San Jose, pt. 4: Last days at CRLA

I returned to my homestay from Dota around 5 pm, and Maria was already cooking dinner. I was looking forward to spending our last week in the city, but little did I know that there was a little bit of 

the outdoors waiting for me at home! After putting down my backpack I sat down on my bed to see if the internet would work, and noticed that there was a little worm on my comforter. I picked it up and threw it in the garbage, thinking nothing of it, and went about my business. About fifteen minutes later, I noticed that there was another one up near my pillow. Curious, I moved my pillow and turned down my blanket, only to find dozens more of the little bugs! I didn't know what they were or why they were in my bed, but I knew that I needed to change my bedding, since they had been crawling around and leaving little trails of poop all over my sheets. Because my host mom is so generous and takes such good care of me all the time, I always feel like a burden asking her for anything. Hesitant to inform her that her house, which she takes great care to keep spotlessly clean (she even hires a cleaning lady to visit at least twice a week!), was infested with little grubs, I knocked on Mary's door instead. When she saw my room, she decided that we needed to tell Maria immediately, even though we both knew she would feel badly about it. So we told her in the best Spanish that we could muster what was going on, and she stopped cooking dinner to come investigate. Of course, she was mortified and confused about having bugs in the house at all, let alone in her guest's bed. We collected all of the bugs we could find, threw them out, swept the floor, and changed all of the bedding. I felt bad about making her do extra work (especially since she had just changed and washed my bedding three days before), but it was a relief to be able to go to bed that night in a clean and insect-free bed. The next day when I had internet access at school, I looked up some different pictures online and figured out that the mystery bugs had been housefly larvae. Luckily this made sense, because we had seen a single fly in my room about a week before the infestation, and although we killed it, it may have laid eggs somewhere in the house before it died. My best guess is that the eggs had hatched sometime around Thursday, and that while I was away for the weekend they were crawling up into my cool, dry covers to pupate. Of course the situation ended up being a hands-on biology lesson for everyone, which seemed fitting for my semester in Costa Rica. Bugs don't really bother me, so instead of being grossed out by the whole incident I found it kind of amusing, especially since it was so easily taken care of. Plus it made a great story to tell my biology professors when we returned from spring break!

Luckily, the rest of my time in San Jose was entirely bug-free. Our last week at CRLA was really packed with work, since we had an essay, a 20-minute presentation, and our three-hour final exam all in the course of four days. We essentially finished all of the grammar that we were learning by Tuesday, and spent the rest of our week doing less "academic" work and more casual conversation. Rebeca even took us out to get ice cream one afternoon! The same day I also went to a cooking class and learned how to make empenadas, which was lots of fun. 

Francesca cooking spicy ground beef to put in the empenadas. Can you tell that she is her happiest around food? Haha.

Empenadas frying... they were delicious! I definitely hope to make these back in the U.S.

I saved my empenada for later, since Wednesday is half-price movie day at the theater in San Pedro and Mary and I told Maria that we wouldn't be home for dinner. This week we saw Hall Pass (aka Pase Libre), which was awful! Thank goodness the movies are so cheap in Costa Rica, otherwise I would have been annoyed about spending so much money to see such a terrible film. A bunch of other OTS students saw it, too, and we at least all commiserated at the end about what a waste of time it was.

Thursday 3/24 was our last real day of class, and we spent all morning taking our final exam, which consisted of grammar, reading, writing, listening, and speaking. It was a very thorough but fair test, and it was nice to feel like I could take a test like that after only two weeks of Spanish classes. The amount which everyone learned in such a short amount of time was astounding. We had a short "graduation" ceremony before lunch, and all received diplomas to prove that we had successfully completed our studies at CRLA.

Getting my diploma from Rebeca, my Spanish professor. Photo by Lee.

