Dings that make you hmmm

From next week we are going to be attending Spanish lessons for 4 hours a day, 5 days a week for 2 weeks. So today we went into Heredia to scout the location of the school so that we don’t get lost on our first day. Addresses here are not like addresses in Scotland. That would be too easy. The clue is in the Spanish word for address: dirección. Addresses here are given as a set of directions e.g. 100m east of the football field, white house with blue trim. This is great, as long as you know where the football field is. And as long as you know that 100m doesn’t actually mean 100m (it actually means one block, which could be any distance at all, really). And as long as there is only one white house with blue trim in the vicinity…

There was also disappointment today when we discovered the microwave that we bought yesterday did not work. We bought the cheapest one in the shop (seeing as we are only going to need it for three months), so it is an old school turn the knob to set the time type. Unfortunately all it did when you turned the knob was go “ding”. Cue a return trip to the shop and a swap undertaken. Now we have a microwave that heats stuff up as it’s meant to (and still goes “ding” when finished).

And so to...

Zoë’s Spanish Phrase of the Day
Compramos este ayer pero no funciona. No hace nada.

Saludos de Costa Rica

Well, we made it. And it’s raining! Still, at least the rain here is warm and not that icy cold, sideways rain we get in Aberdeen.

We arrived here late last night after a rather uneventful journey. Here are some highlights:

• It was snowing when we left Aberdeen – the plane had to be de-iced, which meant we left about an hour late. We think this was Aberdeen bidding us farewell and reminding us what we will be missing during the next three months!


• We were pleasantly surprised at Heathrow not to have to remove our laptops from our bags for the security check. At both Aberdeen & Newark we had to take them out of the bags, and Colin also had his bag searched both times because he didn’t remove Rana (our network drive). The security guy at Newark asked Colin if he had a flux capacitor in his bag. Great Scott!


• We didn’t have much time in Heathrow & Newark due to our flights arriving an hour late each time, a theme which continued to our arrival in San Jose. We did have some time at Newark though to people watch and play our airport waiting game: “Tell me why [insert description of person waiting in lounge] is going to Costa Rica.” Not exactly a catchy title, but fun and laughter-filled nevertheless…

Today we have been settling into our home – we’ll write more about where we are living at a later date. We went for a walk through town to pick up some essentials, and then our friend, Peter, kindly drove us into Heredia where we purchased a kettle (hervidor), microwave (horno microondas) and double electric rings (hornilla eléctrica doble). So we now have basic cooking facilities which is, naturally, very useful. Peter also lent us an umbrella, which we hope won’t be quite so useful.

Zoë’s Spanish Phrase of the Day:
Este es un avión, no es un tambor.

Situation for use: When the guy sitting next to you from Newark to San Jose listens to his iPod loudly and insists on tapping out the rhythms on the window and tray table (just in case you couldn’t already hear it issuing from his earphones). No, I didn’t say it … but I wanted to!