Joanna Biggar's Blog

This translates roughly as the good life, Costa Rican style.

For us it would have something to do with Granny Goose and Grand Doug living the student life again. Yup. We have our own little student apartment with three plates, cups, etc. so we have to keep washing them, and the table is littered with books, flash cards, dictionaries, notebooks, newspapers and books with sexy titles like “Libro de Verbos No 1.” And yes, we do our homework every day. Hours of it.

Our apartment, spacious and full of nice design features and colors, like many buildings we have seen in Costa Rica,  is about five minutes from the campus of CPI (Centro Panamericano de Idiomas).  Like many roads here, ours is, well, rough — dirt, hilly, and full of rocks. It seems to be some kind of  thoroughfare though, and cars and motorbikes whiz along it. Maybe because on the corner is the only gas station and car mechanic in the area. That is also an important geographical feature: in a country without street names, you find things by how many meters one place is from another.  The map lists “gas station,’ no street name, and we are about 70 meters beyond it.

Once we get to the bottom of our hill, however, the road is paved once again, and the campus is a few hundred yards up another hills. It’s a lovely, Spanish-style set of buildings behind a locked fence, appointed with lush gardens, fountains, and an open-air dining area where we can get lunch if we wish. There are also many small classrooms (no classes have more than four students), a library, a small gym, a jacuzzi, and in Tico style, a corridor lined with hammocks.

Classes begin at 8 and run until 12, during which time we are basically hammered. The instructors I’ve had so far have been young, very attractive women — Doug’s have been older women. Maybe his luck will change next week, as every week we switch instructors. But they’ve all been excellent teachers, and very patient. It must be excruciating to hear your beautiful language butchered for hours on end every day, but they’re managing to bear up.

The other students are all over the map in terms of age and origin. Some Americans from, who knew? California! But many more from such climes as New England and the midwest. Also Canadians, lots of Swiss, Germans. and Scandinavians. Hmm, North America and Northern Europe to Costa Rica in winter..

Actually, it’s just a lot of fun, even if the Spanish so far runs like a car with three wheels and a misfiring engine. My class buddy for the last two weeks has been a 23-year-old beauty from Quebec who likes to freak out the environmentally p.c. types (usually from California) by telling them how much she likes to eat rare meat. We act up by speaking French together for comic relief.

Doug’s buddy of the week is a young blond (38) sports doctor from Holland who seems rather a type A personality and wants to relax, we think, but doesn’t know how. So we’ve invited her to dinner tomorrow night. We bought a bottle of local rum (quite good) and have some other specialities from the market, not including the guanabana fruit juice we made. We never could figure out how to get rid of the seeds that, we read, are toxic. All she has to do is bring a plate.

So is it all work and no play for this granny and consort? No way, Jose. Even if we don’t end up speaking a word of Spanish (an unlikely outcome no matter how grim it seems at times) we’re still kicking up our heels with the movies, cooking classes, and salsa/merengue lessons that are all part of “campus life.” And next week, there will be an invasion of teenagers, so the “grown ups” still around are moving on to one-on-one classes. What did I tell you? Pura Vida!