Todo Esta Bien

All continues to be good in Costa Rica. I worked another week at the chicken farm because I found it far too difficult to get out of bed for the 5:30 a.m. start at the orchard. What a difference an hour can make when you´ve stayed up too late watching movies.

This week we´ve been preparing for the delivery of 100 chickens, which were supposed to arrive on Friday, but didn´t. Hopefully next week, though I´m going to likely be working elsewhere, partly because all of the ditches I´ve helped dig at the chicken farm are making it far too dangerous for me. This was a week of incredible clumsiness. On Monday, I was pushing a wheelbarrow and ran straight into a branch, the same branch that I almost ran into a dozen times the week before. Yep, this left a mark on the forehead. Then Wednesday, I was pushing the wheelbarrow again and fell. Coco rushed over to find me laughing, and I was reminded of the time I fell off Devil´s Marbles in Australia where everyone was so concerned but I could do nothing but laugh. I followed up the fall that afternoon by walking into the bathroom door with my head. Thursday I stepped into two holes at the farm and almost fell again. I have been an accident waiting to happen, or perhaps an accident happening repeatedly.

I think my clumsiness is partly due to the fact that my legs have been really tired. I logged 3 hrs and 45 minutes running this week, including a long run Monday of 1 hr and 40 minutes, which put me at about 9 miles. As much as I´ve developed a sense of relaxation here and a go with the flow kind of attitude, the anal retentive side of me still wants to know how far I´m running. It´s impossible to know exactly. I time myself with the stopwatch, and I have some sense of my pace, particularly with certain songs, but it would be nice to know precisely my distance. Instead, I have to be content when someone asks me how far I´ve run to say ¨35 kilometros mas o menos¨ (more or less). And, yes, I have to do the miles to kilometers conversion in my head, which is all the more reason to use mas o menos. (Which just so happens to be one of my favorite phrases. Do I understand the conversation? Mas o menos Do I understand the movie in Spanish? Mas o menos Do I have a boyfriend here? Mas o menos . . .)

Again, as much as I´ve developed a go with the flow attitude, there is still the occasional thing that throws me for a loop. This week it was when my Zune quit working. The battery had died while I was running Thursday, so back in my room I plugged it in to charge. The logo popped up, so all was well. But two hours later, nothing. All day yesterday, nothing. I wasn´t sure if it was the battery, which I replaced this spring, or a piece of the charger which hasn´t been in good shape since I purchased it. Fortunately for me, I´m quite stubborn, so I´ve tried to turn it on numerous times since then. This morning, it finally awakened to tell me the battery was almost dead. I plugged it in to charge and set it down on the bed gently so as not to shake the wires loose. I didn´t even bother to complain that I wasn´t able to bring it on the bus with me today. The thought of 6 months with no music, when I´ve become accustomed to listening for at least 2 hours a day, was incredibly depressing. There was no go with the flow attitude with this problem. Of course, I now know the charger is completely unreliable and that it could quit at any time. I´m going to hope my luck lasts as long as possible and hope that if it finally breaks for good, I can simply say, No worries.

As for my Spanish, I feel like I´m somewhat at a standstill, partly because I haven´t been studying, though I´m not sure what to study other than making vocabulary lists. On the upside, I continue to be able to have one-on-one conversations. On the downside, when there are several people talking, I often have no clue what is going on, or very little. I realized this week that I´ve been far too timid about speaking and that I need to let loose and sometimes just talk even if I fumble for the words or they come out wrong. I´ve done that this week and it´s been a bit liberating. Last night a guy I hadn´t met struck up a conversation with me at the bar, and I actually felt like I talked almost as much last night in Spanish as I would´ve normally spoken in English. Pity for him, hey? :)

This week I´ve had some food cravings. In particular, I´m really dying for a chipotle chicken sandwich and bowl of broccoli cheddar soup from Panera. If someone could just pop one or both of those down here to me, I´d be your friend for life. I´m also missing vegetables as I just don´t get enough of those. Some green beans, peas, a baked potato. Some BBQ chicken would be nice. What I really don´t want more of is eggs. The week started off bad with eggs--3 times on Monday, then 2 on Wednesday--but fortunately I haven´t seen another one since. Thank goodness for small miracles. My mother here says she enjoys cooking for me because I´ll eat anything--except salad. I told her last night that I eat things here I never ate in the States, like hard boiled eggs, which I´ve actually come to like, and mushrooms and onions, which I simply tolerate. I´m sure that by the time I return home, I´ll have an entire page of foods in which I will indulge heartily. Tomorrow I´m buying bread, peanut butter, and jelly. Ah, the taste of home!

The diet here, as I´ve noted, is considerably different. Most notable is the absence of sweets. In talking with David last night at the bar, he noted that his brother went to Canada for two months and came back considerably heftier than when he left but that within two months back in Costa Rica he had slimmed down. He cited chocolate and hamburgers as the contributing factors. And, yes, most people here are thin, particularly the men. I know of only one man in Silencio who would be considered overweight. Though the women are more likely to be overweight, it´s still not common in the way that it is in the States. It´s party the diet, but then in Silencio, it´s also the work. This week Diego handed me his barilla that he uses to cut the palm branches. This is a metal pole with I guess what you´d call a scythe on the end of it, which can extend to at least 30 feet. It was surprisingly heavy, and I now understand now just how difficult that particular job is.

So now I´m trying to wrap up some fun stuff, like facebook, blogging, and pics so that I can concentrate on some grad school stuff. A little burst of motivation hit me last Sunday and I managed to revise my personal statement for my grad school application. I am really happy with the way it turned out and hoping that the people I´ve emailed it to respond with a hearty congratulations on a good piece of writing. I was really happy to be able to detail some of my time in Silencio, as I think the fact that I´m traveling in foreign countries for 9 months will definitely add to the reasons that they should accept me. My goal is to submit my UConn application next Saturday, which will be 3 weeks prior to their deadline. I´ve also decided that I´m going to look into some other schools, perhaps in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania. I need to find schools who have professors with my interests, and I´ve been reminded after having been away for 3 months how easy it is to start all over again. While I´d still love to go to UConn given its proximity to Hartford, if I have to start over in a city several hours away from there, it won´t be as difficult as one might think.

That´s it for this installment of the Chezza Chronicles. Pics to follow on facebook, including one of my Tica mother, who is 8 years my junior!