Playa Avellanas...going to the dogs

As you all know, my habit is normally to do one blog a week but I'm making an exception this week by firing off my first "mid-week" epistle in greatly abbreviated form.  My primary purpose is to share with you some photos of our trip to Playa Avellanas yesterday with our friend Kenny (you'll hear more about him next week).

Avellanas is 45 miles south of us and is one of our favorite beaches here on the Pacific coast.  Getting there in one piece is an award worthy accomplishment and the only vehicle that can traverse these roads without losing half of its parts would be a tank or armored personnel carrier on loan from the military.  Much of the distance is unpaved, pot-hole plagued, gravel covered roads containing obstacles that defy description.  But the prize at the end of the journey makes the challenge of getting there well worth the effort.

A Dutch entrepreneur chose this spot a few years ago to create a tropical beachside restaurant known as Lola. And, despite its remote location, Avellanas is a popular destination because of that restaurant as well as the reliable surf that provides surf-boarders consistent opportunities to feed their habit 365 days a year.

As one might expect, a beach of this caliber attracts people of all descriptions and I must say that most of them are fit, trim, tanned and attractive.  However, on this particular visit, I have to say there were a couple of REAL dogs.  And, one of the visitors there was a complete and TOTAL pig.  Now, as most of you know, I don't usually make such harsh judgments but in this case, I'm simply calling 'em like I see 'em.  That's why I'm documenting the experience with actual photos.  YOU be the judge !!!

Spanish.....So to Speak

Spanish.....So to Speak


OK, so in preparation for our trip to Costa Rica, I did what any person of moderate intelligence would do.  I embarked on a mission to learn Espanol.  After purchasing a couple of dictionaries, a high school text book, a Learn-to-Speak-Spanish instruction book, and an 8 hour audio instruction program downloaded from the internet, I calculated as how I was on the road to fluency in Spanish.  I think I failed to mention that all of this was prior to our FIRST trip to Central America, just one fly-by type year ago.

The significance of clarifying this timeframe is to point out the obvious….I have now had well over a year to study my various instruction-aides plus the month and a half of living in Costa Rica last winter, to achieve the fluency of my desire.  Logic would dictate:  mission accomplished.  But wait!  It turns out my “mission accomplished” would turn out to be about as valid as former President Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech on May 1, 2003.

Now it is true, I have listened to different segments of my audio course using my MP3 player for close to an hour each and every day for at least 15 months.  And I have completed the text book course at least once and another instruction book three or four times.  I have learned hundreds upon hundreds of vocabulary words, verb conjugations of both the regular and highly irregular type, mostly proper grammatical structure, and nearly perfect pronunciation technique.

As a result, I can put together simple sentences (in the present tense only), ask questions, write with a reasonable degree of accuracy and read uncomplicated newspaper articles, etc. with approximately 70% rate of comprehension due to limited vocabulary and verb construction which wanders beyond the present tense.  These efforts are most effective when not under the pressure of another Spanish speaking person waiting for me to remember the words needed to construct my sentence and/or question.  It also turns out that speakers and writers of Spanish tend to use a lot of words that are not among the many I have learned.

The problem is this.  Even when I am satisfied I have delivered a perfectly constructed question or comment and the person to whom I am speaking demonstrates total understanding, I find that when that person responds, I am clueless to figure out what has just been said.  It is not only because native Spanish speakers run their words together so that an entire sentence or even a whole paragraph comes out as one long word, I believe there is a short circuit between my ear and my brain that garbles transmission and renders it all as jibber jabber.   Which in turn unleashes a near panic attack inside of me that temporarily robs my memory of all things previously learned.  So there I stand, looking like a person who is clearly not even of moderate intelligence.

I mean REALLY !!!  It’s like the other person is speaking a foreign language !

Proving once again that being able to listen is the true key to understanding.  Esa es vida!!!

Some Forms of Communication work better than Others...

After several minutes of that loud, annoying, incessant beeping that is the security alarm for our building, I ventured out into the veranda to see what I could see.  I came upon a perplexed appearing member of the security staff here at the resort who proceeded to question me about…well, I’m not quite sure what the questions were about.  He was one of those Latinos whose words come at you at the rate the dollars zoom by on the screen in Times Square showing the progress of the national debt.  Did I mention his words were all in Spanish?  Of course, I wouldn’t even be capable of comprehending speech at this rate of speed even had it been in English. But Espanol at 200 miles per hour….no comprendo!!!

So, as I was explaining to him in my elementary level Spanish that I was not totally understanding his efforts to question me, a soon to be nine-year-old child sitting on a nearby sofa there in the veranda volunteered her assistance.  Having apparently been drawn out of her condo by the same curiosity as my own, she was merely looking around in hopes of seeing something worthy of note.   However, when she observed my rather feeble attempts to understand Senor Security and my lack of success in getting him to understand me, little Maria approached me enthusiastically with eyes as big as saucers and as dark as strong coffee saying, “You can talk to me, then I can talk to him, and maybe we can get this figured out!”

Her exuberance and intense desire to be of assistance by utilizing her bilingual skills in a near state of possible emergency was striking.  Her excitement was almost palpable and was only exceeded by her incredible, natural beauty.  She spoke through an expansive smile that never slackened even when her lips were at rest.  Her caramel colored skin was as smooth and unblemished as a perfect peach.  And her long silky hair flowed like she was filming a shampoo and conditioner commercial.  So much beauty in such a little package.

Just about the time I was instructing Maria to ask the security guy where the alarm control box was located the senseless beeping suddenly stopped for reasons as mysterious as those that caused it to start.  The three of us then looked back and forth at each other and successfully communicated our mutual befuddlement with the universally understood shrugging of the shoulders accompanied by upturned palms as we went our separate ways.

Later, I bumped into Maria out by the pool and thanked her (in my anemic Spanish) for her offer of assistance and complimented her on her complete fluency in both Spanish and English.  She just giggled and reflexively batted her long black eyelashes.  I didn’t tell her I might have just fallen in love.

Day and Night

The morning is ushered in to a cacophony of avian calls which begin at first light.  Coos, hoots, chirps, cackles, screeches and specialized whistles fill the air in what is surely a competition of grand proportions among the feathered inhabitants of El Coco.  As this clamoring for the attention of the opposite sex subsides, humming birds enter the scene, floating like soap bubbles in front of bright blossoms then suddenly kicking in their after-burners they streak away in a blur that defies tracking by the human eye.

The night sky is the blackest black imaginable.  It is like being submerged in an ocean of India ink.  And with little or no ambient light, the stars and planets are so brilliant they look artificial. Like they’ve been manipulated with liberal use of the contrast and intensity buttons in a Photoshop program.  The moon and other astrological bodies appear super-sized.  I gather it is because we are closer to them than we are back home.  Maybe being so close to the equator puts us in closer proximity to the stars.  It’s just a theory I pulled out of my astrological studies but it’s the best I can conjure up at the moment.  One thing is for sure, it definitely feels closer to Heaven here in Playas del Coco.