Learning the Hard Way

Just wrapped up my 2nd day of teaching some middle schoolers math and I gotta say I think I'm gonna love it! Even though half the city had no power for the entire day and we taught with generators that were only powerful enough to insure we had water, not electricity, I made do! I think my poor little 6th graders are still to nervous to do anything too rebellious yet though! I was rather shocked today when the start of my class went something like this: As kids trickled in I just pointed to the white board and told them to start the warm-up problems. I looked around and, get this, they were ALL doing it!!! AMAZING!

This weekend was Mother's Day in Costa Rica. Here, it is a holiday. If it would have fallen on a weekday, we wouldn't have had school! Molly and I celebrated by visiting la feria in the morning and purchasing some fruits and veggies! (We desperately needed these. Case in point, our first "meal" was a disaster! "We better start the rice first cause it'll take awhile," I said. "Doesn't it only take 10 minutes?" Molly ever so innocently replied. "Uhhh, Molly, I don't think they have minute rice here." So then we also noticed they do not put cooking directions on the package! Apparently if you are Tico, you are born with the knowledge of how to properly cook rice! Well, instead of doing the obvious thing and look it up, we went with the initial idea of equal parts. Wrong! We ended up with 'rice al dente' but heavy on the dente. Then, I also decided to cook the pork we just bought. Molly bathed it in olive oil cause "that's how her Senora does it" (she used to live in Spain.) The meal ended up like this: a mixture of pork and rice which had no flavor so we decided to wrap it in our tortillas. Still sucked so we added some mozzarella cheese. All in all a big ole pile of white nastiness.) After the fair, we hung out at the pool with the families celebrating Mother's Day! We totally fit right in...

So I went on a hike the other day with some teachers from the school. Let me remind you that this is rainy season in Costa Rica. We start scaling away and all is good until the 'paved' part disappears and we are attempting to climb up a mud hill, which is at about a 60 degree angle. Seeing as how I was up in the clouds, I imagine someone heard my pleas and I was able to make it up. This, I thought, was the hard part. Then we had to go DOWN the damn mountain! I stupidly volunteered to go down the mud hill first. Let's just say I brought a small piece of the mountain back home with me! My booty was a little sore the next day. Whether it was from the fall or the actual climb, I'll never know.

And now, as I type, Molly and I are sitting in my room quite content. We have visited one of the most amazing places thus far, Price Smart. It is basically Costco but in Spanish! I came back with two wonderful jars of pickles! Although I am slightly bitter that Molly wouldn't let me buy the ginormous container of cheese balls I wanted! (I let her get her box of brownie mix that could feed a small army!)

Oh, one last thing. Some inquiring minds have wanted to know: I have yet to use any of the meds Marsha prescribed to me! Until next time...