Wow - slept until 6:30! Probably because I was up until all hours (8.30pm) typing with Clyde about visits, about maybe having his niece down for a month or more. She just happens to need a new "project" since the one she was working on fell through... hmm. Good timing? A sign? This solves all my endless pondering and weighing of which house: I'm going to need an extra bedroom if people are going to stay for a while. (It has been obnoxious days of calculating and re-thinking, just when I've made the "right" or "smart" decision.)
Here's the deal with renting in PV: you can get a "cabina", a little cottage/cabin, sometimes with no kitchen or a shared kitchen in a different cabin, for very little - say $200-250 mo.
You can get a little house for around $300.(It helps if you know someone and they know someone.) The little house I'm looking at is 350 for just over 5 weeks. The bigger house, with 2 bedrooms is $425mo for the first three months then goes up to 450 (I didn't ask about the logic of this, it must be a local thing.) It is a big difference in price but the location has a security that is very unusual in Puerto Viejo.
Stepping out of my room a tiny frog "goes by". This phrase may be inappropriate since he's not an inch big and his hops are about an inch at a time so BLAZE BY, he did not. But what made me laugh was his color: Mint Chocolate Chip -- I mean, insanely, un-natural Greeen with brown spots, perfect & adorable. I thought to gather him up in the empty water glass I was holding so my poor phone would have a prayer of photographing him; but then I had a vision of Katty coming down (here she is now to unlock the day) and telling me, peering at my capture, "You knowww -- dis one quite poisonous, yaa?"
Meanwhile, time is flying by. Class begins at 10am and if you're new you get there early on Monday to begin with the group. Must shower & scrub off the grime (not an expression) for my first day. I'm nervous too. Goofy.
Bike over at 9am: wooden gates, ten feet tall, locked like Oz and no people in sight (of course, it is made of lattice.)
Okay, so I'm too early. The sign with school information was at Caribeans - just bike over there and re-read. "Claro School 10-12". Well, plenty of time to have a coffee and email Clyde from one of the cafe laptops (you drop 500c in the paint can. No, really. That's a dollar.) But when I bike back an hour later: gates still locked. Okay, find another Spanish school, how hard can it be?
As I'm biking away, there's a one room, cinder block school house next door. They are clearly putting on a show since all of the children are out in the road (quiet dirt road) with the teachers; I'm guessing all of the parents are inside -- and this is "back stage". Each student has a posterboard sign on string around his neck with a big picture of a strawberry or a carrot on each little belly. Classic! Timeless and apparently International is the "dance of the produce" in elementary school. Someday they'll tell the story of how "I was a singing Zanahoria in kindergarten." "Hey, me too! but I was a dancing apple in Massachusetts."
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