Ethan:Week 2

Hola

Well my friends, another week has passed in the land of eternal summer. We have had a good week, buying our van, going to the beach, and trying lots of new things. Today I am going to expound upon the people, some more exotic fruits, and our first real experience at the beach.

The people down here are nice and welcoming although I mostly come in contact with members of our church. They speak very fast, enunciate all of the vowels and laugh at the end of almost every sentence. The community is very friendly and you can walk down the street and say “hola” or “buenas” (that is short for “good morning” but you can use it anytime of the day) to everyone you meet and most of them will respond. They are definitely more friendly than us Americans and love to dance at parties! They have a great community, if you know one guy you know them all.

We have come across a few more new fruits in our exploration of the market that are quite good. Every Monday Mom always brings back a million pounds of whatever she can find and its always a party! We had some water apples that are have the shape and texture of a pear but taste like…..well……water apples. We also cracked some coconuts for the family to snack on. In order to eat a coconut you’ve got to crack it, drain out all the water out, then break it open to get the white stuff inside. When you crack it looks just like a coconut but the white stuff is hard to chew. You have to break off the shell with a knife and then really chew it, it’s a good snack if you have the munchies. We also had some cooked plantain which look like giant bananas. You can fry them into chips when they are green or you can cook them when they are yellow and they are quite sweet. Bread and cheese are not very common here except in the bakeries. They use the bread mainly for pastries which are really good! You can get a good pastry for a dollar a piece and they usually have cream or meat inside. They don’t have sandwich bread here so we have to improvise and have rice for lunch. Cheese is quite expensive here, but I mean like, what would you use cheese for? Life is good with a smoothie for breakfast, Pastries for lunch, and tacos for dinner.

We finally got to go to a real beach this weekend near Puntarenas. It was about an hour away but we got at least three hours of swim time. We also went to a beach last week for Isaac’s birthday but it was mostly for surfing and there wasn’t much to see. This beach was a small beach but there was almost no one there so we had a blast. We saw some monkeys in the trees and got some good pictures of them when they weren’t trying to steal our food. There were tall palm trees, warm water, and soft sand so we just chilled. We spent most of our time body surfing and it was fun diving in and out of the waves.

This week Sean and I started night seminary (a short Sunday school for youth that happens usually in the morning) in Spanish, which was a challenge, but a cool experience. They have it a night here because the students have to catch the bus at 6:30 in the morning!

After jumping through a couple of hoops we finally purchased a micro-bus to carry all nine of us, instead of driving two cars. We now can tour the country in relative comfort. Ciao!