To celebrate our graduation, we went back to Mantra, our favorite restaurant in San Pedro, for lunch. It's a vegetarian cafe (very uncommon in Costa Rica!) that has a variety of delicious dishes like rice bowls, falafel, lasagna, and soups, and fresh-made juices. Rukhshana and I had both gotten the Florentine sandwich the last time we were there, and were mildly obsessed with it since then. It's nearly impossible to find sandwiches in Costa Rica at all, let alone AMAZING sandwiches, like this one from Mantra. It was soft, crispy, garlicky bread with sauteed spinach, tomatoes, mozarella cheese, and pesto. It might not sound special, but it was actually incredible (clearly, since I am taking the time to blog about it a full month later, haha). We both got the sandwiches again, and were very happy with our decision. It was especially good since a group of us had gone out for sushi the day before, which we were all really disappointed by because it was not so cheap and probably the most mediocre sushi I have ever eaten. We probably shouldn't have gotten our hopes up about Japanese food in Central America, but regardless, Mantra the next day was a huge upgrade.

Rukhshana and the infamous Mantra sandwich.

"Class" Thursday afternoon consisted of watching a Mexican movie called El Estudiante, which was good but a little bit sad. That night I had dinner at Ivania, Maria's daughter's, house with her daughters and the students she was hosting. Afterward I met up with Tessa and we went rollerskating! There's a roller rink (or salon de patines) a few blocks away from CRLA, and we passed it every day on the bus to and from school. We had all been talking casually of going there before we left San Jose, but Tessa and I decided to get serious and make it happen since we only had two days left in the city.

The inside of "Salon de Patines Music," complete with neon decorations, a disco ball, and ridiculous music.

Rollerskating was just as much fun as we thought it would be, and even more entertaining. Apparently rollerskating is still really popular here, so the rink was full of people ranging from age 12-25, and people take it really seriously. Many of the skaters were really talented, and groups of friends had little choreographed dances and steps that they would do in unison when they went around the rink. It was actually really impressive, and just as much fun to watch as to skate.

Tessa and I flaunting our four-wheelers

We skated for about an hour and a half, and then left to meet up with the rest of our friends at a bar. We all wanted to go to a reggae bar with Miguel, so we also squeezed that in before leaving San Jose. The bar was really different than we expected because there wasn't really any dancing, but it ended up being really fun anyway. We stayed out until past midnight, and Ethan's birthday was Friday so the bartenders gave him a free drink at midnight. 

Ethan receiving his birthday drink. You can't tell because of the blurry picture, but it was on fire!

Friday was our last day at CRLA, and since we had finished our exams and all of our curriculum, we had a free day to do whatever we wanted with our classes. My class and another class went to the National Museum in the morning, which was really cool to see. The building that the museum is in used to be a barracks, and you can still see bullet marks in the outer walls from the extremely brief Costa Rican civil war. Plus there is an enclosed part before the entrance to the museum that is a butterfly garden, which was awesome. We walked through some of the parks on the way to the museum, too, which was lovely.

Rebeca and Carlos's Spanish classes, as viewed through a tube made of bottle caps. Photo by Maggie.

Patrick and I in front of a sculpture made of recycled plastic crates

Butterflies in the butterfly garden eating fermented bananas

Ancient indigenous sculptures in the National Museum

Maggie on the balcony of the museum, overlooking San Jose

We went out for lunch together at a delicious restaurant that had a lunch special that included bread, soup, an entree, juice, dessert, and coffee for about $8. My Spanish professor really loves food, and always has great recommendations for restaurants, so I was not surprised that we got an excellent lunch for an excellent price while out with her. In the afternoon we went to an exposition at the University of Costa Rica and saw a lot of cool booths about student research from all of the different departments. We also got to learn how to play the xylophone at a music booth, which was really fun! We returned to CRLA for the last time, and the staff had a cake there for Ethan's birthday. After we sang happy birthday, we said goodbye to our wonderful Spanish teachers and headed home.

Ethan's birthday cake on our last day at CRLA