Beach time, Panamá, lot of fiesta, project valle escondido

If you had a house on the beach, wouldn’t you maintain it? Even if it was your mother’s house and she passed away and left the house for you and your 4 other siblings? Even if you couldn’t stand your siblings wouldn’t you at least maintain the house in your mother’s memory?
So my family took me to the beach the other weekend. I had no idea about where the beach was and supposedly there was a house and all we had to do was bring sheets. I think we ended up at an upper class Costa Rican private beach community. Upper class in the sense that all the homes were mostly vacation homes and they had security guards patrolling the community all day long, however not so much in regards to the bumpy gravel road and how run down some of the beach houses had become. For instance the house we stayed at might fall down in a few years. Long story short, sibling rivalries and stubbornness are causing the house to be neglected and it shows. At least there weren’t bed bugs. Anyways besides a semi-rundown house the beach was a nice getaway. I spent most of the weekend sleeping on a hammock and trying not to burn myself. I got pretty bit up at night and the black sand literally made me feel like my feet were going to catch on fire in the sun but other than that things went well. Crazy though how much the ocean can change day to day. I went in the water the first day and it was kind of dirty, I didn’t think much of it because the black sand would make it look like that. However our last day something changed and the water was a lot clearer and there wasn’t as much sand in it.

We came back from the beach on September 15th, Costa Rica’s Independence Day. They don’t shoot fireworks off but rather have a bunch of parades and torch relays. I didn’t get to see much of the parades as I was at the beach but my other volunteer friend told me she had someone run a torch through her town on a relay to somewhere. She lives in Cartago though, the original capitol city of Costa Rica so they crazy over there. They have a religious holiday where people walk from as far as Nicaragua to the cathedral in Cartago to worship the Virgin of Los Angeles.

Shortly after I returned from the beach I had to turn around and head to Panama for 5 days. I wasn’t due to leave the country but another volunteer had to and she didn’t want to go along so I told her I would go with her if we could go to Panama. She agreed but said we had to go see the canal. I’d seen it before but this time we went to an actual tourist area which had a visitor center and museum. Different kind of tourism for me though as there were more Latin American tourists than North American/European tourists. It is off season for tourism though so that could be why. I also was able to hear a lot of funny Spanish accents that I hadn’t heard before. I guess I’m sheltered with only hearing Costa Rica and Panama Spanish. I wasn’t too thrilled about staying in Panama City but in the end it turned out alright because I actually had to navigate the city on my own. The first time I came to Panama City I was able to meet up with cousins of my aunt (language note: I naturally wrote that in passive when it should be active, my Spanish is messing with my English!) and they took me all around so I didn’t have to navigate anything. This time however they were all busy with work so I had to do it all alone. I’m learning Panama backwards from Costa Rica. When I first got to Costa Rica I had to everything on my own cause I didn’t know anyone, now when I come I don’t have to stay in hotels anymore because I have so many other connections.

Well after touring the city we went to the country to stay with my aunt’s family for a few days. My friend Mikey totally stole the show though which I’m glad she did. Granted the guy cousins all wanted to flirt with her but even the girl cousins, aunts and grandmas all had a good time getting to know her. It was nice too that she spoke Spanish so I didn’t have to translate at all. Staying there for 2 days was probably the highlight for me. The town had a club so we went there both nights and got free drinks till 11. No crazy stories resulted from that but it did help me keep my streak alive of consecutive weeks going out and dancing. Our bus back to Costa Rica picked us up at 1am so we had to leave the club early the second night and ended up missing a wet t-shirt contest. Oh well couldn’t have been as crazy as Hawaiian tropic models wrestling in pool full of chocolate…

I have to say town festivals are getting pretty out there these days. In my original host town, a tiny little place out in the country, they decided for their town festival they would get models to wrestle in a pool of chocolate. It didn’t last long though because people started pushing to see and they broke the barrier so the dj called it off. Little ‘ol La Lucha not quite ready for the big time yet mud wrestling events I guess…

