Sámara, April 27

!Hola, amigos!

This is your hasn’t-stopped-sweating-yet correspondent checking in. I have retreated to the relative coolness of the outside kitchen/laundry room/dining room to write this. It’s already ten o’clock, so that means we’ve nearly reached the scorch-point for the day. It will be nice again around midnight… I shall never again complain about the heat of a Michigan August.

I was hanging out on the beach until about 4:30 a.m. Friday night/morning with a friend (not advisable to do so by yourself, so since I had a chaperone, I seized the opportunity), and he was actually cold. I thought the elusive breeze felt great. “But with the windchill, it’s gotta only be 72 degrees!” he protested. And here I thought New Yorkers had some backbone!

The beach at night is incredibly beautiful here: the silhouettes of the palm trees ringing the beach, the sheer volume of the stars, the partially-clouded moon. And there are enough fallen palms and huge pieces of driftwood on the beach to make for some nice midnight seating. Quite a show, really. I don’t think I could ever get tired of that.

I decided to hang in Sámara this weekend to have some chill-out time (or heat-out, as the case may be). Spent most of yesterday hanging out in a hammock at the school and studying with Jesse and John. (Cool California surfer guy and hilarious dude from Texas. If John ever headlines at a club in Austin, I will fly out there to see the show…) I actually even managed to fall asleep in the hammock, but then a damned squirrel peed on me and woke me up. Nasty little buggers—if they’re not throwing nuts at you, they’re using you as their public toilet. […sigh…] But hey, better to get peed on by a squirrel than have a falling coconut hit your head. Or a palm frond…

Speaking of coconuts, I now know how to open them! Jesse and I went coconut-hunting on the beach and then he showed me how to rip away the husk to get to the nut. It is insanely difficult! Even with the pointed metal fence that we found to use, it still took a solid twenty minutes of sweat-inducing labor to tear off the fibers that surround the nut. Once you get them off, though, it’s easy—just smash it on the pavement and then make sure the meat isn’t slimy. (After all that effort, I turned out to have a bad nut. I was quite perturbed about that, but Jesse gave me his. Surfers are universally cool.) Once you have a good, cracked nut, then you just need a good knife to carve out the meat. You can even eat the inner shell—makes it taste like walnut. Fresh coconuts are really, really good. When Jesse and Steve and I made our fish taco dinner, we ate an entire coconut as an appetizer and an entire pineapple for dessert. Also the fish they’d caught that morning and tons of avocado and mango…I was so stuffed afterwards that I could barely ride my bike the however-many-miles back home. (The heat seems to exponentially increase the number of miles.) But there is a lot to be said for getting your lunch off the beach. The school also has a lime tree and an avocado tree.

Had a fantastic class this week. The instructor is hiLARious (think Vince Vaughn in “The Wedding Crashers”) and we spent most of the week cracking each other up. I’m so glad that I can understand his jokes and make some of my own now in Spanish. I’m getting there…but I still gotta think really hard about conjugating the danged verbs. Anyone who says that Spanish is easy obviously doesn’t speak in anything but the present tense: where English has six tenses, Spanish has fourteen, each with its own set of conjugations. Spanish speakers refer to this phenomenon as making the language “rich.” The students describe the situation a bit differently. “God%$#@^*, what a pain in the @#^$*#!!!!” is a common statement. (I include myself in this.) But I think I understand thirteen of them. Understanding them, however, is a far cry from being able to use them in conversation…

In other things of note this week, Jesse showed me the basic jinga in capoeira, which is a Brazilian martial art that makes use of very long, extended stances. It was fun, although my legs were complaining for days afterwards. And a different Jesse showed me the rudiments of juggling. It’s very perfect to have a lime-laden tree right there—they make perfectly-sized juggling balls, and your hands smell really nice afterwards. Figure I might as well learn what random things I can while I’m here… And then Juggling Jesse proceeded to suspend a rope between two palm trees and walk back and forth on it. I declined his offer of tight-rope lessons.

We also had a fútbol game between the students and the instructors. While the professors obviously play together on a regular basis, we had a secret weapon: Swiss guys. Also an American girl who played really well, and another American who actually is in a league. The professors, though, were hard-core. I was exceedingly glad that I was an observer and not a player, because if the Vince-Vaughn instructor had been barrelling towards me like that, I would have run like heck in the opposite direction, ball be damned. I’m pretty sure I know the outcome of me vs. 200 lbs. of forward momentum. There was one particularly brilliant play where Tyrone (one of the school directors; he’s actually from Chicago) jumped up about three feet, whanged the ball off his head (ouch!) and over to Vince, who did a sort of backwards flip/kick and shot the ball right past the hapless American goalie and into the net. The game was actually a lot of fun to watch. End score: professors 18, students 17. !Que madre! Then we all walked the untold miles of dusty road back to the beach and went to one of the beachside bars. Very fun night.

This afternoon I have my first intercambio with a guy from Guatemala. It’ll be half him teaching me Spanish and half me teaching him English. Nifty! It’ll be fun to put my ESL-teaching skills to use again. Then afterwards, I’m going to cook with my Tica sister. I found Feta cheese (!) in the euphemistically-named “super” market (for three times the price it would be in the States; items that have to be refrigerated are at a premium in tropical countries), so we are going to make Greek salad and then something with chayotes. They’re my new fav veggie.

There was a bit of trouble in paradise this week: the actual municipal police from Nicoya (the local “police” mostly hang around their one vehicle and tinker on it) came riding into town and combed through houses to find any Columbia drug dealers who were dumb enough not to get out of town in advance of the raids. Apparently, Sámara is a haven for coke dealings. This would probably explain why the friendly Columbian guy who always said hi to me when I passed his roadside stand just up and disappeared ‘round about Tuesday. Interesting what you learn once you can actually converse with the locals.

On that note…I think I’m going to go shell-hunting at Buena Vista again. Maybe I’ll stop by the frutería and pick up a mango on the way back. In spite of the recent events, on the whole Sámara is a picturesque and friendly little town. I’m really enjoying my stay here. And during those precious daily seconds underneath the cold-water-only shower, I feel refreshed and cool.

P.S.: Just finished having dinner with the fam, and they loved the ensalada griega. Thank goodness—I wasn’t sure they’d be Feta fans. But they all said “!Que rico!”, and that’s a good thing. I’m so glad my dinner idea worked out!!

P.P.S.: My intercambio friend is great: he’s a gay Guatemalan Buddhist philospher who dreams of traveling the world. How cool is that? We had a really fun time hanging out and discussing the eight-fold path. Knew that class on Asian culture would come in handy one of these days…

!Hasta luego and enjoy what breezes come your way!