Well, today we began moving into home number 2...our classrooms. The kind souls that used to be in our rooms have left us with everything imaginable ranging from the necessary to the ridiculous! Things such as faded construction paper, old used workbooks, and long out of date teachers editions are filling dusty boxes and cabinets scattered among the far more useful art supplies, math manipulatives, and current teacher's editions of text books. Aside from the dusty time spent in our classrooms today we finally got to meet the staff from the elementary, middle, and high schools. Looking at all of these new faces together was a bit overwhelming, but the realization that we will typically only interact with the 25 or so elementary school teachers made the name remembering seem less daunting. Over all the staff seems young and friendly with many interesting experiences to share. After school today we had a very early birthday celebration for Joe and Biba. We had everything from a singing candle to cake (from Hiper Mas/Wal Mart), and presents to make it like a real party! We also had a feast from Rosti Pollo which included rotisserie chicken, black beans, rice, fried cheese and yucca, and a salad for the semi-vegetarian. We also received a wonderfu present of a crockpot for our new house. The crockpot will really come in handy after spending long days at home #2 and getting to come back to home #1 for a nice hot meal without the work.
By the way, on Sunday we saw the La Paz waterfalls, which are about an hour from San Jose. There are five huge waterfalls, with very steep and spooky trails leading to them. It is a majestic place, and besides the caterratas, there was also a hummingbird garden, orchid garden, snake house (with all sorts of venemous and non-venemous snakes), a frog-a-torium, and an incredible butterfly garden. Best of all, there was an all-you-can eat buffet, with pasta, gallo pinto, salad, soup, chicken, cheese empenadas, hotdogs, french fries, pizza, and rice pudding. It was a great trip, and our driver brought along his son, who is 10 just like Willie, and his 14 year-old daughter who hung out with Biba.
Tomorrow we have a meeting and more work to do in our classrooms, but Laura and Biba Kirschner have been recruited to help with this task before they fly home on Wednesday.
Our neighbors in the "Dos Rios" complex are great: Jason teaches 4th grade next to Allie, and just finished teaching in Honduras for two years. Martin is an architect from Argentina with two very cute kitties.