Surf, Spanish, and the Fourth Roommate

Hola from Costa Rica.

Since I last wrote, we've arrived at the hostel where we are staying for the majority of orientation. The rooms and the food are in a battle with the people and the beach to see which is most awesome! Yesterday we went surfing, which was great, and even wiping out was fun.

I have had two conversations in Spanish.

One was with Ronald, one of the surf instructors. We were walking up to a waterfall to swim, and he said that if you hike further into the jungle, you have to check the weather beforehand. It takes five or six hours to get there (we just hiked a few minutes, not to the real forest), and if it rains while you are traveling, the rivers can swell up and wash you away. Even though he's a surf instructor, he told me that he has only been surfing for a little while-he grew up in a town further inland, which made getting to the beach a hassle, and he moved to this town about 9 years ago.

I'm normally not good at striking up conversations with strangers, so it was really cool to speak with a local-the stuff he told me was really just basic facts, but that's exactly the kind of things that we as foreigners are completely unfamiliar with. Coming from a suburban town, I have mostly encountered people who have followed roughly similar life paths to my own, so I'm hoping that interacting with people from around the world will let me encounter new lifestyles and understand the day-to-day routines of the places we visit. In some ways, the small details like my chat with Ronald will make the trip complete.

Oh, and as for the waterfall, it was beautiful! The swimming was so great and we saw howler monkeys on the way down to the water.

My second conversation in Spanish was actually first chronologically.

The group is spread out across a couple of rooms here at the hostel, and my roommates are Lizzie and Michele. We pretty much have a party all the time, so our first day at the hostel was great.

Then we meet the fourth roommate. The bat was about three inches long with a wingspan of about six inches, but when it flew around, I think it managed to take up most of the room on its own. I was busy practicing my cowering, so I couldn't gauge anything too precisely, but the bat did a few frantic, panicky laps of the room and then vanished.

I think it was Zelda Jafar (as we named him)'s elusiveness that made him so interesting-other rooms had had bat incidents, but theirs had left fairly promptly, which Jafar declined to do.

Michele and I were there when he appeared, and we did what every good child of the nineties would do, which is google the problem. Reassuring phrases like "the bat will not turn on you" were counterbalanced by our fear of rabies, so we then did what any good TBB student would do, which is go outside to the other building and yell loudly for the Program Leaders.

Their thorough search of our room revealed no trace of Jafar, so once we determined that Jafar was not a safety hazard (in the words of fellow student Ben, "You probably won't get bitten, because they're fruit bats, and you're like... not fruits." Thanks Ben.), we went to bed. Clicking sounds in the night told us that our guest was still present, a suspicion that was confirmed when I saw him fluttering around again in the early hours of the morning.

Mostly we were good sports about it, even when Jafar left his excrement all over the room, and Stephen arranged for our rooms to be cleaned every day to minimize the problem.

Anyway, the Spanish conversation came in when I tried to explain our problem to the man running the hotel. Halfway through the first sentence I realized I had no idea how to say 'bat' in Spanish, so I explained to the man that there was a "bird of the night" in our room (for those curious, it turns out bat is murcielago). He gave me a weird look but I think he got my drift; but there wasn't much he could do about the problem since there weren't any empty rooms.

Jafar's presence made opening the door an adventure-would he be there? Had he brought friends for a bat party, or decided to start a multigenerational bat family in the shower?-but by the second night our extra roomie appeared to have left.

So that was my first Spanish conversation: an attempt to explain to a kind Costa Rican man our adventures with Zelda Jafar, bird of the night.