We're Coming Home

                                                    Hasta Luego Costa Rica!!

Discount Diccionario

You get what you pay for. And I think I paid about a buck. I saw this cute little diccionario in Pali, the local super market in Sa'mara. Pali looks like a prison. Barbed wire topped 15ft high chain-link fences surround it. There's even a watchtower. You just never know when some ambitious tomato is going to try to roll out of there when no one is looking. The first problem (for a tomato) would be hitting the floor and still being able to roll. I guess a tomato would have to land on its side to roll, too. Very precise landing and on a soft spot so as not to spoil rolling ability and cause a big mess. But wait....tomatoes escape from the grocery store all the time in grocery bags! Ahaha! It's those bad tomatoes that try to roll in after hours that they are trying to keep out. So, the diccionario...(I should look up how to say "I am swerving off the subject again"). The bottom line is, the diccionario is going into the trash tonight. I'm not even going to leave it in my hotel room so someone else can have it. It would absolutely not benefit anyone except someone like me with funny-head (my brain perks up and jiggles at strange things - ah, this is my bumper sticker: I LAUGH FOR ANYTHING or maybe I BRAKE FOR UNCONTROLLABLE LAUGHTER). Let me brake here and give you an example of what you cannot find in this diccionario: The word "wait". Waiter, yes. Wait, no. "Weft" and "wrongdoer", yes. "Wait", no. The word "leave" (as in I don't want to leave Samara). I just have to say "No quiero leave Samara" because the word is just not there. "Run". Come on. "Run" is not in here! But, if I'm using "ruffian" or "riffraff" in a sentence, I'm covered. "Pen"? No. "Penis", "peckish" and "pendular", yes. Oooooooh, now here's a great ice breaker: Hola, tienes un hambriento pene puedo usar?  Ah, gracias! Pendulo, man! Whoa that translates really weirdly in babelfish. The word for "peckish" translates as "hungry". Basically, hey do you have a peckish penis I can borrow? Pendular, man! Okay, weird sentence. VERY weird. And the word "weird" IS in this thing called a diccionario, and should be on the front cover. Hey, I wonder about "very".  Let's look it up! Nope, "very" is not in this little piece of barco diccionario. Well, we all know that one anyway. Ex: Meret es muy loco. So, "very" is not there, but we do have "vertebral" and "videocassette", again not usually used in conversation. No one uses video cassettes anymore and when they did, they didn't call them video cassettes. And anyway, the word in spanish is "videocasete".  "Vertebral". Let's use that in a sentence. Well, how about in yoga class: "Oh, you're so vertebral!" Don't make me translate that into spanish. Oh, okay. More of Meret's bad spanish. "Tu eres muy vertebral". "Ten". The word for "ten" is not in. 1-9, yes. 10, no. So, if you want to tell someone they are a "10", you woul have to say, "Tu eres un nuevos mas uno". Or something. Weird. I mean, "Misterioso"! Also, If your birthday is in May or August, forget it. You will have to say "Mi cumpleanos es en el mes despues abril" Or you can just suddenly remember that you know how to say May in spanish because of Cinco de Mayo!  I mentioned a hotel earlier in the post. Did you notice and wonder why??. Yes, we are in a hotel in Allajuela, Costa Rica. We unfortunately missed our 6:20am flight (no, it was not our fault). So we checked into a Holiday Inn at 6:30am this morning! Had breakfast at Denny's, where we managed to order the Meatlover's Scramble with no meat. That waitress must of thought we were so bizarre. Anyway, Denny's. Big mistake. Costa mucho dinaro y la comida NO fue rica ? Bad. Like my spanish.  But, tonight, we went to a restaurant called Jalapenos Central. Top of the list in Trip Advisor for Allajuela. We got a $6 taxi ride to this place run by a Columbian from New York City who makes GREAT mexican food. His name is Norm. He saw me looking puzzled-ly at my drink and he came over to our table to explain. It was called Cas or Caz. Tastes like a combo of mango, lime and kiwi. He said this fruit is so hard it has to be smashed open. Then blended up and sweetened. He hates it. But, I thought ooooh,  yummy-summer-drink. Great guy. He's been there 8 years and loves it. Oh, and two of his waitresses will just break into song when they feel like it. Steve and I give this restaurant dos pulgares arriba! I got those words out of my diccionario just before I put it on the next train to the dumpster.

