Christmas/New Years and More

So…what’s happened since last time a wrote? Hmm…well I guess I’ll start with about three weeks ago we had a BINGO event in out community center to raise money for the high school. They were giving away prizes like a coffee maker, electric frying pan, CD player, and a mattress. We had pretty official bingo cards and everything sponsored by an electronics and home supply store in Nicoya and it was actually kinda fun. Unfortunately I didn’t win anything.

There was a dance afterward but I didn’t feel like hanging around and watching old drunk men and teenagers trying to dance with the handful of young girls that exist in my town. I heard the next day that I didn’t miss anything. Everyone got drunk and there ended up being some fights like usual.

We’ve had a few soccer games in my town against some other towns in the area. It’s pretty informal, usually if one team doesn’t have enough players they borrow them from the other team, and most of the players are half drunk so it can be pretty funny.

Two weeks ago was Christmas week so that was somewhat eventful. Well first I’ll start by saying that the local highway association is working on our roads, making them a little wider and smother. This of course is a very good thing and much needed, except right now, since everything is very dry, the roads are pretty much just loose dirt and dust. They look perfectly smooth but if you don’t have a 4x4 it’s really hard to get up and down the mountains leading into my town. Our bus driver also got a “new” bus, which seems to have half the horsepower of the last one and even balder tires. On several hills along the bus rout the people have the get out of the bus and hike up the hill while the bus gets a running start and tries not to die while puttering and to the top of the hill at 5 kilometres an hours.

Anyway, due to this combination of bad roads and an incompetent bus there have been a several instances when I would be sitting along the road waiting for a bus that never shows up. This can be very frustrating, especially when you have a full day planned in the city. Usually I just start walking a hope that somebody decides to give the poor dust-covered gringo a ride. The locals are very accommodating; the problem is that there is almost no traffic.

At any rate, this is my Christmas story: Two days before Christmas I helped Carmen’s family make tamales. In case you don’t know, they are pretty much my host family except I don’t live with them. Anyways I guess tamales are the typical Christmas food here and throughout most of Latin America and almost everyone makes them, or at least eats them. They are pretty much made of grinded corn mush with spices, rice, potatoes, carrots, peppers, and pork wrapped up in banana leaves, tied tightly and boiled in a big pot (see pictures). We made over one hundred in one day and I still have blisters scars on my hands from cutting so many peppers, carrots, and potatoes. I kept getting sent out with a machete to go look for more big banana leaves, which then had to be stripped from the stem and burnt over a fire to make them softer, and more fabric-like and therefore less likely to crack when wrapped tightly. Since they don’t have electricity all the work was don’t by candlelight which made it all the more interesting, if it wasn’t for the little battery-powered radio we were listening to it could have easily been a couple hundred years ago. It was fun listening to Christmas Carols in Spanish and putting together tamales until 12:30am but I have to admit, I was pretty tired by the end of it and ready for bed…especially since I’m usually in bed and sleeping by 8:00pm.
The following days, Christmas eve and Christmas, most people kept up with their normal farm work. Besides visiting family members in town and eating tamales there was little variation from a routine Wednesday and Thursday. Nobody really exchanged gifts and I only saw one house in my town with a Christmas tree. I guess in the cities the Christmas tradition here is very similar to ours in the states, but in the rural towns where most people struggle economically, Christmas is by no means a material holiday.

For New Years I had the amazing opportunity to spend 2 nights at Flamingo Beach. My friend Kelsey´s parents are renting a condo on the beach for a couple months and they let her invite a bunch of other volunteers over for New Years. The condo was beautiful, directly on the beach, and with a really cool swimming pool. After a very ¨different¨ Christmas in my town it felt good to hang out with other Americans for New Years. We grilled burgers, drank some beers, played some games, and traded a lot of stories. There was even a really good firework show at midnight. It actually felt more like the fourth of July than New Years. It´s not the same without the cold and snow (not that I miss it).

Here’s a little story of an interesting day. I’ve had many days like this one but since I wrote about this in my journal I actually remember some of the details. Its kinda long, you can skip it if you want. Anyway, here we go:

The day after Christmas my friend Andres and I decided to go to Nicoya for the day to hang out. We met at the bus stop in the morning and both immediately realized the bus would not be coming. It had rained for an hour or so in the morning (the first time in about a month) and the once dusty, dry road became a 4 inch deep mud road. Usually the road is packed down enough from traffic that the rain runs right off into the ditch, but since the road had just been worked on, the water soaked right in and instantly made it a muddy mess.

