Costa Rican Food and Ocean Fun.

It’s been a week since my Costa Rican adventure started. My Spanish is not coming along as quickly as I’d like, but that’s OK. My vocabulary has about as much depth as a toddler, so it’s hard to string sentences together when you don’t have enough words in your arsenal. But, like everything else in my life, this experience is about the journey more so than the destination, and I am absolutely enjoying this jaunt.

Not surprisingly, my vocabulary is most robust on the topic of food! Last week, I took a cooking class with a few other students at Maximo Nivel (who were all half my age), where we learned how to make tortillas and picodilla from scratch.

The school has a program that pairs you up with a local who is learning English if you would like to have a partner with whom to practice. I was connected with Francisco, whose English is at a level that only requires fine tuning (even though he thinks his skill level is elementary). I assured him that my toddler Spanish is the one that is elementary, not his English, but that I’m happy to help level-up his English if he could help me make complete sentences in Spanish! We did a walk-and-talk to the local Farmer’s Market for our session. We took turns naming each piece of produce in English and Spanish.

One day after class, I gathered up some change and found my way to the bus station. After a bit of pantomiming and broken Spanish, I found the correct bus to the beach. For 370 colones (about 75 cents in US dollars), I took a 30-minute bus ride to Playa de Manuel Antonio (Manuel Antonio Beach), the most popular beach in the area. The bus ride is on an incredibly curvy, steep paved road that goes up and over a decent sized hill. It would be a perfect motorcycle road except for the lack of lane discipline and craziness of all the drivers!

I rounded out my first week by joining several students taking a course to become TEFL instructors (to teach English as a Foreign Language to non-native speakers) at the same school I go to, for a sunset catamaran cruise. Unlike my laid-back, somewhat flexible curriculum, they have exams and are working towards a certification, so the group, ranging in age from teens to 60s, were ready to relax and blow off some steam. Our cruise meandered past the beach, where I had hung out a couple of days before, to a calmer area for snorkling and swimming. I only saw a few angelfish and clown fish while snorkling, but the swimming was spectacular.

Pura vida!