Still learning!

I’ve had a bit of a sore throat the last two days, but it seems everyone in the class has it, so I guess it’s going around.

In class I’m doing well, we’re going over stuff I already have a tiny bit of knowledge on, so it’s a good chance to practice it. My confidence in my own speaking abilities is improving — I’m still not able to comprehend or compose in realtime, but it’s getting there. 

Of course somethings you learn how to say very well very quickly — ¿cómo se dice …? — how do you say… and ¿qué significa…? — what does … mean?

Status update

I’ve avoided posting an update on how the learning is going for fear of somehow jinxing it. But it’s going well enough now that I feel I can risk it.

In general I’m doing really well, we are all doing well and the teacher is great — we’re going at exactly the right pace, and everyone is getting multiple chances at trying new structures and phrases.

Today we started on irregular verbs. Spanish has regular verbs that can be conjugated easily (eg “comer” means “to eat”, and you can say “I eat” by changing the “er” to “o”, and he eats by changing it to “e”, and we eat by changing the “er” to “emos”, so “comemos cada día” — we eat every day”. But Spanish can’t be too easy, so there are a bunch of irregular verbs where those easy rules don’t always work. Unfortunately there are no rules for those verbs, so you just have to remember the exceptions.

So we had fun using various verbs and building sentences using the syntax we’ve learned. It’s actually been a lot of fun.

The one on one tuition I have in the afternoon is… different.. though I must confess, I start off each lesson skeptical of what he’s asking me to do, and end up acknowledging it was really good.

As for what my day is like:

• 06:45 wake up
• About 06:50 have breakfast
• Usually 07:00 do the morning ablutions
• 07:15 dressed and pack bag.
• About 07:20 head to school. 
• Depending how lazy I’m feeling and whether I stop at a bakery, I get to school around 07:35 to 07:55. (It’s a 1.5km walk to school)
• Class starts at 08:00. 
• 10:00 break for morning tea — eat a banana or other fruit.
• 10:15 class resumes — probably more verbs in different tenses and conjugations.
• 12:00 class ends, lunch time.
• Quickly go buy food if I didn’t get any on the way in.
• 12:30 keep practicing, studying.
• 13:00 private 1:1 tuition starts
• 15:00 walk home.
• When I get home talk to my mamá de tico for a little bit.
• 16:00 homework and study.
• 18:00 dinner time!
• 19:30 I usually call it quits for study. 
• Sometimes I then take the lessons and type up charts and rules in my laptop to help make them stick and to use as reference later.
• And/or I watch Netflix. If I’m not totally exhausted I’ll watch a movie or TV episode that I’ve seen before, but dubbed in Spanish. 
• 21:00 bed time, sleeping not long after.
• Then repeat the next day.

Heredia in pictures — attempt 2

 The app I used decided that we are all still in the late 90’s, so all the pictures were low resolution. I shall try uploading some again in higher resolution.

It’s kinda hard to say what Heredia is like, because it’s kind of like any busy city centre, but it looks different (hey, maybe because it is). I’ve not really spent too much time in any similar city or country, so I can’t exactly go “it’s just like Panama” (though it probably is).

Heredia in pictures

It occurs to me there are little photos here, and I suspect few people are captivated by my prose.

So what is Heredia like?

My day begins on this quiet street. Off to the right there is the Heredia cemetery, and I can finally put to rest the lies that my snoring can wake the dead.

Cheat day!

 My homestay mum, Mizonil, was out this afternoon and her son was here, and speaks very good English. We decided I deserved a "cheat day", and we had pizza and spoke English all evening. Oh wow, I had forgotten how good it feels. At school students in my class talk briefly before and after class, but we are encouraged to not hang out together until we can have our conversations in Spanish -- this makes sense, it forces us to interact with people using what Spanish we know.

So having a cheat day was such a relief, it made me realise how stressful it is not being able to speak the language. I walk out of my bedroom door and before every interaction I have to first think how I can say it in the easiest way, and what words I need to lookup first. 

So every Sunday, at least for a few hours, I will have a "cheat day" and eat bad food and speak English!

