Another Hill to Climb

Or, two, actually. The volunteer who lives San Cayetano (about 12 minutes away) and I spend a lot of time together since we live so close. Since we both had a long weekend (Monday was the Annexation of Nicoya and today there is a teacher’s meeting), we decided to spend it visiting some people from her school. Sunday we went to the house of her school cook, Cecilia. We weren’t entirely sure where her house was, but we knew the general direction so we started our journey and figured we’d just ask along the way. Of course as we began asking we found out that her house was “muy arriba.” Considering we live in such a mountainous area we shouldn’t have expected anything less. It was about a 50 minute hike up the mountain. A stroll, really, in comparison to some places I have gone up the mountains (and especially in comparison to where we would be going the next day). As it turned out, I found out that Cecilia was my host mom’s sister-in-law. I should have known. Everyone here seems to be related in some way or another.

Yesterday we went to the house of Emili, one of the other volunteer’s students. The other volunteer had been to Emili’s house before so she’d warned me that climbing the mountain to their house was quite a feat. I figured I’d seen my fair share of steep hills so I’d be somewhat prepared for it. Wrong. The volunteer, her 19-year old host aunt, and I spent almost 2 hours (counting rest breaks) conquering that mountain. The hills were steep, long, and didn’t provide very good footing which overall made for an incredibly unpleasant (and extremely sweaty) experience. When we finally arrived, we found that it was well worth the traversing. Emili and her family lived in a big, beautiful wooden house at the very top of the mountain. The air was cool and refreshing. Both of Emili’s parents had lived in the states for a few years, so their house had many of the American comforts we were used to (hot water, microwave, electric stove, toilets that could flush toilet paper, etc.). It was about as American as you can get in rural Costa Rica. We had a delicious lunch of salad and spaghetti with meatballs (apparently one of her mother’s many jobs in the States had been working as a chef) without rice and beans. I can count the number of meals that I’ve had without rice and beans (including breakfast) on less than one hand. Once again, being there really reminded me of home. It was also really nice speaking with Emili’s parents because since they understood the difficulty of trying to speak a foreign language, they would always stop to make sure that we understood certain words (usually she was spot on to which word’s we’d never heard before). Eventually (and most unfortunately!) our visit had to come to an end. We were looking at an hour and fifteen minutes of descent so, despite the pouring rain, we had to get going before it got dark.

I thought I’d figured out all there is to know about Costa Rica (or at least, all that was possible for me to know), but in these last few days, I’m still figuring out that I have quite a bit to learn.