Just a bunch of little things

March 14, 2007
Last weekend, I decided to brave the Catholic mass with my family. I guess it was a good experience, and it was better than staying home alone, but I really couldn’t understand a word of the service and tried to just sit in peace while the service continued on, but I was so distracted by all the ornate and gaudy innards in the belly of this massive church that my mind sort of fogged over. I usually feel resentment in Catholic churches, for being excluded from the communion, but only one member of the 5 of my family members went up to take communion, so I didn’t feel bad.
The family novela or soap opera is called La Escrava Isaura, and is about a slave girl (a Latin slave mind you) who escaped from her master who is in love with her and fell in love with a young man and planned to run away to the United States. Her master invested a lot of money and recaptured her, but now everyone is starting to dislike him, and people want to help Isaura escape. It’s very cheesy drama in my opinion, but I’m hooked, I won’t lie. I look forward to my 8 o’clock novela every night.
I met with my advisor this week and what a relief! Her name is Gabriela and she is such a cool woman. She did nothing but reassure me that I was executing my project correctly, praise my data collection, give me ideas, and boost my motivation for working on this. Awesome! I also got a chance to chit chat with her about what she does, and it turns out she used to be some sort of national director of conservation in coffee plantations or something cool like that. And now she’s got a sort of traveling job where she works a consultant for farmers and the like for preservation of natural resources and developing the social relationships that are needed to make the improvements. She was telling me how awful this one place in Limon is where the banana farmers are so poor they hardly have a house to live in, and the planes fly over spraying the bananas, as well as the farmers, their children, and everything else with agrochemicals. And to top it all of, it’s a Rainforest Alliance certified farm. You have to ask yourself, how does this happen? How is it, that food, a necessity for life, is placed at such a low priority that the farmers producing it have nothing to eat and nowhere to live? Gabriela was also telling me that she worked with a lot of coffee farmers, who had never tasted their coffee from their own fields. It saddens me, but it also gives me hope that there are other people who are appalled at these poor conditions, and are working to better them.
After living here in Costa Rica, and talking about how much more luxurious it is here than in Nicaragua or in Honduras, I sometimes find myself embarrassed for the U.S. as a nation, where every family owns several cars, the average family spends more on electronics and entertainment than food, most people work in offices, and many of us never know where their food comes from--- thousands of miles away, where the family is saving up money to buy some small thing that we take for granted in the U.S. Not trying to give anyone a guilt trip! Ok? I think I can just appreciate all that I have in the U.S. (10 times more than I ever did) because I am damn lucky.

March 15, 2007
Ides of March, Ides of March, I can’t remember when the Ides of March are and I’m trying to beware them! Sean you should know this one right? I was thinking it was the 16th or maybe the 11th or 12th, but the truth is that I know that it’s somewhere in March, and that was when Julius Caesar was slain (according to the Shakespeare play). It’s one of those things that I wonder how it entered my thought stream, but there it is, a little golden muse, making a quick dart through my head.
Sometimes do you ever just wonder what you’re looking for, maybe in life in general, but maybe just for one day? I’ll admit it. I’m a shopper. I love to go shopping. But I am a bargain shopper, and many times I don’t intend to buy unless the price is right. I think I confuse Costa Rican shop owners when I just want to wander around looking at their stuff and not buy anything. They don’t understand that I didn’t come with the mission to buy something; I just want to see what’s around, get lost in my thought, etc., and I get nervous when they jump up and stand at my elbow while I’m browsing. This is how my previous internet café excursion went. I didn’t feel like sitting down at the computer yet, probably because it gets overwhelming after a week of not reading emails.
So many moments throughout the day where I want to record my exact emotions to write in a blog later and I’m in no place to do so. Like when Andrea and I shopped around in Zarcero a little bit. We are of similar stature, she a little taller and more slender, but we are both well….on the larger side of the pants and shirts scale so to speak. We went in a shop and Andrea furrowed her brow and said, are these for little kids? I looked around, and said ‘No Andrea, these are for little women.’ We proceeded to laugh about this and then talk about how shapely the Costa Rican manikins are. We speculated that half the time that’s what draws eyes to the window of a shop, not the actual clothing.
Tuesday I had a little treat on TV after the novela. See Costa Rica does a special every month where they feature a certain actor/actress in a movie about once a week for a month. Well this month was Brad Pitt—“El hombre más sexy del mundo!” (The sexiest man in the world) Yes Brad Pitt, Costa Rica loves you. So I sat down and watched “Siete años en el Tibet” (7 years in Tibet) with my host father. Who knows why, besides that neither of us had seen it before, but it was long and sad, but I got a kick out of the fact that it was almost midnight (very late here!) on a Tuesday night and my host father and I were watching a Brad Pitt flick.
After the internet café yesterday, I ran into some relatives Isabel and Alonzo right outside and they offered me a ride home. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned her much before but the 1 and a half year old, daughter of theirs, Anny, makes me think they’ve got a Raquel Jr. on their hands. Oh she’s cute alright, when she’s in a good moon. Everyone wants to do everything for her, but man if she wants something and doesn’t get it, she gets MAD! They call her the ‘chapulina’ which is like the little trouble maker. She’s learned how to push buttons, and she likes to rile everyone up by turning off the TV in the middle of the soap opera. So when I accepted a ride home from my neighbors/family instead of taking the bus, I didn’t know I was signing up for a dose of cranky Anny. Oye what a headache. At least she got tired of screaming and fell asleep. Then last night I had another even better treat of ‘A Knight’s Tale’ which since I know very well, was able to laugh at all the jokes in all the right places, all of which seem funnier in Spanish, and hear that glorious soundtrack which includes Queen and War. Wonderful. I’ve been looking forward to watching some other movies like Ice Age and Finding Nemo in Spanish with the grandkids here. Maybe I’ll have to schedule it.