Weekend

 I'm hesitant to post a positive update, since the last two times I did that things then turned to custard.

Monday I'm in a different class, another beginners one, but this time everyone has zero previous experience with Spanish. I'm happy about this. It's also my first week with private tuition. 8am to midday group class, then 1pm to 3pm for private. Gonna be intense.

On that note, I've done a bunch more self study this weekend, and am feeling better. My spanish is still very low, I catch words now, but that is at least something. I understood the word for breakfast, and the word for eight, so I figured that breakfast was at 8am. I was right.

I went down to, forgive me, a Walmart (yes, there's a Walmart in Heredia) to buy a bunch of cheap things. Notably cheap shoes. The reason? I only have hiking boots and jandals, and I want something in between.

I'm going to try adapting my morning routine somewhat. 6am wake up and go for a maybe 20-30min run, get back around 6:45am, shower, change, then breakfast at 7am, and walk to school at 7:30am for the 8am start. I suspect I'll only do that 3 days a week, but we shall see. Next blog post might be "nope, not gonna exercise".

Hopefully classes are easier this week.

Day 3

Learning pace of class slowed down today, I felt like my head was now just above water. Instead of long sentences with no explanation of what was going on we now talked about when to use es vs estar. Still not 100% sure on it, but I managed to figure out a bunch of it.

Day 2

Fuck.

Day 1 — Estoy Cansado

Wow, my brain is melted. Estoy cansado — I am tired. I thought initially, as we learn the very basics — hello, I want, you want, they want, we want — that I’d be ok.

But no, it very quickly evolved.

It felt like the language school version of this:

But nonetheless, I am learning. Touch slower than others, but they also sensibly did some Duo Lingo before coming here (cheaters!).

We also had a walking tour of Heredia after class, and i now have some local currency and an approximate idea of the conversion. (Half USD times a thousand. So USD $10 is about 5,000 colones).

My brain is fried, but dinner is shortly and hopefully that should help. Tomorrow I shall pickup some brain food (other than agua — water) to help keep me going.

The long-ish road to Costa Rica

Ok, so, if you insist, here’s a brief rundown of all the “fun” I had getting here.

This may sound like whining over small things, but add them all up and it makes for a tiring 2 days. And I’m not actually looking for sympathy, I was just asked what happened…

• Two weeks out my glasses frame broke. I took them to an optometrist who repaired it, but it will break again soon — probably permanently. 
• I ordered new frame and glasses from the optometrist, but their supplier took 4 days for a 48hr turn around, then sent a lens that wasn’t right, then the ultra rush job it replace just that lens took 3 more days, by which point I’d left London. 
• 2 weeks out I also ordered 6 months of my medication, only to find that England was out of some of it — not the pharmacy, the country. Fortunately that resolved itself the day before I flew.

