"Pobre Banana" (Playing with children in Boruca).
"Como esta su hamburgesa?" (Nonsense phrases with Omar in the waterfall...and continuing onward).
"Grammar Snaps" (Fun with grammar?? or not).
"Next weed...week" (Can we speak english? Do we need lessons?)
"I may have a little crush..." (on conditionals and modal verbs).
So we returned from Boruca last night, and I feel that I have been very out of touch the last few days. We've been having power outages (some nation wide, some local... all bleeding hot) a lot (for hours at a time), as well as water outages, here in Manuel Antonio, so it was nice to go to Boruca in the mountains, where it is much cooler and less humid!
The trip was AMAZING!! It was so nice to not be in a classroom for a couple of days (Photos to come later). We crammed 30 of us into two 15 passenger "vans" for 5-6 hours of no AC, bumpy roads, and a certain someone making OBNOXIOUS comments every five seconds...actually, it was quite nice. We had two seats facing each other, so six of us were sitting in a circle, and we told many interesting stories.
We stopped several times on the way there:
Stop one: Dominical...for a very quick stretch and potty break.
Stop two: Parma Norte...at a Soda for lunch.
Stop three: At the sacred river on the reservation
Stop four: At a bar, for dance lessons and a couple of drinks
Stops five, six, and seven: on the sacred road, where you can see jaguars, "small people" (like the pigmys), and at the place of the wars with the Spanish conquistadors.
We got into town just as it was getting dark. We met Omar's mother, father, brother, cousins... He took us around to see the place where his father makes masks. Then we went to his brother's house, where we saw pictures depicting different legends (man in the waterfall, man and jaguar, village with precolumbian stones). We had a very banana centric dinner, but some tasty sides, at his mother's home: yucca, rice, tamales, beans, pork...
We got to see "The Dance of the Devils," which was really neat! Omar got the chief's permission, and he and his friends gave us a really good idea of what goes on in late December/early January. It was AH-MAZING!
We stayed with host families around the village. My host was named Oscar. There were five of us in his house. I shared a bed with a girl from COSI named Nikki, Eileen and Priya slept next door, and then Jason (also from COSI) in a small bedroom. His family gave up their own beds for us...which made me feel really bad. The little girl, Nashalie, who was about 4, kept coming into my room, putting her hand on my arm, and staring at me, her little fingers on her other hands stuck in her mouth...this went on every couple of hours.
At night, most people went out to the bar, but Jennie, Anna (from the Jan. class), and I sad around the fire with Omar's daughter, Agnes, and her friend Henni (short for Hennisee) were roasting bananas around the fire. Their sticks kept catching on fire, and they would freak out, shake their sticks in the air, sent the bananas flying, and then would scream "pobre banana" or "pobre plantano."
All of the kids were SO FREAKING CUTE!! We colored together a lot. Nashalie and I played a "touch my toes" game, and she wrapped a sheet around her and pretended to be a ghost.
In the morning we had a breakfast of rice, fried yucca, and fried corn and cheese. We then headed out to the markets, where they told us how they dyed their yarns by hand, carved and painted masks, and other faboo handicrafts. We all bought a few from them to help support their local economy. They are an amazing people! I may come back and teach english for them, and in return, I would get to study painting and weaving with them for a month or so!!!!!!
After our craft extravaganza, we hiked (in flippers) down to a BEAUTIFUL waterfall! We went swimming, ate watermelon (one named Chloe, that Ana and Meg had bought on our drive up), and climbed around on the rocks. The first waterfall was short enough to jump off of, and the second fell about 120 feet below us!! There were amazing views from the top!!
By the time we returned to Omar's family home, it was already 3 in the afternoon. We had a short snack of...you guessed it...bananas and rice...crammed back into our clown cars, and headed back home to Manuel Antonio.
We stopped again at the same Soda we went to on the ride up. I had the vegie rice and a hearts of palm salad...with a mango and pineapple smoothy to top it off...bueno!!! Of course, our van broke down...something with the transmission is what I got from my broken spanish...so we had to wait for a while.
Oooh. Gotta run back to class.
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