To Nicaragua and back...

I took the bus to San Ramon with the other participants (they continued on to San Jose) and then found a connection to Liberia. Alber, who is from Nicaragua, gave up his plane flight and joined me for the bus adventure. We got on the bus and were greeted with traffic jams and a heavy downpour. There was just room for us to sit (at turns) on the front steps. Although we’d planned to get off in Liberia and catch a tourist bus through to Granada, we arrived in Liberia far too late to make the connection, and realized that the terminus was Penas Blancas, which was the border town on the CR side. Things would work out from here, we reasoned, and as it turned out, very mas y menos, they kind of did. We were stranded there for a little while as we gradually came to find out that there were not much in the way of towns on either side. We had managed to walk our way through the various CR and Nicaraguan official places and the street money changers (not an easy task), and suddenly our trail stopped as a muddy road not meant for pedestrians continued on. This was Alber’s first real trip, so although he had the language and culture skills, he was unsure how to proceed. We went back and forth between paying a high price to a tourist bus to paying a high price for a taxi (and a dodgy taxi at that) until a quiet woman finally approached us in the crowd and told us we’d better share the taxi with her and get out at Rivas, the nearest town up from the border. That we did, and after a nice pizza we took a constitution of the neighborhood, and I got another whiff of not being in Kansas anymore… totally different from Costa Rica!

The buildings had high ceilings and the doorways were also enormous, of cafés, restaurants, homes, hotels, everything. The colors also seemed to be either a shade brighter, or in some cases faded tones, both bringing up images of colonial times. The poverty level was certainly a tad lower and the skin of the locals was darker, and election posters and paintings were just about anywhere you looked (Alber explained a brief history of the country’s civil war between leftist Sandinista and the conservative dictatorship, and pointed out the multitude of red and black flags that marked the Sandinista). Horses, mules, and donkeys were common sights, either pulling a car behind them or being used for manual labor or debris or concrete. It was still Latin America with the large squares marking the center of the town and usually fronted by a church, designed to be in front of a spectacular sunset. We came across one large green building, a kind of pavilion, and found out that a boxing match was going on. We heard the bells and the cheers of the crowd, and young boys who couldn’t afford the ticket peering in through the gate (see photo, taken in morning). Later down the block at least half a dozen kids were standing—standing—on bicycles that carefully balanced their weight as they could look over the gate.

The next day we bought some fruit and yogurt from a supermarket and took a bicycle taxi pedaled by a young boy to the bus stand. I watched a number of buses go by, and from the yellow school buses with MONROE JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL on the side to other buses with kanji characters in the windows, it looked like most of the Nicaraguan fleet had been donated from the US or Japan. After a little while a guy in a car stopped by and asked if we were going to Granada, Alber said yes and we negotiated a price of $10 for us to take the backseat. He drove at a speed that must have doubled the local bus, and after a brief police stop we found ourselves in Granada. They were having a huge festival, and the streets were so packed it was hard to walk on them, let alone drive. The driver let Alber and I off although by this time his previously-new and very large (and insanely heavy!) bag had been deemed almost entirely useless. One handle had clean broken off and the wheels had self-destructed, making us totally immobile. I stayed with the bags for some time while Alber went off in many directions to do many things, and when he came back we still had no idea what to do.

Eventually he phoned his girlfriend’s family, who lived in Granada, and so we took another taxi to the outskirts of town and they made some calls to hotels to find a room, as I sat by the grandmother rocking in her chair, knitting, and occasionally muttering to herself que caliente! Two young boys roamed the living room looking for scrawny kittens to throw in the air, one dressed in a nice Sunday church outfit and the other in underwear. Eventually they got a single for me at The Bearded Monkey and we took a taxi out there, only to discover the question had been not to “reserve” an actual room, but rather finding out its cost, ah, semantics!

The clerk took pity on me after I’d said it had been a long day (a long two days!) and called to find another room elsewhere for me. Alber and I had another meal and he went off to see his girlfriend as I wandered around the huge fiesta celebration, with music blaring from all sides, packed streets, dozens and dozens of cowboys and cowgirls, foods, etc., a celebration of “hipicos”. There were parades and shouts, and I wandered around and took part in all of it before turning in.