The flights, or lack of…

• On Friday the flight from London to Madrid was surprisingly (given what happens next) uneventful.
• I arrive in Madrid at 5pm to find that my Avianca airlines flight, that was supposed to leave just after midnight, has been delayed till 2am. 
• I can’t checkin online, so I can’t get a boarding pass to get through to a lounge, it takes another 3 hours for the Avianca counter to open.
• 00:30h rolls around — I hate being late to the gate, and I start walking up and down the concourse waiting for the boarding to start at 1am
• 01:00 rolls around and the departure time that was 02:00 is updated to 02:30.
• 03:20 rolls around, people have been napping on the floor, or just generally sitting, and they announce they are postponing the flight till 4pm later that day.
• They announce they have organised busses and hotels for us, and we then proceed to make our way through the airport.
• Then begins the lines, we are taken in groups, we have to wait for the lifts, which take forever to get 200 people through
• Then we hit immigration (we’d left Spain, so we have to come back in). Of the two immigration officers working (there are no other flights at this time of the morning), one of them is really paying attention to each passport, as if we’d not all come from Spain 4 hours earlier.
• Finally there is the line for the bus (but not before lots more lifts), but they don’t have enough busses, it’s just one, so we have to wait and wait for the bus to keep shuttling back and forth.
• I lose track of time now, but it’s around 5am and we are waiting in a very long line to get checked in at the hotel.
• I think I got to sleep around 6am. I’ve been up 24 hours now.
• Wake up at midday, they want us at the airport early for our 4pm flight.
• We get to the airport and of course lines, we need to line up to get our boarding pass updated, line up to get our boarding pass manually verified by security (something extra for Colombia, not sure why), line up for security.
• Finally about 30 minutes after our 3pm boarding time, I’m on the plane! 
• Unfortunately it’s 4pm, our takeoff time, and we are still at the gate, but we then push back, get onto the taxi way, and the engines stop — no idea what happened there, but they restart again and off we go
• I’ve now got a 10 hour flight in front of me, but when we land it’ll be around 8pm, so I can’t sleep. All my long hauls (including the original for this one), I plan so I can sleep through it. Good lord 10 hours is boring.
• We land, what about my connection to Costa Rica? (All on one ticket, so they have to sort it for me). Get off the plane it’s 8pm or so, and I’m given a new boarding pass for the next day at 2:30pm, as well as a hotel voucher, dinner voucher, breakfast and lunch vouchers! Yay? Not so fast
• All the way through security and immigration, and once again we have to wait for the bus, which involves another 15 minute wait (look, these times don’t seem long, but add them all up)
• But yay, it’s 10pm at night now, and we are at the hotel — the line for which seems quite slow…. Too slow… the hotel then confesses they don’t have any rooms available and they are talking to Avianca to find out what to do.
• An *hour* later, they advise us to go get dinner, at the place next door, who it turns out don’t accept the dinner voucher.
• This dear reader is where I give up. I’m done. I tried doing it right, I tried sticking to a budget, nope. 
• I throw money at the problem, myself and Mitsy, my translator/friend, get a taxi to the Marriot hotel, and book in two rooms, pre order room service, and head to bed. It was about midnight by the time I got my head down. Rumour has it the rest of the passengers are still waiting for dinner.

So that’s it? Right? lol.

• Next day I’m on my own, Mitsy has continued on her flight to Aruba, and I am not at the “correct” hotel, so I take a taxi to the airport.
• I have my boarding pass, given to me last night, right? Little did I know that through the night they cancelled AV 698, and created AV 5058, which was leaving 30 minutes after my flight was supposed to leave. 
• Security wouldn’t let me in with my boarding pass, so I had to go back to the Avianca counter — long long line, to get a fresh boarding pass printed, I get through the first security point…
• I get to the automated gates that check my passport and flight number… and AV 5058 doesn’t work, nor does 698… eventually a security person manually assigned me to the flight and the gate let me past and into actual security.
• Finally I’m resting in the lounge (Priority Pass for the win), and then it’s time to head to the gate…
• Only to find they push back the flight another 30 minutes…
• Ok, that’s fine, we get on, and then we sit there… for another 15 minutes, until finally another group of people come on (they held our flight for another connection).
• We taxi to the runway — Bogotá airport has the longest taxi way in the world, I assume. I could have driven across the Darién Gap in the time the taxing took.
• Finally we take off on my last leg of the trip to Costa Rica! Phew!

lol.

• “Attention passengers, if there is a doctor or any medical professional onboard please make yourself known to the cabin crew immediately”
• I’m not kidding, 20 minutes into the flight that happens. Then the plane banks and turns right around.
• I don’t know the details of what happened, but I’m guessing we circled a couple of times before deciding that whatever went wrong didn’t end up needing us to return to Bogotá.
• 2hr of a 1.5hr flight later and we land in San Jose Costa Rica. Also, either that pilot was asleep, or really you need a 4 wheel drive to navigate that runway, I’ve had rougher landings, but not many.

Fortunately that’s the end of the trials and tribulations. As I mentioned in my last post, I’m here, and all is good.

Day 0 of home stay

My home stay mum is Mizonil, and I’ve been here for about 3 hours now, and wow it’s been great and fun. She speaks very little English, so we make do with her limited English, my very small Spanish, and lots of signing and pointing, and occasionally, when I have to, Google translate — but I don’t like using it.

I can tell already I’m going to learn a lot, so long as I can remember it 😁. 

