Costa Rica 2

Birthdays

In April, Li'el turned 10

with passover cake on her actual birthday...

and non-passover cake with our neighbors the following weekend.

In May, Noa turned 6 1/2 (and has big plans for inviting over the neighbors and a friend pending).

Walks

The walks around campus continue, finding further afield corners to check out.

(sugar cane fields)

(canal)

(tree pasture border)

(reforestation plot) 

(bananas)

(coffee)

(cut sugar cane field)

(botanical garden entrance)

Turrialba volcano (at a distance, but see the steam coming out?)

(big tree)

(Eytan at the bottom of the tree for scale)

(vistas from a recent walk)

It had been really hot and dry the last couple of months, and only recently has it started to rain again sometimes.

(clouds)

Sugar Cane

Sugar cane season continues. When it's time to harvest, the field get burned.

And cut.

Then the cane gets gathered.

And loaded with a crane into big trucks to be taken to a processing facility (where the cane gets squeezed into sugar juice and then boiled down and precipitated out into sugar).

And the fields meanwhile start to regrow next year's harvest.

Visits

Big news is that Safta came to visit at the end of April.

And her visit coincided with one of several recent festivals here on campus.

Festivals

As one part of CATIE's 50th anniversary celebration, a bunch of high school marching bands played on campus, providing big entertainment here.

(this one is the band of the kids school, consisting of drums and what the kids have been calling ding-dongs (lyres or xylophone kinds of things I think)

There was also a festival/carnival kind of thing at school before this. The kids have been impressed at how loud the music has been at all these festivals, compared to what they'd seen before in the U.S.

And then at the end of April (when Safta was here) was CATIE's international festival, where students from different countries run booths selling food from their country and there's a stage with performing groups all weekend. It hadn't been held since 2019, so this was the first international festival-since-pandemic, and it was packed.

There was even a zipline set up on scaffolding between two trees on campus.

(Noa climbing up)

(Oren zipping)

And more recently there was a piano/viola concert at the University of Costa Rica campus given by two musicians from Spain.

General updates

Meanwhile, school uniforms have finally arrived.

(regular uniforms)

(gym day uniforms)

Eytan was able to work on an assignment from school in Pittsburgh he had wanted to stay part of, a report about a state (in this case Alaska).

(unrelated picture of making pizzas in Costa Rica school)

Mike worked for a couple of weeks at the high school as a substitute English teacher, and then transitioned to volunteering a couple of days a week at the CATIE botanical gardens.

(frog in the garden while weeding)

This, as well as weekly trips to the market, have been pushing him to learn a little more Spanish too.

Kids and Martha have been working on handwork projects more lately (cross-stich, as well as a few leftover projects still pending from Pittsburgh school)

And as of recently we have three kids who can not only read but also ride bicycles (!).

(the fourth is chipping away at both tasks too bit by bit...)

Noa has developed a new favorite sandwich, refried beans + bologna on bread.

And also has developed a pattern of singing to scare away snakes from parts of the paths that seem too crowded with vegetation (I don't think she's seen snakes there, I guess it's mostly precautionary).

Meanwhile, Oren is fun to listen to pronouncing his friends' names from school, because he does it by ear, without realizing what the equivalent English name would be -- like, Ka-te-reen (oh, it's the same as Katherine?) and Bree-an (wait, it's like Brian!)

This week at there were elections at school. Kids formed political parties and put forward platforms and at the end of the week, everyone voted. Oren's and Noa's understanding of it, between the language and the novelty of this as an activity, was that different groups were giving out candy and stickers and one might vote for the ones who gave better candy. Eytan and Li'el's seemed to have a sense of what kinds of issues the parties were proposing (the 4th grade group wanted to help animals, the 6th grade group wanted to have more sports days at school) as well. So it was an interesting manifestation of the ways in which  everyone's Spanish is growing bit by bit. 

On one hand, it would be nice to stay longer than we are, so that the kids can get more comfortable language-wise before we go; on the other hand, I think everyone is starting to look forward to going back home. Plan is to be here about three more months (3 weeks of which are a school vacation) and head back to Pittsburgh at the end of August.