Today was an overall normal day. I did my homework, and my parents worked. At the end of the day, my mom found a place in Alajuela that apparently had belly dance classes, breakdance classes, Latin dance classes, Spanish classes, and a bunch of other stuff too. I was pretty excited to see this place, I mean, it was the first place we had found that had classes of any kind.
So off we went to find this place. We walked along the road for a little ways, it was lightly raining at the time, and quite out of the blue, a man with a red van came along and offered to drive us to the bus stop up ahead. We had seen him pick some people up the other day, and my mom made the comment that perhaps this was the bus. It’s not. Turns out, this man just drives people around to help them out.
He and his wife said that their daughter was taking four English classes. It didn’t take us very long to get down to the bus stop, but this is about how much I can remember distinctly understanding. They seemed like very cheerful people.
While we were sitting on the actual bus, everyone was listening to some sports game or something over the speakers on the bus. The bus just so happened to be very loud, like everything else here. As we rode along, noses up against the window in hopes of seeing something interesting, our wishes were fulfilled. Right outside the window a little ways off, were the words Maxi Pali written in bright white big letters on a red background of a large warehouse like building for all to see. I wonder if anybody else here every chuckles at this…
Getting on the bus and getting to the bus station was relatively simple. Getting off took some consideration. It was pouring rain, and there was only one medium sized umbrella to use between the three of us. Me and my mom got out, but we didn’t have the umbrella, so we were a tad desperate. A nice man who had just got off the bus put his umbrella over the top of us until my dad got off the bus and got our umbrella up.
First thing after getting off the bus, we hailed a taxi. There are lots taxis around the bus station, and they’re not very hard to find. What a disappointment it was to find that the place with the classes was closed today. On their website, it had said that they would be open today, but on the bus there was a sports game playing, and Costa Rican Google had said that today had been some sort of a holiday.
After this rather sad ordeal, we went to one of the two or three fruit stands there were around the bus station. We got a variety of fruit: bananas, plantains (which we discovered today at lunch that we can fry for an excellent dish when paired with rice), apples, a mango, grapes, and much more. The Pali was right next to the bus station, so we went there as well. Here, we got some more pillows, two more umbrellas, leafy greens, some chicken, and various other things.
Tonight we had a substantial meal that consisted of chicken, leafy greens in the form of salad, rice, and coconut milk. Normally, I despise salad and will do anything to avoid eating it, but this salad tasted so good I thought I could die. It even if it had my least favorite “dressing,” balsamic vinegar. While we ate, we watched children’s programming in Spanish.
Our TV has a nifty little feature that on some channels allows you to change the language from Spanish to English, or vice versa. We put this little feature into use when we watched about Tec the Tractor’s “mission” (was it really a mission?) to get two baby goats milk (one was named Owen). We also watched some wordless shows, which I’m sad to say were extremely entertaining in my dazed stated, and we also watched some Magic Box thing. This was about the easiest thing to understand of it all. I was sad when it was over.
(NOTE: This post was written when I was 12. I edited it in 2017 for grammatical errors and other technical stuff, but maintained the content to preserve my 12-year-old perspective)
Related Posts:
First Yoga Class for All — By Lydian Shipp
Finding the Alajuela Yoga Studio — By Jennifer Shipp
Umbrellas Would Be Nice – By Jennifer Shipp
Scarcity Value — By Lydian Shipp
