I went for my first class yesterday. I have to admit, I have my doubts about it. It is run by an American woman who is fluent in Spanish, but her style of teaching is very much of a unversity class, heavily dependent upon grammar terms and memorising conditions when one form is used or another. Also she has an American accent, so the rs are wrong. After the last couple of months where grammar seamlessly combined with conversation, I am struggling a little. Today was a little better. However, I shall give it till tomorrow and then decide whether to continue. I went this morning, despite fierce rain, to another school to ask their methods. They seem closer to what I want, but are almost much more expensive, and of course I won’t know the quality of the teaching until I start. Well, I suppose I can do a week and then see; they don’t reduce their rates for prepayment. Eventually, though, I think I’ll move on to Slype lessons, for conversational with my Oaxaca teacher and for preparing for the DELE exam with the Medellin teachers, as the former will be less expensive and the latter are trained and experienced.
There is something very strange about the Google algorithms. I tried very hard to search for Spanish language schools in Puerto Viejo and really could not find any at all, just stumbled across this woman by chance. I don’t even remember how. Now that I’m actually in the town, however, three schools show up without the slightest trouble. It’s really bizarre, particularly since if I search for anything non-commercial I get pages of shopfroents and SEO-ed-to-death helpful suggestions for what I might have searched for when in reality I am very precise and know what I want, thank you very much. I really dislike Google now. To think that once it was a good search engine. I miss Yahoo’s categories and lists of links, I did actually spend a reasonable about of time adding to them back in the 90s, and there are definitely many, many times when that hierarchical, curated-by-a-human approach would be far more useful for my purposes.
Puerto Viejo is very much a backpacker town, as I wrote earlier, but this also means that there are some things it does extremely well. One of these is cake, and today we had the best cake since, well, a very long time. A really delicious chocolate cake, with a very light and non-intense French Press coffee for me. Just the thing. We also had a superb lunch. This was basically Puerto Viejo fine dining, a fish restaurant run by a Caribe/ Tico/ Frenchman, with delicious soup and a fantastic grilled eel. Really made me happy.
I am enjoyin being here. It helps that our shack is a 15 minute walk from the town, so we’re not hit by backpackerism whenever we step out. The place is beautiful, of course, even though it’s mostly been quite cloudy so the sea has been grey and pale blue, in pastels rather than the intense colours of SE Asia. Behind are low hills covered in dense jungle. The beach nearest us is covered in black volcanic sand; further away there are white sand beaches. The waves are ocean waves. The people are either young foreigners, mostly Americans, tanned and gnarly older foreigners of the type one finds in these places, or the locals who are relaxed and slow. The latter are largely black or indigenous or mestizo with indigenous dominating, unlike other parts of Costa Rica which were very white. There are no resort-like places in this area so far as I can tell; people come here for surfing.
While walking to town with my rainjacket on I had one of those classic business ideas, though more on the hipster’s labour of love side of things than inventing Amazon. Women’s hiking gear is always, always, always designed for European or East Asian body types, ie with very narrow hips and straight bodies from shoulder down to hip and beyond. Because I have a curvier body shape (not particularly large, just curved) I had to buy a jacket that was two sizes too big for my shoulders and while it fits over my chest now, it is still snug around the hips. Why oh why do they not cut them to flare a little? I feel like people of South Asian descent and many African women, and even a great many Caucasians and East Asians, would thank them. I release this idea into the world, I demand no royalties.
Edited to add: also trousers! My current hiking trousers fit me well because I bought a size or two bigger that would fit my hips and then took them to a tailor to have the waist taken in by a good 3 or 4 inches. This was in London, so the added cost was not insignificant.