I will finish this...

The last couple entries will be coming soon. I had to start writing with a pencil and paper there at the end (pencil and paper-what are those?). I have some more pictures and video clips to add as well! Have no fear...the end is near. :)

6 people in 1 kitchen

Cooked dinner with friends last night...Spanish, English, and French were spoken during the process. There were 6 of us all in the kitchen at once...grilled cheese, tomato soup, green bean casserole, and a cookie cake. They were so much help and it was an awesome evening :)

which subtitles do we use?

Picture yourself in a room with 4 young women from 4 different parts of the world trying to watch the Wizard of Oz and deciding what language to watch it in and what subtitles should be chosen also. The 4 girls speak 3 different languages and luckily all of them know English (or rather are sufficient enough in their English reading abilities to read the English subtitles). One girl from Costa Rica, one from France, and two from the U.S.....we watched it in English with English subtitles. The story sounds like a math problem, I am a language major and the only solution I can compute from that mess of a story is that English is truly dominating the world.
Don't let all the other languages die! Learn a second language! (...Even if your second language of choice is English)

Which reminds me of a friend I met from Japan who didn't speak English and was studying abroad here and in Colombia. We spoke in Spanish...and that was the only language he was able to use here. End of that story is that he was fluent fluent fluent when he left here :)

Fonchingale de Graciela Rojas Sucre

"tengo el vicio del movimiento y la extrana locura de lo desconocido"

San Ramon "Moncho"

San Ramon or "Moncho" as the locals call it, is a little town outside of San Jose. In this town lives a friend of a friend named Yiyo. Yiyo loves living in Moncho and takes the public bus to school each way for an hour because he would rather live with his family there than in San Jose. He lives in a studio apartment above his Grandmother's house (his Grandmother's house is the most beautiful and creative pieces of art I have ever seen, it is so delicately polished like a cave in the mountains with a million different crystals and gems to look at) that overlooks the city. We went up on his balcony at about 5 in the evening when the sun was just perfect and the sky was filled with colors of rosado, amarillo, anaranjado, morado...basically a rainbow. His family owns an awesome burger joint called Bugy's which serves some killer burgers with fries on the burger. Neat little town with a really cool church in the middle of the plaza (just like all the other neat little towns haha)

the language of their love

Recently I went to visit my last gringo friend that was here in Costa Rica who wasn't staying in San Jose for his last few weeks, but instead saved his money to travel around the country that is well know for it's awesome riptides. He surfed for a few weeks in various places, Tamarindo and Malpais being his favorites until finally returning to MalPais to stay at the Calocita. He came here in August of 2009 and spent 9 months taking art classes at our school (Veritas)and was spending his very last week in a beautiful little town with some "friends from Norway". He was always sneaking off to places on the weekends and no one ever knew with whom he was traveling. The minute I arrived in MalPais I knew where and why he had been away every weekend. Her name was Maria and they couldn't communicate in either of their first languages but they got by with their Spanish. She is from Norway and was working in San Ramon in an orphanage and he studying at Veritas. They met one weekend and the rest was history. They couldn't speak Norwegian or English together, but Spanish was the language of their love.

with a little help from my friends...

I would not have been able to travel every weekend minus 2 in 5 months without the help of my local friends. It is a beautiful thing to have friends abroad. I say thank you all the time but do they really know how much it means to me? I hope that each one of them has the opportunity to come to the states in our lifetimes so that I can at least offer them the roof that I have and the food in my refrigerator and a hot shower. That is what so many people offered me along the way that helped me explore Costa Rica inside and out.

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."-Mark Twain

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