Tidbits.

After dinner last night, I went up to our course coordinator and asked her if she could move the first 1000-word essay back one day. We’re going to a jazz bar for Andrea’s 21st tonight, and we’re going to the ocean all weekend, and then we’ll be back from the volcano so late Monday that we won’t have time to write a paper. All she said was, Stop begging, and cut us off and walked away. But two hours later, we had an email in our inbox saying the essay was canceled. We only have one essay now, it’s due next Friday. Today at breakfast, though, she came up to me and informed our whole table, I didn’t cancel the essay because we asked. Frankly, I was very pissed you asked to push it back so you could party all weekend. I just pushed it back because I’m tired. … Well, at least it’s canceled.

I’m listening to a three hour lecture in Spanish right now. We have a translator in a back and we have headsets so we can hear it in English, but I took it off and I’m halfway listening in Spanish. Again, I thought I knew so much Spanish before I got here. I realized I just know isolated words, and I can hold basic conversations, and read pretty much everything – but I can’t understand rapid-fire Spanish. So I haven’t really gotten that much from this lecture, but having an English speaker in your right ear while you’re hearing Spanish and trying to write notes in English is just way too confusing.

We had a minor crisis today while sitting by the pool during our coffee break. A girl got an email from her mother saying that Puerto Viejo is a high-malaria area, and she succeeded in making all of us pretty nervous and thinking about canceling this weekend. Amanda had talked to one of the locals last night, too, and I guess he had said the area was “shady”. Our weekend trip looked like it was quickly falling apart, and Anita was getting nervous because she’s already booked the bus and hotel rooms for 30 people. We talked to our course coordinator and she told us that yeah, just because it’s a high-malaria area doesn’t mean that you’re going to get malaria. It’s a very small chance…and bring bug spray. It’s “shady” because I guess there’s a lot of drugs there – mainly pot – and you shouldn’t walk alone after dark. But it’s a huge tourist location, so it can’t be that bad, right? She was very much like, You don’t have anything to worry about, so we aren’t. I’m pretty sure 26 of us are still going. Two of the girls dropped out, and I think two of the guys have dropped out, but the rest of us are still going to go with the five and a half hour bus ride and risk it this weekend. I wouldn’t go if I felt like I was really in danger. And I don’t think our coordinator would let us go, and I don’t think the majority of the locals would have said it was a good place to go.

We went to an Argentinean restaurant for dinner last night. It took four hours. It was maybe 45 minutes away, but the whole dinner was just extraordinarily slow. I had trucha and papa asada, though, and both were really good. I haven’t had fish in awhile. The soccer game was on, and there was a huge cheering group for the Costa Rican team there that went wild at all the big moments. I’ve never seen anyone get that excited about soccer.

It’s the beginning of the rainy season here, so it’s gorgeous from 6 a.m. (when the sun comes up) to about 1 p.m., then it pours from 1 to 5. The problem is, we have class from 9 to 12, then we only get a little time in the sun before it rains, then we have class 2 to 5 and it gets dark about an hour after we get out.

I guess that means I’m waking up super early to take advantage of the sun this weekend. I’m totally okay with that.