The next day I explored the city of Granada, a beautiful and famous colonial town with old churches, architecture, and a general feeling… a very nice place, I found. I went into many of the churches and saw the harbor where the lake was, and ate some good food outside of what I can find in El Invu. It was kind of strange to suddenly be transformed from that tiny Costa Rican town and its intensive work atmosphere to the heart of a backpacker scene that could have resembled anything from Bangkok to Varanasi to Paris. Many of the restaurants were trendy for this crowd, cheap DVD showings were featured in places, trips were planned that seemed to fit this lifestyle and some of the hotels I saw were real hangout spots—even the conversations could have been in any of those places!

On Tuesday I made my way into the capital city of Managua and went to UCA, the famous University with several branches in Latin America. I met some English teachers who had taken the SIT course and was able to join them for a lunch and talk about what changes the course had affected in their teaching… was very interesting. And it was great to suddenly find myself in a University environment, to walk around a campus that was enclosed from the outside hustle and bustle, with large trees and big fountains. I was pointed to a vegetarian restaurant (!) just off campus and actually was able to get a veggie burger there. The owner reflected a kind of health and radiance that I suppose many people start to get when they give up eating animals, and I understood enough Spanish to get how happy she was being a vegetarian, but how rare it was in her country—there were only a couple other semi-veggie restaurants she knew of in the city.

I went back to my hotel and had a sit, only to be interrupted by a rustle in my backpack. It was only an inch open, but when I jabbed it, a mouse squirted out and ran under the bed! I zipped it up (I had just bought some food) and hung it on the wall. About 20 minutes later I heard a plop sound, and several very loud noises followed by a squeal… I turned the light on to find the mouse had scaled the wall, fallen off the bag and into the fan, and after getting highly bruised had retreated for under the bed again… I quickly took the food to a refrigerator and that was that.

So, with a wealth of brand new and exotic bug bites (I counted over a dozen on one side), I prepared to leave Granada. I was up before 6.00 a.m. on Wednesday morning, and I walked to the TicoBus station. On my way was an old hospital (called the Old Hospital, incidentally) that looked more horrific than anything I could imagine in a genuine horror film. The stones were dirty grey and white with black specks, grass and trees and weeds had taken over everything—fountains, windows, rooftops. The feeling there was still very much hospitalish, it just felt like overnight everything had stopped and no one dared set foot anywhere near it for ages.

I got on the bus at 7.00 a.m., and found myself in air conditioning for the second time since arriving in Latin America (the first was the day before at the University). After a very prolonged stay at the border, we were off again, a DVD popped into the TV, showing of all things “United Flight 93”. A very interesting movie to watch when one hasn’t seen any movies or TV in over 2 months, and doubly interesting to see on a bus having to make many curves on rainy roads. I got to San Jose in the afternoon and after some horchata ice cream managed to walk with my bags across town to the bus. The bus went to Cuidad Quesada, where I then waited another 2.5 hours while eating some mediocre veggies, watching part of a terrible Cinemax movie and making conversation with a cook who had lived in Montreal. At 8 p.m. I boarded the bus and was dropped off in the middle of nowhere by San Isidro, where I then walked the final 2-3 miles home… over 18 hours of travel, home again! Home again, and, well, busy again, much and much work to do this time around!

Activity flurries in the land of La Dulce Vida

Here are the traditional in-front-of-the-spiral pictures taken after the last two courses… the first one is in July and the second in August, where I was working as a Trainer.

I just have a moment to write a few lines about what I’ve been up to lately, actually it is a moment I really do not have but I will try to take it anyway! The last course—the one month SIT TESOL Certificate intensive month course—was quite the challenge, complete with 12 (and even 14) hour days and looming deadlines and much else. My responsibility was running workshops, looking over lesson plans, observing teaching sessions and taking notes, responding to participants' papers, leading post-teaching Feedback meetings, and a few other things here and there as well.

