I've lost weight, and not long to wait!

 

It's not long until school finishes -- 6 more school days. In preparation for the next part of my trip, I took everything I want to take on the road from Guatemala to Panama and put it all in my shiny summit pack. This is a 36L backpack that is very comfy to carry. 

Since I'm not having to take all my winter, hiking, and climbing gear with me on this part of the trip, I can shed all that weight and volume. This smaller backpack should feel very nice carrying around -- first measure is that it's only 10kg and will easily fit in an overhead locker or probably even at my feet on a plane.

I don't need hiking poles, sleeping bags, jackets, gloves, etc. all of that stuff is remaining in my big backpack. And all of that weighs a lot, so now I'll have less weight on my back. How much? Of course I had to measure, so I used the trick of standing on the scales with and without my backpack. 10kg, not bad, but I also noted that my personal weight is now down to 100kg. Wow!

Classes and glasses

This week (esta semana), I am repeating the previous weeks class (repitiendo la clase de la hace semana), however this is a good thing, because that sentence above says “me repeating the class from a week ago.” 

Next steps confirmed

Late February I'll be continuing my adventure to Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua and then back to Costa Rica! Yes, these aren't countries people normally line up to visit, but I'm not over here to visit the big destinations -- I'd have stayed in Europe if I was.

Poco a poco

Poco a poco — little by little, a favourite saying around here, meaning that you learn spanish a little bit at a time, but with only 3 weeks(!!) left of my time at Tico Lingo, I really need grande a grande else I feel I’m going to still be saying lo siento, sólo hablo un poco de español — I’m sorry, I only speak a little Spanish. I probably will always say that, even if I magically got to conversational level in the next 3 weeks.

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).