A little more time

When I don't live in Pittsburgh and don't work at my normal job, my time is less squished.  Things are still busy by definition, but the fact that I can write here more on the pace of what it used to be like pre-Pittsburgh means to me that time is not quite as scarce (and/or maybe there are more "new" things going on to write about).  Big news since last update is that we have been able to find some more bikes, so Eytan continues to ride, and Li'el and Oren (and a little bit Noa) are working on getting up and running too.

I last wrote on the cusp of some travel. We went the first weekend in March to Panama.  It's probably about 4 hours to the border, although was quite a bit longer because it required 4 bus changes for us.  We went to Bocas del Toro which is a group of islands in Panama, but close to Costa Rica. Because we are on tourist visas, we need to leave Costa Rica and re-enter every no-longer-than 3 months, so we took buses to the border, walked across a bridge to Panama, rode to a port and took a boat to Bocas, essentially spent a day there, visited the beach, and came back.  

(waiting for buses...)

(taxi in Puerto Viejo on the way that we actually all fit into for a 5 minute ride...)

(border bridge...)

(boats...)

(mosquito bites...)

(beaches...)

It was nice, although, there had been, we came to find out, a stomach virus circulating around the kids' school that week, and Oren came down with it Saturday morning and Eytan Saturday night.  So the two of them spent a lot of time on buses and in hotels throwing up or visiting bathrooms or just feeling yucky.  So that made the hours and hours of travel time somewhat more complicated, as was the part where we had to hoist everyone over the fence of the place we were staying (in the rain) because we had lost the key and were locked in when we had to catch our boat back to the mainland (the front desk people hadn't arrived yet). We almost got to see an old friend of Eytan's whose family had moved to Costa Rica after kindergarten, but their family was sick too.  

We had debated for a while whether to stay longer than planned or travel back, and in the end I think it was the right decision to come back quickly, as we spent the next couple of weeks with everyone taking turns with slightly unhappy stomachs (but now everyone's back in business). We decided too that next time we need to cross the border (we have one more border crossing we'll need to do), we should go back to the same place, now that we know how to get there, and can stay for a couple days longer and look around a little more, hopefully without being sick.

Meanwhile, once we got back, we had a visitor. My friend Martha from Peru, who I hadn't seen since 2009, came to visit.  She has never been able to come to the U.S. to visit (too hard to get a visa), so we thought to take advantage of the no-visa-needed for Costa Rica.  After 3 buses and 5 hours to get to the airport in San Jose (on a nauseous stomach as it happened to fall on my day for the stomach virus, although for me it was actually pretty mild) and then the same ride back, we have an extra live-in-grandma-on-loan for a bit.

Meanwhile, kids have settled into school a little more.  There are after-school activities some days (things like karate and soccer and art and robotics and cooking) that the kids seem to enjoy, I hear them with more Spanish bit by bit, and we are juggling to try and keep up with all the special events (and associated asks) that are peppering the school year. Even academically, it seems like rather than have a steady supply (or not) of homework, there are certain weeks where every subject assigns homework or a project due the following week, and then there is a break of a couple of weeks, and then there is a week where every subject gives a test. 

Meanwhile these happenings are interspersed with things like the "day of water" and "day of sports" (which mostly involved in-school activities), "day of coexistence and peace" (which required white t-shirts and hats for a parade around the campus), "international day of women" (which required sending in pictures), "day for down's syndrome" (different colored socks), "day of autism" (blue shirts), internal school soccer tournaments (different color t-shirts different days), pizza-making day in English class, and more. In some ways I suppose it's nice to foster awareness of things; on the other hand, hard to ever find a routine or settle in.

Meanwhile, one of the English teachers in the high school had to leave for a couple of weeks to take care of a family health issue and so Mike has started teaching English at the high school some days a week as well.  This past week, though, we were all on spring break, and grateful for the pause. So instead of school, we have been baking a lot of matza for passover (long trip to san jose to look for it in the store, so we're making it at home).

(one seder just us; one seder with zoom to NY and MI...)

Mike also went in to Turrialba for one of the Semana Santa (Holy Week) processions near the Cathedral. I had known that Easter and Easter week was a bigger deal in Latin America than typically in the U.S. but I hadn't really realized that the church (at least here) spends the week acting out the whole Easter story in full costume and procession, with each day representing a different part of the story. Really elaborate and different from the Easter bunny (or "easter-the-bunny" as our kids used to call it when they were little and the Easter bunny was stationed at the supermarket at this time of year) and chocolate eggs approach. That said, one of our neighbors did invite us over for an Easter egg hunt on Sunday (the mom is German, thus the eggs-approach), so the kids did get to see what that was like too.

In other news, I got to go to EARTH University for a day a couple of weeks ago for a work project. It is the place where we were originally supposed to be on sabbatical and where we had been for 2 weeks in 2015 (when Oren was 6 months old) with a class of mine.  The elementary school there is managed by the same administration as the one here, so there's a shuttle every day between the two campuses to transport some teachers who alternate campuses, so I rode with them, and got to revisit old haunts a bit (including banana production/processing areas). 

Work in general is also good -- I'm supposed to be helping think through future options for CATIE's masters programs (there has been a decline in donor funds for scholarships and therefore a decline in enrollment and therefore a concern about how to increase enrollment to keep the finances balanced) -- so I've had a lot of conversations with program directors and am helping work on a survey of graduates, students, potential students, and potential employers about how to maintain the strengths of the programs while also thinking about more virtual and hybrid options and possibilities.  It's less interesting than my normal job but also way way way more bounded, so I'm appreciating having a little less of a crazy schedule for a while.

Kids also seem to be doing okay too. Everyone is a little more on edge probably than at home (waking up more at night, trouble falling asleep, more easily grouchy or sad or mad or scared or insistent or argumentative or whatever the go-to emotion usually is for that particular kid(s)), so it asks for more time/patience/boundaries/creativity from grown-ups often (which sometimes we are better or worse at), but is presumably the leakage from processing and navigating a new environment. Meanwhile, I've been walking more around the agricultural parts of the campus, checking things out, in part because I (maybe) broke my toe a couple of weeks ago and so have been walking instead of running, which ironically maybe means I often end up going farther afield.

There is a lot of sugar cane production in the farther parts of campus (and some neat crane systems for loading it into trucks, that I have yet to take pictures of)...

and lots of coffee and cacao production (with interesting multi-layer agroforestry systems and also big germplasm collections, meaning tons of varieties and relatives of cacao and coffee plants grown as seed source for breeding and seed preservation)...

and also a dairy...

and areas on campus which end up being big congregating and nesting areas for birds.

With the kids on break this past week, we've had some opportunities for walks out there with them too.

And also to see is a sloth that lives in another family's backyard on campus

Li'el got to zoom-join her class back in Pittsburgh for a show-and-tell about their animal project reports (she had started working on one about a bird that lives here in Costa Rica during that first month we were here before school had started for us).

And here are some more random pictures of everyone (several of them from back when Grandma Kathy visited)

(including one with purim costumes...)

And last, there have been a number of Costa Rican history days commemorating independence battles, which have anthems and poems and stories that go with them that we only partly understand... but here's Noa's class reciting a poem about one of them, the Battle of Santa Rosa.

Tomorrow is Li'el's 10th birthday, and we may have a few other visitors in the works next few months, so onward and upward, and hopefully I'll be able to continue to throw pictures etc. up here somewhat regularly.