Livin "La Pura Vida"

So I’m not quite making this weekly blog update happen, but at least I’m updating it. I have been in CR for a month and 3 days now. I’m in my 4^th week of teaching and next week we have trimester exams because we are finishing the end of the 2^nd trimester. My days at school go by so fast it’s hard to believe. The kids continue to amaze me (sometimes in good ways and sometimes not). I am learning that the “classroom culture” is much more talkative here than in the states so it is taking a lot of effort to work with the kids to help them remember to raise their hands before talking and that it is not ok to have a conversation with your friend while the teacher is giving instructions for an assignment. Although they may not show it every day I can tell that the kids are grateful to have me here. One student told me last week that he didn’t like their last teacher because she told them she didn’t really care about being there. And today a fellow teacher told me that her daughter (who is in one of my 3^rd grade classes) came home yesterday and told her (in Spanish) “Teacher Lynne is the perfect teacher. She is nice and smiles a lot and does fun activities with us and she is really good at English.” Way to make my day! J Another highlight of today was watching my 5^th graders (who are my toughest groups to manage) get so excited about playing charades with this unit’s vocabulary. They got super into it and by the end we were all cracking up at the girls wrapping themselves in toilet paper to demonstrate a mummy and the boys rolling up their pants and tying their jackets around their waists to act out the type of skirts worn by Egyptian men. So entertaining!

To catch you up a little on the last week and a half or so my week at school was pretty normal last week, very busy and kinda stressful but on Wednesday Leslie and I started scheming about taking a trip to the Caribbean side of CR to an area called Tortuguero. I was first presented the idea by my friends Allie and Kristen who are friends from Whitworth who are down here student teaching. They arrived almost two weeks ago and wanted to do a little traveling before they started school. At first I didn’t think I’d be able to make it work because I had 2 sets of quizzes and 4 sets of homework to grade along with writing my lesson plans. But, the more I thought about it the more I wanted to go. I rationalized that I needed to take advantage of the long weekend (we had Monday off for mother’s day). So off we went to Tortuguero, me, Leslie, Kristin, Allie, their roommate Ana Lena and two of her friends (all from Germany), then another girl that Leslie and I met a few weeks ago.

We left our house a little before 5AM on Saturday morning and 10 hours later (after 1 taxi, 3 busses, and 1 boat ride) we arrived in Tortuguero. This little touristy town only has access by boat and the “main drag” of the town is a pathway about the size of a large sidewalk. So we found the place where we had arranged to stay. For $10 a night you can imagine that it was a little rustic, but it was a place to crash and it worked fine. The coolest thing about it was that it was literally right on the beach. Saturday morning Leslie and I got up early to see the sunrise over the ocean. It wasn’t super colorful, but with the clouds the light made pretty patterns across the sky and beautiful reflections on the water. We ran along the beach for a while finding pretty sand dollars and trails in the sand from turtles crawling up to lay their eggs. By about 7 we went back to the room and changed into our swim suits and grabbed the banana bread we brought. We enjoyed a nice breakfast on the beach followed by a swim in the ocean. We spent most of the morning in and out of the water because it got super hot. In the afternoon it cooled off a little and while Leslie and the German girls explored the national park in a large canoe, Kristen, Allie, Sarah and I explored the town, chatted with some of the locals over lemonade and spent some more time at the beach. After dinner that evening we got dressed in dark clothes and met with our guide for a “turtle tour” in which we were taken by boat to a different area of the beach and spent a few hours watching turtles crawl up from the ocean and laying their eggs. It was super cool! Not only was it cool to see those huge turtles up close but to watch them lay hundreds of eggs! Incredible!

The trip home went much quicker and although I didn’t really want to have to get up early again it was nice to get back home in the early afternoon and have time to finish lesson plans and do a bit of laundry. Thus ends my extremely long post about my adventures during the last week or so. Hopefully I didn’t bore you to death.