It got off to a rather slow start though, or at least a slow lead-up. After the previous course ended I was invited to go fishing with Mark and his host family, a former Peace Corps volunteer in Costa Rica who was a participant in that course. I passed up the opportunity to take life but was going to go anywhere for the walk and the nature until fatigue combined with downpours set in. So I still managed to make it to their home that night, where they ate the fresh fish, and I was then invited to come to their mother’s farm (everybody’s family seems to live just around the corner in El Invu!) in the morning. It was here I milked a cow for the first time and also drank fresh cow milk as well. For someone who is not too into dairy it was absolutely delicious! As we walked around the farm a large green parrot followed us from branch to branch and tree to tree, and then back at the house (where we drank the warm milk and put it into our coffees) the parrot flew inside and around the house, until I realized it actually belonged to the old woman, and it began to eat angrily by the sink. Another Gabriel Garcia Marquez moment here… Oh, check out the starfruit litter outside her house on the ground!

The next course started up and I went to the San Jose Airport (an exhausting all day trip to start out an intensive 6-day first week with the eccentric Pipa as driver) to pick them up, 3 Americans and 2 Latinos who won grants from the US Embassy to be able to come here. It was a very busy month and so much happened that as I sit calmly (or not so calmly as I am thinking about my present work ahead) here at the computer I kind of come up blank about what to write about! Ron and Ellen, the supervisors I had in Chicago, came to assess the course and we went with them to a hot springs in Cuidad Quesada. This was especially nice for me as the scheduled hot springs trip during the first weekend I had been left behind due to a miscommunication! Here is a picture of all of us over at Mary’s house after a swim in La Pechuga, the local river.

We did get a lot of use out of the river this course, it was a great cooling-off mechanism. Sometimes Anna and I (the other trainer) took a brief swim before a Sunday meeting at Mary’s house to dive into work, and once we even decided to all play hooky for an hour and rearrange the workshop schedule to plan in some more swim time during a very intense and muggy week!

Another party at Mary’s house featured a couple of birthdays to celebrate, and we all got to experience the Costa Rican style of piñatas. They tie the piñata on a string and blindfold someone who then tries to swing at it—up till now, pretty much the same thing in either hemisphere. The difference is that they have another person who pulls on the string to make the piñata swing up and down as well as to either side, so the blindfolded one has little idea of not only where he is standing in relation to the piñata, but even when he manages to make contact, it surely won’t be there the second swing… it could be above the head or at the feet, eliciting big laughs from the crowd as the stick goes flinging in all directions.

And so the month ended, and we cleaned El Centro Espiral Mana and I locked my cabin and joined the crew heading back to San Jose, to make my way north into Nicaragua for visa reasons (with Alber who is pictured there with me)… Here's another shot of that parrot munchin away...

Costa Rica Vipassana

Well the first TESOL Certificate course has just ended and I am totally exhausted. After so much activity this past month, I now sit here alone in the computer room, alone in El Centro Espiral Mana, seemingly alone in the whole town of EL INVU. Alone except for the little yapping dogs who still come around to make trouble and the loud and penetrating insects…

It was a good last week. Out of the blue I discovered there was to be a Vipassana course in Costa Rica. It wasn’t listed on the English web pages so it took a little good fortune to come across this. Then it took more good fortune for my supervisor to give me the time off as well as for the transportation to just manage to work out. Dhamma really took care of everything for me so that I’d be able to make it with minimal trouble. I rescheduled one class and missed about a World Cup game and a half (though one was only the third place game)! Oh, this is a great picture of one house where I watched the Brazil-France game. The poor grandfather is watching his Brazil team get ousted below the Brazilian flag as his grandson next to me is cheering on Les Blues… and the hand outside is from some other guy who watched nearly the whole game from that peculiar spot!