Marco the Magnificent and my rambling surf saga

I think he looks bored. Do you think he looks bored? Look at the under-enthused one thumb sort of up! Remember 18? What were YOU wanting to do when you were 18. Probably not hang around with someone who is (although kinda cute and youthful) old enough to at leeeeast be your mother. Even maybe grandmother (they marry early here).  Whoa, I just imagined one of my grandmothers surfing. No, she had the spunk for sure. But, I don't think she ever wore a bathing suit or even a pair of pants. My grandmother wore a corset, stockings, dress and Nancy Drew-type high heels (black, thick heeled with ties) every day. I remember she wore hairnets and dyed here hair and her pillow always had this blue/grey tint to it. But, she played a mean game of gin rummy. And she moved fast around the house in those heels.  No messing around. Oh, and then there was her driving. They called her Gallopin' Gertie, really! She rode the wave-y streets of Cordell Oklahoma in her 1948 green bubble car Buick. That was before seatbelts and I can remember sitting next to her going over the bumps hitting my head on the roof of the car  (The only changes in altitude in western Okla are the bumps in the roads). So, Marco....not impressed that I am learning to surf at the age of %&! No...and I'm pretty sure his mind is s-o-m-e-w-h-e-r-e else doing
s-o-m-e-t-h-i-n-g else, and often. Give him a little slack. He teaches year round, at least 7 hours/day, 7 days/week,  365 days/year unless it rains. Lucky for him it gets dark at 6pm year round here. So they close up at 5pm every day. His hours are tide dependent. I had lessons at 7am and sometimes at 4:30pm depending on the tide. His father is a fisherman and although Marco loves the sea, he did not want to be a fisherman like his father. His mother is a school teacher. Age 55 (see, I'm about his mother's age).  Anyway, he was not easy on me. He did, however, protect me from breaking myself which I'm grateful for. He shouted at me and looked perturbed a lot. I think I was a pain in the ass because I wouldn't give up, but I was also a wimp. Frustrating combination of qualities for a teacher - the tenacious wimp. I often got little mini lectures about how surfing was not easy, and just because I was determined to do it, didn't mean it was going to happen fast. Dead-on right. I think he thought that I thought I would just be able to do it (spot-on again). After graduating from the white-wave kindergarten with flying colors, leccion three was to "paddle out" into the big boy waves. The first paddle out was on rough ocean (see Rollin and Tumblin). I had the fear-o-god after that. The second time we paddled out was a week later and again the ocean was not in the mood and quite a rough. I was getting thrashed about, my surfboard would get yanked out of my hands. I was feeling terror at the oncoming waves. Marco had instructed me in two ways to get through the breaking waves. One way was for the smaller waves. You kind of do a pushup on the board so the crashing water runs between you and your board. For the bigger waves, he taught me to do a turtle roll which I thought was surely going to break my nose the first time I tried it. Right before the wave breaks on you, you grab the sides of the board and roll over so the surfboard in on top of you as the wave is breaking. If you do it too late, the wave tries to separate you from your board and laughs while your puny little arms fight back. Timing is critical in this sport. No doubt about it. Also, learning which waves are big enough to do the turtle roll is one of those trial and error processes. Marco says: "That wave was too small to do a turtle roll". Oh. "You don't want to waste your energy". And it is quite a maneuver. You rarely end up on your surfboard after a turtle roll. Climbing back on your surfboard all the time takes a lot of energy (as does panicking). I was panicking a lot, and I am really the non-panicking fish type when it comes to water. Height, yes, I predictably panic.(I won't be learning to skydive) But fearing water, I was not used to that. Panicking, of course, is one of the worst things you can do for your health while surfing. I had a mini lecture in the middle of the ocean about not panicking.  At one point (pre-lecture) I was screaming, "Marco, I can't do this!" at the top of my lungs and was flailing around like shark bait. I just about almost gave up totally. But, he said the waves would get better in a few days, and my stubborn side was not letting me give up. For probably ten days, I went, hoping for a calmer ocean. Psyching myself up each time to overcome my paddling out fear. And each time Marco would say, not today. Too rough. Tomorrow for sure. Finally after a series of successful but unfulfilled psych-ings, the day came. After mentally punching my hand through a few walls, shouting obscenities, chanting the nasty badass honey badger theme and flanked by Steve, Lyn and Athena, I went once again to bored, aggravated, babe-deprived Marco and the wave machine to "paddle out". Eureka! The ocean was in a much better mood. Marco - no, but at least I got a glint of a smile out of him. I was not afraid. I turtle rolled beautifully, kept on paddling and smiled, laughed! Nasty badass Meret badger EATS waves! I caught my first wave! And didn't eat it! Yahoo! I (sort of) hugged Marco and got a high five from Choco. Sittin on top of the world tooo-day! The next day I paddled out with Steve (the big boy surfer). Another victory for me. Didn't do much, but I learned subtle things like how to turn my board around quickly without someone shouting commands at me and when/when not to do a turtle roll. So, I mostly sat on my surfboard and coasted for a long time realizing, there are a lot of waves out there and there are no signs (and no Marco) saying "This one is yours". I had no idea which wave to take. So, when I went back in to shore, Marco asks me 'how was it?" and I said oh, great, but one minor detail, I don't know which waves to take! Marco (eye roll) said, just take the waves like we did yesterday. Uh huh, but yesterday he was standing up on his surf board watching the waves and shouting orders to me. "THIS YOUR WAVE", "TURN AROUND NOW!", "PADDLE!", "PADDLE FASTER",  "DON'T STAND UP". Oh, I thought you said STAND UP! (sh**t). (another Marco eye roll). Anyway, when he was out there with me, I never knew what was coming, wave-wise. It could have been a tsunami. I was just belly-on-surfboard facing the shore getting ready to paddle-never-fast-enough, and trying to hear broken english commands over the surf. Of course, I was supposed to "look the wave", "LOOK THE WAVE!". But, I thought right now HE'S there to "LOOK THE WAVE!". He's going to yell at me anyway, so let him tell me which wave to take.  "I have to think about a million other things right now, Marco", I'm thinking in my stubborn, spoiled american girl way. I did try one wave but I stood up too soon just like he told me not too and the wave got away. He says "you have to do what I say". I say "I know, I know, I go into fight or flight when this wave is about to send me on a roller coaster" Sorry (feeling like a BAD student). So, here's Marco. Very sweet, very competent, but really disgusted with me, and longing for the babes.  Oh, and I was the ONLY woman on the beach with a one-piece bathing suit. How un-cool is that!. I do have a bikini with me, but imagine trying to retrieve the two pieces of a bikini AND trying to figure out where your surf board is (like, is it coming toward my head?) AND having a nose full of ocean AND Marco yelling "PADDLE OUT!"     S-o-r-r-y!