It seems my days will start at 7am, with pancakes or eggs or toast (she asked if I liked them and I said yes), then a walk to school, and then I guess a lot of learning, and I imagine lots of study when I get home.

Mizonil fussed trying to get the TV in my room working, and I was trying to say don’t worry, I don’t watch TV — till she pointed out that I will have to watch to learn Spanish! Of course!

It’s important to recognise when I say that we said something, I mean that it was mostly us gesturing and her occasionally using an English word she knows.

Anyway, positive first day!

Made it to San Jose Costa Rica

Wow, quite the adventure, cancelled flights, delayed flights, missed connections, delays, overbooked hotels, napping on the floor, an inflight medical emergency (not me!), and a LOT of waiting in lines. God so many lines.

I knew travel in South America would be different to what I’m used to, but I was kinda hoping I’d get off to an easier start.

I would probably not have made it, or at least had a much worse time, if it wasn’t for my new friend Mitsy, who I met in line right back at the beginning, when lining up to checkin in Madrid. Mitsy and I became instant friends, and given she spoke fluent Spanish she was able to help me navigate through all the chaos. Thank goodness I’m about to go learn Spanish!

Mitsy also lives in Aruba (island country off the coast of Colombia — the first island listed in the iconic song “Kokomo”), and she has insisted I come visit after Costa Rica. I in turn have insisted she goes to visit New Zealand — pretty sure she has the expensive end of that deal!

After all the trials and tribulations, as I write this I am in Costa Rica, about to head to my home stay family.

A couple of extra nights I wasn’t planning

Last night at 3am they said it won’t be till 4pm that they will get it fixed, so they bussed us off to a hotel — the Marriot, and nice rooms — but it wasn’t until 6am I got to bed. So. Many. Lines. We. Had. To. Wait. In. Lines for elevators, immigration, the busses, the hotel checkin.

Today I’m waiting to board, attempt 2, to go to Bogotá. The flight will not get in until after the last flight to Costa Rica. But fortunately it’s all on one ticket, so the airline will have to put me up in a hotel in Bogotá and fly me the next morning.

Of course, that assumes everything goes to plan — it has so far, right?

Delays delays

The flight from Madrid to Bogotá was delayed… it’s still delayed… it feels like it’s hour 235 of delays.

Because the flight is originating from the EU, every passenger will get compensation for the delay — someone said it will be around 600EUR. That’s like half the price of the ticket. 

My connection in Bogotá to San Jose is looking a little tight, but again because I brought it as a connecting flight, originating from Europe, they have to put me on the next flight and give a bunch of other compensation or something.

In the meantime I wait… and wait… I’ve been pacing up and down the concourse and since midnight walked 5,200 steps… waiting…

The next stage begins

A rather chaotic last week, with a bunch of problems occurring. Fortunately the larger hurdles have been overcome, so all ahead full.

In 2 hours I’ll be getting on my flight to Madrid. Once there I need to kill about 6 hours until a short 10h30m flight to Bogotá in Columbia. Arriving at 5am I’m sure I’ll feel refreshed and ready to wait 3hrs till my final flight to San Jose, Costa Rica. 

Tico Lingo have been great and sent me the info pack on who is picking me up and who I’ll be staying with. Wali is picking me up and taking me to stay with Mizonil and her son Alonso.

After that, I’ll probably sleep for 24 hours 😀

Forgetting things

I am depressingly normal — nine days out from travelling to central and South America I realise that I haven't done anything about vaccinations — something that a lot of travellers leave to the last minute. Typical.

Fortunately, it turns out because of my Nepal trip years ago my vaccinations are mostly up to date, and I only need a few including yellow fever. Unfortunately the yellow fever vaccine may lay me out for a day or so, but fortunately I can postpone for next week, so I’ll plan that around not having lots of other things to do.

In other news — my glasses frame broke again — the screw came loose. I was out at the time, so I immediately went to an optometrist and they fixed them. That lead to a conversation where I found that yes, they can get me new glasses with an up to date prescription before I leave.

End of that story is I’m waiting for my eye check and then by early next week I’ll have new glasses and sunglasses that actually work for my prescription!