Spur of the moment

Hola!

People often want to know what families are like in Costa Rica. Well, that’s a really tough question. If you ask me what the typical American family is like, I can give you a generalization, but that’s exactly what it is: a generalization. No family fits the exact same mold. There are huge variations in families. My family in America is totally different than yours. Your family is totally different than a millionaires. The same is true here—there is a huge variety in families. So keep that in mind as I talk about my Friday night because there is really no such thing as a “typical” family.

Last night I hung out with my family for most of the night. I worked on homework while they watched TV (the common hang out place is the parent’s bedroom, not the living room). At about 8:45pm, my mom started making food, and I asked her if she wanted help. This is very normal for our family to eat supper this late at night. Now, some of my classmates say that they eat supper at 6:00 and are in bed by 9:00. Again, it just totally depends on the family. Anyway, my mom told me that she didn’t need help, but then asked the dad to go to the supermarket to get milk. I told him I wanted to go with him, so we headed out. The supermarket is right on our block, so it didn’t take long at all. On the way to the market, he asked me if I was tired, I said yes, but that I was alright. To make a long story short, we had about a 5 minute conversation on what should have taken about 30 seconds for me to understand, but I was just so confused! This hasn’t happened a lot accutally: where he has to rexplain something like seriously 4 times for me to get it. Usually one more time is good enough, but I was seriously not understanding what he was talking about. He was being really patient though :)

The conversation ended up being that he wanted to know if I was tired because the family wanted to go out to eat in a restaurant that is about 20 minutes away. Part of the reason I was confused is because my mind isn’t thinking of going out to a restaurant at 9:00 at night, especially in San Jose where everyone stays inside after 6:00pm for safety reasons. I was also confused because my mom was making food! He ended up saying that the mom was only going to cook a little bit, and it was for the next day. After I finally understood what was going on, we packed in the car at about 9:15 and headed out to the restaurant.

On the way to the restaurant, my sister was getting texts from one of her friends who was about to go into labor. So we stopped by the house by her house to see how she was doing and to see if she needed to go to the hospital. It was so sad to see this…the girl was tiny. Just 17 years old and totally pregnant. She was 1 day over her due date, and just looked ready to pop, even though she was tiny. It was really sad too because my parents were saying that her parents really weren’t helping her too much, hence the reason that she was texting my sister. Melissa (my sister) said that her “friend” was really only texting her because she wanted my dad to help her and take her to the hospital. After all, I guess he had taken Melissa’s last pregnant friend to the hospital. Yes, that’s right. My 16 year old sister has had at least 2 pregnant friends…probably more actually. Teenage pregnancy is sadly very common here.

After realizing that she didn’t’ need to go to the hospital right now, we headed on to the restaurant, where we ate at a typical Costa Rican restaurant. The restaurant was so cute: it was like a log cabin with all wooden things inside: wooden tables, wooden benches, very rustic looking, and open to the outside. Most of the restaurants here are not enclosed buildings. The restaurant was really good, and the food I ordered was good too. I had a casada con pollo y aguadulce con leche. These are both very traditional Costa Rican things. It was really good…but I will say that eating so much food at 10:30 at night is really challenging, especially when it is very rude to leave food on your plate!

This morning I went to the farmer’s market with my dad, and I really like going here. I’m getting better at figuring out what they are saying when the spit out the numbers so fast on how much stuff costs! It’s really interesting to see the conversions too and how things compare to the United States. When we got back, we made lunch (yeah, I mostly watched again :). After lunch my dad went to the supermarket and bought ice cream which was just such a treat! It reminded me why ice cream is one of my favorite foods :)

After that, we watched a movie that we rented on cable, and I worked on some homework while we watched this too. It was so sad because the movie they rented was in English (which is normal) but it didn’t have Spanish subtitles (which is not normal)! So my poor dad had no idea what was going on, but he totally was into the movie the whole time and was laughing at their actions and everything else. Once in awhile he would ask me what happened or what they said. Haha, it was just so sad that he was watching this movie that he had no idea what was going on! My sister probably understood a lot of it, and my mom was playing a game on the computer so she wasn’t really paying attention anyway. Oh well, so it goes!

The rest of the afternoon I mostly did homework and just kind of chilled with the family and one of the grandkids. This particular grandson is 11, and he is just such a cute and mature little guy. He’s been around for several hours now, and he’s really here a lot. I never hardly see the other grandkids, but he’s here at least several times a week. He’s really precious and I like him a lot :)

 It’s been really good having a more relaxed day as it has given me the opportunity to really spend time with God, and I’m really thankful for that time. While I was working on my homework, my parents said that they were going to leave but be back. When they got back, they had a new TV for my sister because she passed her exam for school. We set up the TV and put her old TV in the kitchen. I honestly feel so helpful and tall here because I’m taller than everyone in my family. I actually felt useful during this process of moving the TVs!

Overall, it has been a really good day. It has been relaxed and low-stress, even though we have a ton of homework. Even so, I do feel like I made some progress on my homework, so I’m relieved about that. For this Wednesday I have a 15 page paper due (in Spanish) and then an 8 minute oral presentation (in Spanish) that I have to give on Wednesday too. Unfortunately, these are for 2 totally different classes so none of my information can be used in both! This means a lot of research, but I think I’m making gains at least. I hope you are all having a wonderful Saturday, and thanks for reading :)