Just like we would have been doing in Austin, we spent the last two months adjusting to the hectic schedule of school and work. The routine of getting back to school brought a sense of familiarity and comfort: early morning workouts followed by long days spent teaching/learning followed by after school meetings/extracurricular activities followed by dinner and homework/prep for the next day. Mike and I agree that the difference is not a lack of stress, but that the edges of that stress are significantly dulled.
In terms of our reduced stress, I chalk it up to manageable class sizes, reasonable teaching hours, and lots of time to play. Students and teachers get 3 breaks, or "mini-recreos", a day where kids (and teachers) play 4-square, basketball, ultimate (!), gaga ball, volleyball, etc. P has gnarly blisters on both palms from climbing on the monkey bars 3 times a day every day. S is playing tag and ultimate during her breaks and complained the first few weeks after school everyday that her whole body was sore from all of the movement.
If there is one image to summarize the difference between our lives here and in Austin, this is it!
September 15th is Costa Rica Independence Day and La Paz does it up big! Children all over CR make faroles, or lanterns, out of recycled materials and carry them in a lantern parade the weekend of Independence Day to commemorate the flame of freedom (i.e. news) that traveled from Guatemala to Costa Rica after achieving independence from Spain in 1821. There is a torch run every year from Guatemala through El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and ending in Costa Rica that schools and organizations participate in and the La Paz HS running team got to carry the torch for a few miles! Cities and schools all over Costa Rica hold parades, with drum lines leading parades of lanterns.
P got into the holiday spirit that week by decorating herself with the national symbols of CR, including the flag, the Guaria Morada (national flower) and coffee beans.
P chilling in one of the school hammocks. In the background you can see the palapa (thatch covered circle) where we hold our twice weekly "community meetings" with the whole school, sing, and give announcements. In the back left is the chicken coop, which is the Anchor project (yearly community project) for the entire 6th grade. Mike hated our chickens back in Austin and would often joke about giving them away or eating them, so it's sweet karma that he now will be helping to care for a shit ton of chickens.
We have a weekly tradition of going to a beach after school on Fridays to wind down and wash off the week. This epic sunset on Playa Penca, our most jaw-dropping yet, was our treat after the first week of school. The only downside to the evening was that Mike sacrificed his wedding ring to the Pacific Ocean while throwing Parker up into the air.
Another awesome Friday sunset on "Secret" Flamingo Beach.
Not a Friday Beach pic, we've also been exploring new beaches on weekends. This was our first time at Playa Pirata, and it became a family favorite after just one visit. There is a caldosa stand, or Costa Rican Frito Pie, right on the beach. It's ceviche piled in a bag of potato chips with mayonaise on top and it's delicious.
On October 1st, P turned 6! I brought back a tradition of drawing her name using letters that represent what she was into that year. This year her imagination and brain are in overdrive, she still loves princesses, she thinks Costa Rica is beautiful and likes the beach, and she enjoys making potions, reading, and swimming. She's as energetic and friendly as ever and her teachers report that she is a kind, helpful, and humorous addition to the class.
We threw caution to the waves in this "rainy season" (it hasn't been very rainy) and in the interest of free and fun we threw her a birthday beach party on Playa Puerto Viejo just down the road from our house. We served homemade tacos, pineapple, chips, and Snickerdoodles for her b-day treat (<--Mom, that sentence was for you!). We picked this beach because it is in a cove and was bathtub calm the 2 times we had been there before. We got very lucky with the weather and it didn't rain, but we pulled a Gringo move and didn't check the tides or surf report. We showed up an hour before high tide with approximately 10 feet of beach and monster waves that could sweep a 6 year old away. The kids were so flexible and had a great time playing in the sand and running up and down the thin stretch of beach.
We have a goal of taking a road trip to explore a new place once a month. Our first road trip was to a natural hot springs on the slopes of Volcano Rincon de la Vieja. The Rio Negro Hot Springs are a series of 10 human created pools with differing temperatures, from 113° F to 95° F. It's a beautiful natural setting in the forest, and the cloudy drizzly day and cold river were a nice juxtaposition to the hot spring pools.
They give you a container of volcanic mud to smear all over your body.
Then you hop in the cool Rio Negro to wash off.
To top off an incredible day, we saw a Blue Morpho butterfly while soaking in our last pool overlooking the river.
S has been decorating her space with art from school at home. Since we don't have many toys, the girls have been doing a lot of art.
S is taking a clay modeling class after school and made this ode to Costa Rica there. They are also in a swimming class twice a week after school, and take another mixed art class once a week. It's so convenient to have so many great extracurricular options right on campus after school.
