Taratulas and Giant Cockroaches!

Well, things are exciting in Emily House (that’s the name of where we live). A few days ago there was a giant bug in the house that I first thought to be a grasshopper. Upon closer inspection, Annie convinced me it was a giant cockroach. Today, Annie was outside reading in the grass and found a furry spider on her pants leg (good reason to always wear pants) and we suspect it was a tarantula. Imagine her saying “get it off, get it off,” making me do it, then telling me, “Now it’s on you.” She was less than descriptive about where, so I was looking all over, finally finding it on my right shoulder, five inches from my neck. Eek! There is also a giant wasp buzzing in a window trying to get out. Everything is bigger here. After consulting with some neighbors who’ve been here forever, the roach really was a three inch long grasshopper chilling on a kitchen chair. The tarantula, we aren’t so sure about. It wasn’t big like the ones we’ve seen in cages and movies, but it sure was furry and brown. Baby tarantula? Our inherent fear or discomfort around insects and things with many legs is strange and strong. We saw two green parrots at the house yesterday. Did you know they mate for life? There was also a glimpse of a blackish squirrel type animal jumping from tree to tree. No monkeys yet. We’ll keep you posted.

Yesterday, at the crack of dawn...well, not really...dawn is at 5:30 and we didn’t go until 6:30...we went to the farmers’ market. Oh joy of joys! We spent $10 and came home with two bags full of fruits and veggies, all grown right here. Well, some of them are from down the mountain a little, but that’s still pretty close. One grower even uses organic practices, so we bought whatever we could from him. Some of the more exotic purchases include whole pineapples and star fruit. You can even get lychees here. They grow in this really pretty red prickly outer skin. The mangoes weren’t ripe so we didn’t buy any.
Last night we had some of the other new teachers over for dinner. Annie made really yummy sweet pepper soup, which costs a bazillion dollars to make in the US, but only pittance here. And she made yummy bread. The others brought empanadas, which we learned to make at our Costa Rican cooking class, and banana bread cake. Then we learned to play Euchre, a game a bit like bridge and spades played a lot in the Midwest. The people who work at this school really are pretty awesome.

So, we had a cooking lesson that was really helpful, especially in terms of using what’s available and without some of the conveniences we know at home. I can now make really good beans, handmade tortillas, empanadas, picadillo (which is mostly this really yummy vegetable called chayote), and plantains. I already knew how to fry cheese, but our teachers told us to use higher heat than I did before. I could totally get used to eating rice and beans every day.

We’ve been meeting a lot of people, some of them the original settlers, some of their descendants, some long-time residents who came and stayed, some tourists, some native Costaricenses (that’s how you say Costa Ricans in Spanish. A person from the US is estadounidence. And around here it is very bad form to use the word America to mean the US. To Ticos, America means both the North and South American continents. And Central America isn’t really its own continent; it just describes a geographical or political region. Here’s another interesting tidbit: geographically, Panama is part of Central America, but politically, it is part of South America.

I started work in the Monteverde Institute library yesterday. I talked a lot with the library coordinator who’s been there since the beginning, about the vision and goals of the place, then we got down to priority number one: weeding. When a library consists entirely of donations, you’re bound to get some stuff you don’t want. And we want to get the collection cataloged and into a searchable catalog so people know what is there. But it’s a big waste of time to catalog things you plan to get rid of, so first comes the weeding. We also are thinking about rearranging the materials in such a way that they are easy to find by students in particular courses. The Institute runs courses on a few environmental biology topics, eco-tourism, gender studies, and public health. Their second priority is to serve local researchers conducting studies in the area. And lastly, they want to serve the local community. The Quaker school has a pleasure reading library open to the public so we feel confident maintaining the Institute as a strictly research library. But I really need to help them get some funds. That place is very pretty, but the resources are very old and very patchy. Maybe I’ll even find an organization that wants to pay me to work in the library, since the Institute can’t. Anyone with ideas should leave me comments. This job will be a lot more fun with some money to spend on resources, so think about those funding sources too.