I know it sounds like all I have been doing the last few weeks is sun tanning, travelling and going to exotic clubs/parties but that’s really how its been… not really but seriously I went to probably the best surprise birthday party ever the other night. My boss at my office in Alaujela is dating an engineer from the main office in San José except it is super down low because of the whole no dating people you work with policy. I don’t know if it is policy here but they just prefer to keep it on the down low. They do so well that I almost forgot they were “dating”. Well that was until my boss decided to plan a surprise birthday party for him and we spent the better part of a day working on stuff for the party. This however was more than just hide everybody in a room and yell surprise, we were on a mission. Not only was there cake and food, but we also had music, karaoke and a piñata. Well it didn’t stop there as we bought fake eggs and filled them with candy and then when Carlos (the b-day boy) was blindfolded for the piñata we just let him have it, the whole time him thinking the eggs were real. The best surprise of the night though was when we gave him a fake gift. We had a big box wrapped up with a bow and everything and one of Carlos’s friends dressed up as a woman and hid in the box. I’ll have to try and get a picture of his face when he opened the box because it was hysterical. Having a grown man jump out of a box, wearing a wig and makeup, dressed like a stripper… just can’t be described in words.

That concludes this edition of my Costa Rica Party tour but leads me to my next point as Carlos and I now work together on housing projects and we are pretty good resources for each other. I tell him how construction projects go in the US and he tells me how they do them here. In Costa Rica my degree Construction Management doesn’t exist, so everybody becomes engineers and they are dam proud of it. They answer the phone saying their name as engineer so-and-so. They’ll say their title but they won’t say who they work for as if being an engineer carries more weight than any company name.

Right now were in the bidding stage of a housing project of 17 houses that we are doing in San Ramon and are big struggle is finding a decent contractor. We’ve already had two site visits because only one contractor showed up for the first one and had to push our bid date back two weeks because of that. We are hoping that we get 3-4 good bids for this project. Our concern is that most of these contractors have very little experience doing this type of housing and won’t be set up for this kind of work, causing the bids to be high because they won’t be as efficient. We have one project going right now where the contractor has pretty much given up on finishing it anytime soon as he sends maybe 3 ppl to the site each day. They are already way late and there are penalty clauses in the contract but apparently the laws are too weak to enforce them in court. So here is my open call for bidders, bids are due next Friday, send them to San José. We have one really good contractor that does what he says so we use him on individual projects and little side jobs and repairs that we need done. We just need like 2 or 3 more of him for these bigger projects. Maybe that’s my calling…

Sucesos:

-I think dancing is a way better way to meet people than smoking. In college ppl would say they smoke because you’ll meet other ppl that stand around outside when it’s ten below and you can be there so they don’t feel completely insane. I have this cultural suspicion that everyone here either knows how to dance or are very open to learning how to and it is a great way to break the ice. For instance I was out with my friend and his girlfriend and my friend didn’t dance and the girl was like “yeah I dance a little” when I asked her to dance with me. She was pretty shy so I hadn’t talked to her much before but I had to at least ask her to dance. So we go dance and I spin her around enough that she gains confidence in me and then the music changed and I asked her if she wanted to keep dancing and she was like hell yeah (well the Spanish equivalent more or less of hell yeah). Turns out she danced a lot more than she said she did. Later when I was saying good bye to everyone she tells me that I’m an excellent dancer and I need to come back and teach her to dance sometime. Doesn’t always go like that but I’ve gotten to know a fair amount of people from dancing.

-I almost got stranded for the first time in Costa Rica coming back to the office with another employee when our truck’s electrical system went crazy. It literally shut the truck down and we had to disconnect the battery in order to start the car and get it back to the office. Weirdest thing ever though, like it all of a sudden became possessed, or blew a fuse.

-My host mom makes incredible pizza.

-I (still) hate the Cowboys. I still remember when we finally crushed them the season after the super bowl. I was watching the game with some cousins and we were dominating when Sharper returned an interception for a td. It was glorious but all I remember are my cousins getting upset because they would have won a bunch of money had the score remained as it was. Have to savor those moments now because it looks like were back to the early 90’s again. At least the Vikings still suck.