional desks-in-a-row set up with a white board, lined with large wooden doors that are adorned with patterned glass windows. Some days we have experts (some local Costa Ricans or from America) present information to us, sometimes ranging from health care systems to education in Costa Rica and Costa Rica's natural resources.  There is one fatal problem here: the fan in the lecture room.  There are two fans in the room to provide some air circulation during the blazing Costa Rican afternoons, and one fan does its job very well besides the fact that it looks as though it could swivel off its fixture and behead whoever is unlucky enough to sit below it.  But the other one creates this nerve-fraying rhythm, a kind of click-click-click.  Needless to say, sometimes the lecturers can't handle the fan's noise either so we just put up with a little bit of natural perspiration.  Other days we have process groups; these small five-person clusters provide a forum for discussion about what we learned over the past week, questions we have, or our general sentiments towards our time in Costa Rica.   Or sometimes we take a field trip--some of our field trip destinations have included the U.S. embassy, famous sites in San Jose, and this week we are headed for a coffee plantation.

On the way to the gym

Even though it only costs about $0.30 to ride the bus, most of us walk home together in a kind of animal pack formation at the end of the day.  Slowly people peel off as they come to their houses, and Robert, Lily, and I continue to our houses, which are the farthest away from school.  After school I go home and change into workout clothes and just a block away from my house is the local gym, embedded in the middle of a yellow and blue soccer stadium.  Most of the material in the gym looks like it's from the 1990s, but honestly a bike is a bike and I just try to avoid the treadmill that has the sign "este maquina no funciona bien" (this machine doesn't work well).  There's no air conditioning in the gym, just the pure and clean Costa Rican breeze, and there's usually a Jackie Chan movie playing on the TV with spanish subtitles.  However, my workouts always must end promptly by 6:45 so I can be showered and ready for dinner at 7:10 pm.  In our introduction packet, ICADS warned us that Costa Ricans tend to be pretty sensitive to body odor and that students would be expected to shower every day, so you can bet that I wouldn't dare show up to the dinner table all disgusting after a trip to the gym. During dinner my Tica family and I always watch these overly dramatic telenovelas; I'm not sure of the past seasons' plot lines, but this one seems to be exploring the love triangle theme, the I-found-my-dad theme, the you-can't-marry-her theme, and blackmail.  If I'm going to leave the table to go work on homework or go to bed or meet up with friends, it's expected that I say "con permiso" (with your permission) in order to avoid rude behavior.

So, let's try it out:

Con permiso.