School was again at 8:30am today... I've always heard about some mysterious afternoon classes that start after my ones, but they have always managed to avoid confronting me.
However, I do thing in some ways it is good to have the early class because it means I get home at lunchtime and have the whole afternoon free and am able to go places if things are planned.
Class at the start of a new week means a new teacher, new classroom and new classmates. My new teacher is called Jesus (Hey-sus) and I have two others in my class, Isabel from Germany and Kate from Ohio USA, they are both nice and are closer to my age than a lot of the other people who go to the school. So far, I'm not enjoying this class as much as last week though, last week I learnt so much and had heaps of practice applying the new stuff, but today we did hardly any proper practice of using specific language structures.
Today I actually discovered that the school has a bell... I have been at the school for two weeks and only just realized today. This is because it hardly sounds like bell at all and more like a cross between a kettle boiling and a cat scratching at a door.
After class I came home for a lunch of you guessed it, rice and beans...yay! In saying this, I do actually like the rice and beans, but there is just so much of it.
After lunch, I hung out around the house with Jose for a bit, before he left for university. Even though he is technically on holiday now, he still has to go in to receive grades for stuff and sit in a room and be bored.
A little while later I was told that Jorge and I were going somewhere. I had no idea where because I didn't understand but went along with it anyway. Turns out, firstly we were going to the mall for me to buy an external hard drive for all the photos and videos I have already taken. Yes, I have already filled up my camera... Buying this hurt the pocket a little.
At the shop where I got it, the guy serving me had the funniest tan line. He obviously wears long sleeve shirts a lot out in the sun, because it looked like he was wearing tan coloured gloves.
After I emptied my wallet, we quickly went to a place for Jorge to pay the cable TV bill, before driving around San Jose to a little village called Salitral. Here we began our ascent, by car, to the top of Cerro Cedral, a hill with heaps of windmills. We were just in the little Toyota and so for most of the way up we were going no more than 20km/hr because the road was steep. Now, I know that Baldwin street in Dunedin may be steeper, but the distance that this road was steep was simply immense. At one point we caught sight of a little squirrel running along a power line.
When we reached the top, the view was incredible, there was a bit of wind, and a bit of cloud cover, but it was impossible not to be blown away by how amazing both the windmills were up close and the view. We crawled through a fence to get to a better spot, marveled at everything we could see, even though I hardly knew what the places that I could see were.
After about 30 minutes up the top, the cloud started to close in and rain started to douse the hillside. I began covering my camera and only taking it out for a few seconds at a time, snapping as many pictures as I could. I think there are a few blurry ones in there :)
We made it back to the car and headed down the hill. Part way down we noticed a smell. It was the car brakes. Because it was now wet, Jorge was driving less than 10km/hr meaning that the brakes were having to work very very hard.
We did make it down though, and did a quick stop of in a little town called Santa Ana, to look at the beautiful stone church. There are a lot of churches here.
Then we hit the traffic. Now I know traffic is bad in places like Auckland, but I'm not used to it. So taking over 1 hour to go about 20km is very painful, and I now feel like I can partly empathize with what some people have to cope with everyday.
We got home at about 6:30pm and had dinner.
The first of the two football games to decide the winner between my province Heredia and Alajuela was on tonight. It ended with a disappointing 0-0 draw. This just means Heredia is going to win in front of a home crowd.
All in all a good day.
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| High up, away from the busy streets below |
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