Which is soooooo hard.
A word about the most critical daily grind: coffee. Day 1 in Florida, we bought the brand of coffee we drank for probably 10 years. After living la pura vida drinking Costa Rican coffee, that coffee was SOOOOOO bad. We dumped it and raced out for café con leche, cubano style.
I am no coffee connoisseur. As long as it's not old, I like it. But this… how did we drink that stuff for a decade???? Day 1 back here, we ran to our favorite feria in Hatillo where we buy kilos of fresh-ground locally-grown coffee for 1400 colones ($1.50/pound). Sooooo good!
6am: to the gym with my friend, Barbara, girl singer in my geezer band, massage therapist to the stars and all around gal pal. I'm up at 5am… being up before anyone else is a gift. The house is silent, even the dogs are sleeping. Watching the sun come up over the mountains, slowly drowning out the city lights, hearing the birds… perfect beginning.
Next week, gym is at 7am so blogging and writing can be squeezed in there between coffee and gym. I can at least get the first draft online. Lately, I'm back on the book idea. We'll see… I think I jinxed it talking about it. So forget I said anything.
Breakfast is Hal's Zen Aplausos: ah-PLOW-sewce. We call them applauses and clap as they come to the table. Yeah, we know how to have a good time.
Traditional aplausos start with two flat tortillas, some grated cheese and a griddle. Lay a tortilla face-up on the griddle (ok, that's a joke, I'm not such a terrible cook I don't know every tortilla has two faces), grate some cheese onto it, sprinkle some red pepper flakes on there for spice and really anything else you want like chopped ham or lightly cooked veggies. Last night's leftovers. You can even pour a little scrambled egg on there. It runs a little over the side, but you just scrape it back on there with your spatula. Top with the second tortilla, brown on one side, then flip and brown on the other. Voilà!
Zen Aplausos require only one tortilla, folded over. So ONE tortilla. Like the sound of ONE hand clapping? Get it? Yeah. Whoa.
Then comes the really fun part: class with Jorge, our profesor de Español [pro-fey-SORE day ā-spawn-YOLE. Jorge has been coming to our house three mornings a week, two hours each time, for about six months now ($300 a month, worth every penny). I haven't been taking the class because… it makes me crazy. Seriously, this is why I'm so sane.
Only now everyone in the house speaks WAY better Spanish than me, so I gotta sit in. If only for one of the hours. Besides, there are constant eruptions of raucous laughter… I gotta find out what's so funny.
The boys are practically fluent. Even the campo guys – the plumber, the gardener, the guys who speak country Spanish really really rapido [RAP-ee-dough] – Mo and Ryan understand them. Ryan's accent is killer – he has a knack. His accent got good before he really understood, though. Made for some pretty comical moments…
Morgan has actually started speaking it. When we first came, he shut down completely in Spanish class. Nothing penetrated. Now he speaks like a pro. An expat pro, but he's good and no longer self-conscious. In fact, I think he's pleased he can speak another language.
Hal has the best intellectual command of the language, but he still occasionally gets the deer-in-the-headlights look. The panic fades quickly though and he can formulate, then offer the correct response before the other party has walked away. This is progress. He is determined to master the language and the accent, and he goes at it. He reads La Nación every morning, listens to Spanish radio in the car. Starting next week, he's going to teach English to ticos at a volunteer school in Santa Ana. The boys are going to help him which will be good for all of them.
And I'll have the house to myself. Heheheh.
The rest of the day, we school. I manage most of it. The boys are in Algebra II (which is still mostly basic math, just more complex formulas), they write a 250 word essay everyday, they read for at least an hour a day or 50 pages, whichever comes first, from our master reading list. Ryan reads voraciously. I have to chain Morgan to the bed and watch the clock. But Morgan will sit at the piano for two hours all on his own and pick out the theme song to the last movie we saw. Both hands. So he doesn't like to read…
Their essays are on a variety of topics, some creative, some journal, some researched. We discuss history, watch documentaries, talk politics. Somewhere along the line here in Costa Rica, Hal and I lost complete interest in the "what college are the boys going to?" question. The college thing used to hang over us because "everyone knows" college graduates do better than non. We've come to believe that is propaganda. If they want to go to college, great. If they don't, great. If they find contentment somewhere, somehow, that would do very nicely. Somehow, they are turning out so beautifully. Smart, funny, well-mannered (in public, at least.) You would like them. Everyone does.
Hal works while I school. He works on the websites and various other possible money making schemes. Er, projects. No runaway successes so far, but it all looks positive. We are doing a little Costa Rica real estate, a little real estate in Key West. There are good deals to be had in both places. I wrote two offers on property in Key West and another buyer is looking now. It's fun to shop with savvy buyers who can afford it. You know they are not going to get hurt and they enjoy the process. Plus, in Key West at least, the heads are out of the sand and the bright lights are on. Reality bites, but things are getting done.