I made it to Quepos, saw the CR coast line, watched the first 20 minutes of the France-Portugal game, then put all that behind me by boarding a local bus that went across horrible potted roads to read the small town of Hatillo, about 40 km away. Seems like it shouldn’t have been the 2 plus hour ride it ended up being, but that’s what happens when a bus doesn’t break the 15 km speed limit. So we proceeded along at this snails pace, gingerly negotiating our way around dozens of flooded out sections and oversized puddles. We even crossed a fairly large and fast-flowing river that covered the first few steps of the bus in brown water. It was an interesting ride, though, the first part consumed by a large fruit plantation and trucks carrying full loads to a nearby factory spitting out one pure white and another coal black stream of smoke, though I really couldn’t identify which kind of fruit it was. After the plantation we passed through small hamlets where the only real defining feature was absolutely beautiful, pristine, full length soccer fields. Sometimes the entire community was literally built around the field on all sides, and the road was dotted with billboards advertising beach-side resorts built with “American standards”. All the time I was just marveling at the fact that a Vipassana course actually awaited me, seemingly miraculously and certainly unexpectedly, on the other side of this trip (that is, if the bus driver remembered me and my poor Spanish request to shout out “Hatillo” when we approached.” (though some part of me must have known what was coming, one morning I had a strange and strong wave of panic and depression pass by…) Here is a picture of some beautiful flowers at the course site, at the close up with the ants!

He did remember, and sure enough I found the “Alma de Hatillo” albergue run by the Dutch woman who had never taken a Vipassana course but strangely had welcomed the 10 day course to her inn and stranger still was insisting on doing the cooking for the course with her Costa Rican assistant. All of this meant that as I helped get set up and met a few of the students, I was to actually find out just before heading to the hall that I too would be sitting—my server application form wasn’t needed! It was kind of a surprise, but ultimately a welcome one. No, more than that, it was a gift, another “Dhamma works!” for me. I chatted briefly with Carmen, a Panamanian woman who used to live in Colorado and was on the RMVA, and best friends with another meditator I had once served with and stayed with in Salt Lake City. Here is a picture of these amazing multicolored leaves at the site... I've never seen anything like it...

The course was three days of extremely difficult and beneficial work, so what else is new! There was only one other non-Latino student there besides me, and only a little over a dozen in total. Only 2 full time male students, and only 1 full time old student! The food was delicious, but because it was largely non-Vipassana people preparing it, we often didn’t get too much of it and it was brought out and taken away at odd times. The meditation “hall” was a converted outside pavilion with several sheets along the sides. This meant that strong equanimity with mosquitoes was a definite must! I would spray on my repellent before sittings and other students wrapped their entire body in sheets. There were also no pillows provided, which I didn’t know about, and some of these new students were braving out the ten days with small couch cushions only. The Costa Rican kept pushing right on through and we had to bring umbrellas everywhere we went because you never knew when it would hit. Once it was coming down so hard during the hour sit that it was totally impossible to hear the chanting telling you that the hour was up. Also, it took out all the electricity so many times that the AT herself had to do the “Bhavatu…” It was interesting, without that chorus of old students, the “Sadhu, sadhu, sadhu” never did catch on… Here's a picture of the meditation "hall"...

I left the course on Day 4 and just managed to hear that Morocco as well will get its first ever Vipassana course later this year. I was waiting for the bus as the inn-keeper spotted from a morning jog and said how affected she was from the seriousness of the students. I can’t imagine witnessing so much of a ten day course for the first time from the outside! Then through some other conversation I managed to learn she was from Poland and not Holland, she was a Polish Jew, and was just beginning to tell me about the Polish Jewish community during WWII when the bus appeared over the ridge! So with many of the EL INVU insects bites starting to clear up and the new and diverse Hatillo ones starting to take their place, I got on the bus and went 15 km per hour again back to Quepos. Here's a picture of a huge spider just outside my door there...

I arrived in Quepos a little before noon and did some craving shopping of things I didn’t need before getting a bite to eat. I knew the final of the World Cup was on today, and given the previous game times had expected it’d start at 1 pm. That would allow me to watch about a half of it before my 2.30 bus came. But by another magnanimous turn of events worked in my favor… inexplicably, the game began at noon! So I watched the entire game, the entire overtime sessions, and finally had to turn away just as Zidane gave that bizarre headbutt. I boarded the minibus and sat in the front next to the driver as he interpreted into easy Spanish (from the radio) the penalties kick-by-kick… then took an hour or so longer getting home by another massive storm that came down…but learned all about CR passing customs on the road, how a slow truck will signal for the car behind that it’s clear and safe to pass… and passed more than a few VERY dodgy bridges…

… and how wonderful to be back after those three days, what changes! A lot of the tensions I felt under I was able to see how slight changes of my own behavior could produce such a profound change. You always know you’re in charge of your own misery, 100%, but to remember what that actually means on a practical level… it’s great!