We decided to start walking anyway and see what would happen. After about an hour we decided to stop at this little store to have a coke and some plantain chips. Some guy with a truck who was there said he would give Andres and I, a ride to the highway, along with 4 other people who were there still waiting hopelessly for the bus. After about 5 minutes in the truck the driver and his friend stopped by this little trail entrance and got out with machetes. They said they had to go cut some plantain to load in the truck. Andres and I and another guy offered to help. We hiked about 10 minutes back into the jungle until we came to this little farm with about 50 or so plantain trees. The guys from the truck started going around chopping off the bunches (I don’t really know what else to call them) of plantains and we started carrying them back to the truck. They were pretty big, probably weighing an average of 50lbs apiece. After lugging these things out of the jungle for an hour or so my nice, clean clothes were covered with mud, sweat and plantain sap. I got back into the truck, nestled myself into the pile of plantains, and tried to avoid the bewildered giant spiders that kept emerging from their nests within the bunches. I sat comfortably knowing I had earned my ride to the highway.
Along the road, on the first hill after leaving the main road we saw our bus abandoned in the ditch, covered in mud. It was obvious that it wouldn’t be going anywhere soon.

We waited along the highway for about a half hour until a bus finally came for Nicoya. By the time we got there we only had a couple hours until the bus left to go back to our town. I did my usually stuff; went to the post office, used the internet, ran some errands, got some food then went to the bus station to wait for the bus. Since it had been really hot and sunny all day the roads had definitely dried back up and we knew the bus would be able to get up the hill to our town. We also knew that the owner of the bus company has extra busses he could send in case of an emergency to pick the people up, so we waited in total faith that the/a bus was on its way. After waiting for almost an hour the rest of the crowd had given up hope gradually dispersed, looking for other ways home, or someone to stay with in Nicoya.

We decided to take a different bus along the highway and get off at the road that heads up toward my town and just start walking. When we got off the bus we heard a loud music coming from down the road. We walked to the center of town and saw a big party getting under way. There was gonna be bull riding and dancing and all kinds of fun and though we were tempted, we decided not to stay. It was getting dark and we knew we had at least 3 hour walk ahead of us, all up hill, and that the earlier we left the better chance we would have of getting a ride. We started our hike up into the mountains, weighed down by 10lbs of rice and a big bottle of cooking oil for Andres’s mom. Within 30 minutes it was dark, but at least the moon was fairly bright. It wasn’t too long before we ran out of thing to talk about but we kept up a good pace for about an hour and a half.

Not a single car passed us going up into the mountain only a handful of people coming down to the party. One car coming down the road stopped and said the driver said he was a “private taxi” from Nicoya and he would be willing to give us a ride back to our town for $15. Andres and I looked at each other, drenched in sweat, out of breath, knowing that we had at least another hour and a half to go, the majority up hill. He shrugged his shoulders and I offered the guy $10. He turned around his car in the narrow road and off we went. Upon getting into the car I realized he had a buddy in the passenger seat and by the way they were talking and the manner he was driving, it was obvious that they had been drinking. A new bar had opened up that week at the top of this one hill and apparently his uncle was the owner and he was on his way to home from there. He insisted on taking us up to meet his uncle, who we already knew since he’s the bus driver for the high school in my town. It was actually a really nice place, all open with a thatched palm roof and an amazing view of the Guanacaste flats. As we were enjoying the view we actually saw an airplane land at the Liberia airport…I never realized the airport was so close.

He eventually took us back to our town where we still had a 35 minute walk to Andres’s house. By the time we go there it was almost 8:00. His mom made us a dinner of rice, beans and coffee then with his siblings and crazy uncle we watched the first Lord of the Rings which for some reason didn’t have Spanish subtitles. I spent the next 3 hours trying to translate everything that was going on into Spanish. The younger kids kept asking outrageous questions that I would have had trouble answering in English. Since I hadn’t seen the movie in over 5 years I kinda forgot what it was all about myself. I explained things the best I could and ended up making most of it up.
It was definitely a humbling experience because even though I’m getting comfortable with my Spanish, I realized how much vocabulary I’m still lacking. After the movie I went to bed with visions of Orcs and Hobbits dancing through my head.

Well if you´ve made it through this whole thing without falling asleep I congratulate you.
Keep checking back for more. Enjoy the pictures!