Epilogue: I did paddle out twice with Steve and I caught two waves all by myself and ate them for dinner!

Costa Rican Bird Pop Star

There's this one particular bird that has entertained us every day with an ever changing repertoire of songs, and if you listen without your ears, you can hear the words he is saying (Translating the meaning is another talent that I may develop sometime in the future). We can tell it's the same type of bird every time because of the crystal clear tone and... the volume knob. This bird has a volume knob.  Starts out low and then cranks it UP.  (The cell phones in Costa Rica do the same volume thing.)

Here are my faves with lyrics listed below:

Potato Creek Bomber
You Have Freckles in Your Beard
Beef Stew
Green Acres remix (see link below for original Green Acres theme song)
You're a weirdo
La Cucaracha ((great cover of an old fave)
Get Real



Lyrics

Potato Creek Bomber
Potato-creek-bomber  
Potato-creek-bomber
Potato-creek-bomber 
Potato-creek-bomber

You Have Freckles In Your Beard
You have freckles in your beard
You have freckles in your beard
You have freckles in your beard
You have freckles in your beard

Beef Stew 
Beef stew (pause)
Beef stew (pause)
Repeat

GreenAcres remix 

Instrumental

You're a Weirdo
You're a weir-do
You're a weir-do
You're a weir-do  
You're a weir-do

La Cucaracha remix
La Cucaracha
La Cucaracha
La Cucaracha
La Cucaracha  

 

Get Real
Get REAL
Get REAL
Get REAL
.....(pause) Steeeeeeve!.........
Kiss Meret
Kiss Meret
Kiss Meret 

(this is all true)

Green Acres Theme Song (first 5 notes is all you need - but go ahead and listen to it all. Sing along!)