Now the present course has ended, another karaoke night at La Pachuga’s, the Tiki Hut converted into a bar atmosphere that is in the backyard of Manuel’s (an ESL student) house. I went into La Fortuna today for a teeth cleaning and a pizza meal, now a week to prepare and rest up and possibly two round trips to San Jose in the meantime…

Pura Vida

Another quiet night here in EL INVU (those flower pictures are just outside my room). The days are really full here, there’s always so much to get done and there aren’t the normal kinds of distractions going on, it gives one pause to ponder how we normally have time for those distractions to begin with. From auditing the TESOL course to trying to apply these concepts to my own two classes (and then reflect on them), to trying to learn Spanish to enjoying the meditation, it’s a full day’s work. And not included in that is all the mandatory time you have to spend chatting, making small talk, visiting friends’ porches, and other vital activities. My supervisor here made the comment that while the Japanese use silence for greater intimacy, Costa Ricans fill up that space with talk that really means something else. Here's some great goat pictures below... the first one is at the town's soccer field, the second at a student's house...

The classes are going well. It is still quite challenging to have such very non-academic students and at such a beginning level as well. It makes me feel like I have so much to learn and not a lot of time to do it! I always want to rush through material more quickly in order to feel successful as a good teacher and also come up with really creative and dynamic (and alas, complicated) lessons. I keep having to step back and examine what it means for them to actually “know” a word or phrase, and KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid). The bugs and weather seem to be an issue no matter what around here, in whatever context. Come to think of it I did a lesson on weather terms, I should try another on bugs! One class a bat flew in and took quite some time finding its way back out. Another time a fly the size of a fist came in and it buzzed around like mad until one student caught it. He held onto it gently in his hand for some time, then placed it below his shoulder, on his chest. It stayed there motionless until the class ended. It was like his pet giant fly. I swear, this town really can feel like a town out of a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel, though I’m not sure how to explain it all the time! Yesterday I was teaching the phrase “it’s muggy” just as it was so muggy that you could barely think, then they had a hard time understanding “it’s raining cats and dogs.” As if on cue, the rain outside started up so hard, as it’s ever so apt to do around here, banging away on that tin roof with such vengeance that you have to yell to get heard. Oh, here's the picture of the road leading up to "El Centro Espiral Mana":


Ah, the rain, yes. It’s pretty much daily, and it can just feel like the faucet is turned on non-stop with a kind of force that is hard to describe. That’s what I thought, at least, until last night. It had been a persistently deafening sound, and over a sustained period of time, when I realized this was something a little special, and woke up. The clock read 3.00 a.m. and I slid out of my mosquito net. The sky was flashing outside like a strobe light but the sheer racket outdid any major sound system! I took my flashlight to see if we were soon going to be flooded and as I rounded the corner, my neighbor, John, also a participant on this course, was also just coming out. All I remember him saying is “How am I ever going to be able to describe this to anyone I know?” We just kind of stood there for a minute in our underclothes and then went back to our rooms. All that could come to mind for me was New Orleans, I just had nothing else to really compare it to—somewhat the monsoon season of Japan, somewhat a couple weeks I’d spent in Florida—but not of this intensity! Here are some pictures of "El Centro Espiral Mana": Some good news that came my way with a haircut though. I’d been trying to get one for sometime. I figure I can make up some of the airfare costs by timing my periods overseas with cheap haircuts. So I got one upon arrival in Bombay, one just before leaving, and hadn’t had one since. Mary told me that a woman in town cuts hair, and lives just next to Milagro, one of my students, whose family I hang out with often. So I went to her house and was shown to an adjoining tiled room, where I got a very short haircut (and which cost less than $2). Everyone around here was utterly shocked and said they kind of didn’t know who I was now! They had gotten used to the locks. Anyway, her husband Francisco happened to be watching the Mexico-Argentina game on very poor reception, with commentary from the local radio. I made no attempt to hide my profound interest and was duly invited in to join in. She then said in parting that I’d be welcome to come over anytime future World Cup games were on. (here are some cows below that I spotted on a walk...)

