Gin and Soda

Today was another rough day of classes for me. Partly because of all the gin I drank over the weekend instead of being a computer geek, and also because I’m just plain older than these 19 and 20 year old kids in my class who WHIZ through every new lesson like it’s “sooooooo easy.” I hate them. Okay, not really. Well, maybe a little.

Today was also the first day since we’ve been here that it rained from 2pm until 9pm straight. It wasn’t in a constant storm, just a continuous rain. But at least this damn place will be “clean” in the morning when I walk to school. Which brings up another thing, my legs freaking hurt. We walk about seven blocks to the bus station in the morning, uphill half of the distance, and then once we get off we walk about a mile to the school, which is pretty much up hill the whole way. The last stretch of about 200 yards is at a freaking 45 degree incline. Alright, alright…35 degrees. But it’s freaking hard, and every day by the time I reach the top, the museum door, I’m literally wet with sweat showing through my shirt, front and back thank you, and am panting like Katie Holmes on the end of her Tom leash. And not to mention the leg power needed to beat off all of the beggars and pickpockets that swarm around you constantly from the bus drop-off to the museum. So, my legs are sore as hell. I feel like I’ve been on a Stairmaster for three hours all the time. This BETTER be improving some muscles, somewhere.

So, all of those things today, plus Bernie e-mailing that he was trying to get a ticket here for this weekend, but then the cheap fare he found couldn’t be found again, got me to bitching on the way home to Alex. He’s the twenty year old that lives across the street. Yes, one of the smart bastards. But what made the night a huge freaking stress reliever was that he came over and explained everything we’ve learned reeeeeeally slowly, and I totally understood it all. He made better analogies than the professor and drew pictures while he talked, and that’s how I get things. So my homework tonight made total sense, and now I feel smart. I just hate that it takes me two hours compared to these kids’ freaking twenty minutes. Or, as our Costa Rican video teacher would say, “Twenty meenoots.”

Enough bitching. I haven’t said anything about the excursion this past weekend. It, naturally, was a peek into what so many people have been calling, “the beauty of Costa Rica.” Because I cannot stress enough, there is none of it in the center of the country. We went first to a live volcano. It’s wildly impressive and exciting because it really can blow at any minute. The opening looks like this gentle sea of white water, which is actually swirling gases. Sections of it even become yellow from sulfur being in the mix. We stood up on a huge platform overlooking the opening and the crater-like whole that surrounded it. Our guide suddenly said, “Can you tell that it is actually a mile in diameter?” It’s freaking huge.

We then went to the “La Paz” waterfalls and surrounding rainforest and gardens. There is a fancy hotel there that runs the show, all of the bridges and walkways and gardens, so it’s like “Natural rain forest waterfalls over Texas.” On the grounds of the hotel is this huge butterfly sanctuary and an insane humming bird population. There’s a large garden with dozens of humming bird feeders and there are so many birds and they swoosh by your head so fast and so close that it’s like mini jets flying by. I wish I had another day there because it was really not until the following day that I figured out Bernie’s digital camera better, so several of the bird pictures were out of focus. Sucks, because they could have been super cool.

And then we all got back on the bus and gleefully rode back into hell. At least I now know that there’s gin here.

V