The Mascots of Al Manglar

Excuse me...did you say you have a boa constrictor for a mascot? We went back to Al Manglar (which means In the Mangroves) for the 4th night in a row tonight. I think we like the food. I wrote more about this restaurant on Trip Advisor, if anyone is interested in coming to Samara with us when we return in January (probably a dream). I found myself telling Rosa, the chef, that we would be back in January (which was probably a lie). She had to prompt me on the italian word for January because all I could say was "the month after December". Otherwise, unbelievably, I spit out a sentence or two in italian and was somewhat understood. Anyway, we arrived to find Massimo (our waiter from Naples) out in front of Al Manglar talking to something in the muddy stream. I yelled something like "Hey are you talking to the toads?" No, he said, a crocodile. !!!!! Sure enough, yes, a maybe pre-teen sized cocodrillo was there at the bank of the creek, sticking his nose up and showing his little pearly adolescent teeth. Apparently, Rosa feeds the little rascal daily at least once. Raw fish, etc. He's her "baby". A Mascot. So, when Massimo walked up to the water, out popped croc looking for a meal. He's a growing boy! Massimo was scolding him for his enormous appetite and suggested he go distract himself with a girlfriend. Wow! I'm standing 3 feet from a crocodile who might be getting pissed off about  a) not being fed and b) being told to go get a girlfriend - which I think would piss one off if one had to go miles to find one. There seems to be only one croc per muddy stream. Our spanish teacher Leni said there is one that lives in the muddy stream under a bridge down the road from her house. Recently it rained so much here that her entire road merged with that muddy stream and its lone inhabitant swam up the road and was lounging around in her front yard. She is saying all this with only mild distress. Yikes! I guess it's like me and tornadoes. I grew up with funnels touching down and sirens blowing all the time and frantic weathermen saying "Folks, this is no joke. We have a funnel on the ground. Take shelter now!" We would be standing out in the streets looking up at the sky saying, "Naaa!" Or sometimes piling into the station wagon at 2am and going to the fallout shelter at the hospital because we were all going to blow away. Fun! I just didn't have the fear of tornadoes that I do of crocodiles. I grew up with muddy streams, too. But, all I remember inhabiting those creeks were crawdads and snapping turtles. Scary? no. So, back to Al Manglar ...we came back tonight because Rosa and Massimo promised to have lasagna. We tried two nights in a row without success, but we knew it was worth trying again for because we had it a week before, and Massimo promised they would have it. We decided to trust this Neopolitan, even though he thoroughly convinced us never to go to Naples because you cannot trust anyone there and it is impossible to reform them because it is in their genes. Hmmm. Well, we trusted him (and Rosa who is from very trust-worthy Verona-home-of-Romeo-and-Juliet) and they did produce the goods - the lasagnaaaaah. Excellent lasagna. Subtle, integrated, smooth, layered delight! We got the one with ground beef and ham (I'm pretty sure we will have to renounce our vegetarianism with that one). So, okay, rewind a bit to pre-lasagna. We sat down to wait for the deliciousness, amongst the usual array of cats and dogs that wander in, and we heard some commotion out front.  It was Rosa feeding our randy little growing boy, the croc. We had to see this. He swallowed a big piece of fish whole and then turned on his side (oh, that's ayurvedic isn't it?) and gave us a smile showing his fine, razor sharp adolescent teeth. She says he is very smart. I wonder if he is smart enough to know that when he grows up, he could make one of us his meal. It's just a little eerie the thought of befriending a crocodile. It's about trust. Can you trust someone who could swallow you some day? Maaaybe... Anyway, one piece of fish was not enough for young crockinstein. He wanted more and started to charge up the bank towards Rosa. We may have a nasty drug dealer/addict situation developing here. Again, I'm thinking, never deal drugs to someone who would bite your leg off if you were a little too slow to deliver.  Massimo again reprimanded him and suggested female distractions. Croclet slid back into the water with that "oh dad" kind of look (I thought I saw a hint of "oh dad, just you wait", too). We returned to our table eager to chomp our lasagna (and roll onto our sides with teeth glistening). On this occasion we were sitting more on the inside part of the restaurant. Usually we sat in the open-air section but there was some kind of stink going on that we couldn't handle. Turned out to be a lobster in the trash that Rosa had bought and discarded (trash day was tomorrow). So we moved inward away from the stink of the morte langosta under the beautifully crafted high thatched roof. (Think these words using a sinister voice) - We were soon to be introduced to Al Manglar Mascot #2 (insert creepy music here). Rosa motioned for us to look up at something long and brownish above us that sort of looked like a piece of the roof thatching (are you guessing yet?). The "rrrroof thatching" mmmoved. We began to make out a head. The eyes. It slowly became an "s" (as in oh shit) shape.  It was a boa constrictor with about half of its body sticking through the thatching staring down at us. Su amigo? I said to Rosa. Si, she said. He's my "pet". He eats the bats. A living ecosystem right there under the roof at Al Manglar. The bats eat the mesquitos (but not quite well enough), the snake eats the bats, and I don't think anyone eats the snake. Maybe the croc would. Or a nasty badass honey badger if they had any there. (see previous post).  Tune in next week for  "Who's chomping who" and "Crocky gets a date".