I was a little shy on how to act on that the following morning, but the England-Ecuador elimination game gave me some confidence. They seemed pleased enough to see me and I bought a few sodas for us all at the local (and only) convenience shack around (see photo), owned by Poi, Mary’s husband’s brother (and my new language exchange partner). After the game, they somehow made me to understand that they would not be home for the later Holland-Portugal game, but invited me to come with them. Not knowing exactly where I’d end up, I hopped in the van and we drove across town (which means across the soccer field) and got out to spend about 20 minutes in the intense humidity visiting their aunts, uncles, great uncles, cousins, parents, etc. Then a horde more of us jumped in the van again and drove to a neighboring town of San Isidro to go into a humongous tin shack where just about everyone I have ever met was gathered there to play BING for a school charity event (it reminded me of Simpsons episodes where just about every character you’ve ever met in the series ends up being at some scene!) I kind of shrugged my shoulders and resigned myself to endure how many hours of Bingo until Francisco rescued me by giving me a puzzled look, so I got back in the car, after which he duly drove to the nearest restaurant where we watched the game in full (except we left inexplicably at halftime and went to a market, where Francisco tried to ask me questions that I couldn’t figure out, eventually it was all settled when I suggested going to a nearby restaurant for the second half).

We went back to the Bingo and waited around another hour (they marked their boards with corn pieces). A storm hit and the rain again made such a racket no one could hear anyone and we got soaked to the bone. Then I met Donald again, a serious England supporter who, with his limited English, tries to prove almost mathematically that England is destined to win it all this year. Oh yeah, and he’s a math teacher at the local high school. Somehow the whole thing was happening at Donald’s girlfriend’s house complex, so we went into their kitchen and had some coffee and got again thoroughly wet some more before departing. Here's a church and some cows around here we were... (in the picture above of the two men talking, Francisco is on the right and Donald on the left)

So now I’ve had to add to my daily retinue watching a couple World Cup games per day at Francisco’s house. I haven’t figured out what his work is, but his wife cooks food at the local school (and of course gives haircuts). It’s actually been a pretty fascinating comparison to what happened at the last World Cup for me. It was kind of a watershed time for me. I had been looking forward to it being in Tokyo for years beforehand, but just as it came, I was getting quite involved with Vipassana. I have some very powerful memories from that time, like going to the usual venues with friends, and the energy being some of the most exciting and exhilarating ever. And just learning experientially what this “anicha” was really about, and what I wanted to seek after and what I wanted to let go of, I found it incredibly unsatisfying and empty—much to my shock, I think. I remember once riding my bike by myself to the center of Tokyo one very late weekend night, and finding my way into this huge crowd of futbal aficionados from all different countries, chanting soccer songs and throwing balls into the crowd—it was one of the more amazing spectacles you could hope to find, but it really did nothing for me—I’d never had that kind of reaction before, and what’s more, it almost made me disgusted. So it seems like a funny kind of irony to now, four years later finding myself in a small town, away from any kind of commotion or excitement, and here I’m experiencing this huge craving to watch these games at all cost… well, I guess it is all anicha, eh!

Well, better bring this to an end because the bug bites keep coming the longer I stay here! I went to this one hot springs last weekend that was superb. It had dozens of pools and I’d say it's definitely on a level with Japan! Some pools were actually too hot to get in, even though I like to think of myself as a little seasoned in that area! Another pool I stood under this powerful and hot waterfall that emptied from above, and notice a cord in the air by me. Ah, I thought, must be something to hold onto if the falling water is too strong. Nope, just a live electric wire I found out, getting shocked in the process! The complex even had two entire bars in different pools—not the most ideal for me, but pretty interesting to see. Here is a picture of some of my friends and students...

Oh, and I guess I have to throw in another bug picture, eh....