Mike and I have been running on the dirt roads near our house, and one of my favorites is the "Finca Road" (see our first blog post in CR). A few of my students take riding lessons on this farm, and one of their families owns it, so we went by to check it out on a Sunday. It's a regionally famous operation called "Finca las Garzas".
We took a tour of the working farm and saw/rode/manhandled piglets (Babe!), horses, chickens, ducks, donkeys, giant bulls, and rabbits. If you've never picked up a piglet before, they are possibly the loudest animal on the planet by decibel.
We ate lunch at the farm restaurant and then decided to go horseback riding. It was the first time horseback riding for the girls, and it was awesome. In typical Costa Rican fashion it was a relaxed affair and they weren't overly concerned with giving us directions or rules to follow so the girls got a taste of going fast on a horse when all the horses went into a canter in a huge open field. S has some good horse energy so loved it.
On our most recent weekend adventure we went to see a wonder of nature: the Olive Ridley sea turtle arribada. While these sea turtles nest 3-4 times a year, for reasons not totally known to scientists, hundreds of thousands of them arrive within a 5-7 day period in October/November on a tiny beach in Costa Rica called Playa Ostional. We had been keeping one ear to the internet to see when they started to arrive and hoping that it aligned with a time that we could go see them. When we got news from a friend that they had started to arrive, we booked an AirBnB nearby, canceled our weekend plans, and invited our friend to come along.
In an effort to minimize the human impact of this popular event, you have to have a certified guide with you to tour the nesting beach. We drove a few hours south, braving a river crossing and some truly terrible roads (I may have permanently changed the alignment on our car), and arrived just in time for our 7 pm tour. We arrived in the beginning days of the arribada, so there weren't thousands of turtles but there was a constant stream of hundreds in total emerging from the waves. They come up on to the beach, dig a deep hole with their back flippers, then lay between 80-120 soft eggs, then bury and tamp down the sand on top of the eggs using their back flippers and the bottom of their shell. The whole process takes about 45 minutes to an hour! Only red light is allowed in order to not disturb the turtles. It was an incredible thing to witness, but it also felt invasive and intimate to be so close. Our guide also showed us that some of the turtles have a bioluminescent algae on their carapace (shell), which I'm pretty sure she wasn't supposed to show us because it involved touching the turtles. Throughout the night, hundreds of turtles laid their eggs and then trudged back into the surf, exhausted and ready to start the whole process again.
It was so incredible that we decided to come back in the morning in the hopes of seeing some eggs hatch from the previous month's nesting. We woke up at 6 a.m. and drove the bumpy road back. It was awesome to see the nesting happen in the daylight.
And the lack of sleep paid off! We saw hundreds of baby turtles trying to make their way to the beach. There were so many that you had to be very careful where you stepped because they were camouflaged in the dark sand.
For the girls it was a valuable but hard look at the circle of life; many of the baby turtles don't make it to adulthood (we heard 1/100 and 1/500 from different guides). It was tough to see so many dead baby turtles, like the one above, but we also followed the journey of a couple as they made it all the way to be carried away by the surf. The guides told us that since there are so many nesting turtles, they turn over eggs of previous turtles as they dig, forcing the eggs to hatch prematurely so the babies aren't strong enough to make the long and tiring journey to the sea. There are also hoards of vultures hopping up and down the beach pecking at the nesting and baby turtles. It led to some really good conversations on the way home about life and death!
It's time for a classroom critter count! So far, besides middle schoolers, in or near my classroom I have come across: a crab, a giant moth, an enormous grasshopper the size of Mike's hand, and a 4 inch scorpion (crab not pictured). The campus is mostly outdoors (except for the air-conditioned classrooms) and I am loving the near constant contact with nature.
Lastly, we all experienced our first earthquakes. I was upstairs in bed reading, S was at a friend's house in the complex, and Mike and P were at a birthday party near the beach. It immediately clicked when the bed and walls started shaking and I ran tripping down the stairs and outside to try to find S. It only lasted about 5 seconds, but it was a 6.6 magnitude, so pretty big. No damage to our apartment thankfully, but people had stuff fall off walls. It was 40 km from us out in the ocean, so I was worried about P and Mike being so close to the beach in terms of tsunami risk (thankfully, since we are on a subduction zone a tsunami wasn't a risk). There were 4 more aftershocks over the next few days, so we're getting good opportunities to practice our disaster response. Building up that Costa Rica cred!
All in all, we're adjusting well to life at 10 degrees north latitude.