Evenings at home, we attach ourselves to appliances: computers, TV, ipods, DVDs. We read, we talk, we eat, we hang-out, till we crash around 10pm. Sleep, then repeat. Does it sound boring? There are some variations on the theme, of course. Like we occasionally leave the house… and we often have people over for potluck dinner. That is really fun. It's a good life today. A very good life. I'm thinking it will still be good tomorrow. I'll keep you posted!
Hi Sally,
It is a good life here, isn’t it? Time is precious and worth more than money. Not that money is not important. It’s VERY IMPORTANT :)) But having so much time to be with family and to be with our friends who visit us as well, it’s irreplaceable. Couldn’t get that in the US before, living in a city. If we were to go back, I would need to create something similiar, and I could now. But it also wouldn’t be living in the tropics by the beach, so for now I’m okay with the lifestyle here. I like the experiment of living in another country, learning the language, making new friends and pushing ourselves to grow. I like having really examined our priorities. Again, we just couldn’t really thoroughly do that living in a city in the US. Not in the way moving out of the country provided and still provides to us daily.
Thanks for hanging in there and keeping up with your blog too. I just started to check out Hal’s blog and I enjoyed it too.
Take care,
Heidi in Guanacaste.
Hola Sally,
I LOOVE reading your blog. I really got interested in reading about Costa Rica a few months ago, and then life got too busy, so I gave up (for now) on trying to keep up with the Costa Rica Living egroup messages, etc., but I always check in here to see what’s new with you. And let’s not talk about my self-paced Spanish class….
Keep it up!
…Chuck
Boy you are soooo right about the coffee. I am no big-time coffee expert but in Costa Rica it is so damn good! Here in NYC I have tried it all, made every possible way and it never compares to a cup at some tipico/soda out in the middle of nowhere CR even when brewed through a “sock”. Recently we moved uptown “Washington Heights” and I found the best little Dominican bakery, just like pachis pan in Jaco. Finally some great coffee and I get to practice my Spanish.
Hi Heidi, great hearing from you as always! We have got to hook up. Examining priorities: that’s what we are doing here. It kinda gets done “to” you without any real effort. Things are just so slow here, you slow down with it.
Hi Chuck, you and me on the Spanish… I have got to sit down with Jorge and the boys!
Keith, I am so jealous that you live in Manhattan. That is a city I could live in, at least part-time. I LOVE that place. When I come for a visit (I still have friends from when I lived there), we’ll have coffee at the bakery. That would be a perfect life: most of the year in Costa Rica with a couple of months in Manhattan and a couple of months in Key West. OK, that’s going on the five year plan.
Is it really worthwhile to make Morgan read if he’s not into it? I was a voracious reader but my high school & college reading slowly beat that out of me, and I stopped reading anything beyond magazines & newspapers for two years after almost finishing college (I wrapped it up 2 summers later).
I wasn’t ready for a lot of the required reading in high school – the only things I liked were Shakespeare and Aldous Huxley. 5 years later I took 19th century British lit in college and, to my utter surprise, really liked it. Kids know what they’re ready for. I have relatives who’ve killed the joy of reading in 8-10 year olds by making them read for that requisite hour a day. I’d be thrilled if my kid wanted to play music instead of read.
Come to think of it, I used to have superb grammer and spelling skills, and I noticed that they slid steadily down as I got better at playing guitar. I make normal spelling errors that would never have happened before I obsessed about music.
Do you guys have a real piano or a keyboard? Did you bring it down?
Hi Arp, probably a mistake to make Morgan read. He enjoys what he reads once he does. He CAN read so maybe my work here is done. But like moving from homeschooling to unschooling, from college is a must to college is a whatever… giving up the reading thing is going to be hard for the two of us. We may not be there yet. Part of me knows you are right. But the control freak part of me goes bananas considering allowing him to make the choice of reading or not. ACK.
We have a real electric piano, full-size keyboard, same one we had in the states only double the price. We bought it when we first got here: Yamaha, $2,000 from Baunsbach, the big music store in multi-plaza. They have a baby grand for $11,000. We lust for that. One day.
I hear that. We committed to unschooling last spring, but we didn’t really get it until December. And the hardest part was untraining ourselves. The magic book was Rue Kreams Parenting a Free Child, definitely worth a read if you can get a hold of it.
We’d like to have a piano there – sounds like something that might be worth bringing down, though I dunno what would happen with a $1000 electronic item in aduana. Gotta cost less than $2k, even with a flightcase.