Athena gets kissed by a frog

We rented bikes today and had the best adventure. We were going to ride down the highway to Carillo beach which is about 7km from Samara. (see Gilligan's Island post earlier this month). We realized quickly that it was too hilly for the types of bikes we had and turned around. I was intent on getting in the water at that point and wanted to head down the beach on our bikes. We did. I jumped in the water (have bathing suit will travel) and we jumped on our bikes and rode to the ends of the earth. At earth's end there was a road that went off to the left and headlands to our right. We took the road. It was a pretty short bike on a dirt road that T-ed into a two lane paved road. There on the corner was a sign advertising La Selva Refugio and indicating it was only 2km away. I knew La Selva was at Carillo Beach, so magically, we were only a little over a mile away from where we were headed in the first place! We had ridden to Carillo Beach on our bikes down the beach!  We stayed a bit and swam, played with the hermit crabs in the tide pool, avoided several horses hanging out on the highway, saw cows in the river and then headed back. I want to swerve here for a few lines to describe how wonderful it was to have Lyn and Athena visit us at that time. We were just starting to feel a bit homesick and loosing our enthusiasm when these two showed up with their incredible enthusiasm and vacation spirit. Suddenly we were showing them around "our" Samara with pride and a new sense of appreciation. It sort of re-awakened us  to all the specialness of this place. The sweet people, the ocean, the local artists, our veranda, the Tico food, the birds, the iguanas. It was miraculous. We realized we had a new home-away-from-home. Samara had woven itself quietly and deeply into our hearts.
Back to our story: We headed back down the two-lane, dirt road and beach toward Samara. We wanted to take Lyn and Athena to Pablito's Bar that evening, and it was getting toward dusk. Pablitos, you may remember from an earlier post (Pablito's Bar - Here comes the Sun), is the place to really feel the local vibe of Samara. As we reached the familiar territory of Chaco's Surf School, we parked our bikes and took a dip in the ocean, then headed to Pablito's at the other end of town, past the usual horses, cows and chickens. We arrived just about dusk (6pm) and were about the only customers there. The nice man (the one that brought me the sun on a previous visit - see earlier post about Pablito's) was there and seated us in the smoking section inhabited only by the chirping geckos on the walls. The geckos were not smoking and neither were we. We had a Boca (a cup of stew that comes free with your beer) and a few beers/pepsis we ate some of their great french fries and chatted.  By the way, for some reason the french fries here in Costa Rica are GREAT! Like they were pre-McDonalds when a french fry was a potato and not ... cardboard (?). Anyway, we're chatting/enjoying hanging out and then - Frog-on-table. There he was. A frog. Not a toad, noooo. We all gasped in delight and asked the obvious whys and where-came-froms. But we were left to only speculate. He was not talking. I know now, but did not know then that prince frog had a very specific mission. He was coming a-courting. He was seeking his princedom. He had his sites set on Athena (and what prince wouldn't!).  Of course, being gurls, we had to touch the frog and coo "oh he's so cute". That was his cue. His moment! No guts, no glory! He flew straight into Athena's mouth. Smack! We're talkin frog mouth to Athena mouth. Bleck! Ick. and all. She said there was actual tongue contact (french froggie, I guess). Oh, Monsieur! Bleck! Ick! Then he ricocheted off her teeth onto her chest. This was one CHEEKY frenchy froggie. Then he was gone. Definitely a drive-by kissing. He sat under a chair for the rest of the evening. Humiliated and re-grouping, I'm sure, and later agreed to a few (hundred) photos. While we were there, we managed to see two of those famous yodeling toads that night, too. One smiled for the camera as we took another half-billion photos in the dark while the locals looked on. Another cute human critter we met that night was little boy about the size of a coke bottle with a beatle haircut who kept whizzing by our table with one of those toy cars that are almost big enough to ride on. He was adorable. We coo-ed. We did not, however, reach out and touch him in case he pulled a stunt like ricochet froggie. He seemed to belong to Pablito's and when we got up to leave, he cleared the beer bottles off our table, gave us a wave and said Ciao! We were charmed. Oh yeah, the frog may have gotten a kiss, but he never turned into a prince (unless there was some delayed reaction and there is now a prince hiding under a chair at Pablito's looking for Athena). I just don't think the whole kiss-a-frog-he-turns-into-a-prince works that way. His technique was all wrong. I believe the girl has to CHOOSE to kiss the frog. Choose. I know, we choose everything...blah, blah, blah, but I'm just really sure Athena was not being a random costa rican frog/prince magnet that night.