Update on Monteverde

Well the best I can do with this particular blog is to make it a rambling jumbled mix of all the different things that have happened over the past few weeks. Bare with me, there will be some superfluous crap that you have no interest in but hopefully there will be some nuggets of interest.

I'm going to start off with school since that is my primary reason for being here. In a lot of ways school is pretty similar to any school ive ever been in. Except for the fact that you can randomly see white faced monkeys on the library roof, or you can have gigantic spiders and scorpions in your class at any time. The classes I am working in are learning ancient rome, biographies, Buddhism and reading Asian fiction. For the most part I am just like an assistant in the room which is a whole different perspective of a classroom for me. Usually I am a control freak and I dont like other people telling me how to or what to teach but this has actually been kind of a refreshing change. I'm seeing teaching in a different light and realizing how I need to improve to work better with my co teachers in the future. For the most part though I work with small groups and just annoy kids with my incessant questions about anything and everything.
I did get the opportunity to teach sex ed to the 5/6th grade boys the other day which was an adventure all in itself. Frankly I am a terrible person to teach this subject, I laugh every time I see or speak the word penis and in fact I just laughed right now after writing it. I am far from mature, I have bizarre beliefs about personal hygiene ranging from super uptight and anal retentive to completely and absolutely lax. In essence the things I know about the human body and puberty are not beneficial for anyone let alone those who dont know much. The basic summary of the class: wear deodorant, wash up, and if and when you ever have sex dont be an idiot. Hopefully those gems of wisdom will make those gentleman into upstanding citizens that we can all be proud of.
Some other interesting notes from school. I am starting to make friends but its more with the kids in the school than the teachers, not because the teachers aren't nice but because I think 7 year olds like me better than adults. I even got invited over a 6 year olds house to play soccer , I am probably going to take him up on it and then totally dominate because I dont care how old you are im not letting anyone win at anything.
Oh I am teaching basketball as well. Its quite the class and I am super psyched that we are starting to master lay ups. Full court games are an absolute mess and its impossible to teach them how to play because they have very little attention span and for kids who have seen a sum total of 10 games in their life they have a self righteous know it all nature about the rules and the right things to do.
We also had a slight lice scare in the school which freaked me out a bit. The whole day I kept scratching my head and thinking I had lice which would be devastating because I cant afford to cut these sweet locks of mine, its one of my go to features. Long story short im clean and the school is lice free, toca madera, so I can continue to stroke my fingers through this sweet sweet head of hair.

Family
I think ive written a little about the family but ill use this space to right more. There are 3 kids, Annalise(11), Angelina(6) and Massimo(4), so there is never really a dull moment in the house. Just a few minutes ago I had Angelina and Massimo throwing toys in my room for about a half hour and last night at dinner I was entertained as Angelina kept showing me her tongue with piles of chewed food on it. I have played a crap load of memory and made some pretty sweet stuff out of play doh over the past few weeks. The eldest daughter Annalise is actually in my class, she is a violin prodigy and completely obsessed with Twilight so ive had plenty of conversations about how cool it would be to be a vampire. (im awaiting a mugford joke on that comment). Most days it is actually a blast to have them around though there are moments where they can turn pretty nasty, like when Angelina hid the remote controls to the TV because she knew I wanted to watch jeopardy. I figured out a way around that whole debacle though.
The only big hang up that I have is that basically I am treated like a child, which most times is pretty appropriate but there are shining moments when I am a real adult. Its one of those things where they ask me questions “do you want ice in this drink” and ill respond “no I dont really like ice” and then they'll give me a look like your an idiot and just put the ice in my drink anyway. Or how much food do you want and ill say stop and then they'll add 4 more scoops because I dont know what im talking about. This week I baked cupcakes in ice cream cones something they had never seen before and therefore theoretically I should be the expert. Though through the whole process they kept telling me I didn't know what I was doing and would try and fix it themselves, changing the temperature of the oven, arbitrarily moving the pan remixing the batter. I mean I know im an idiot but I am capable of doing some things in life.
Other than that they are beyond nice. Last weekend they invited me to a wedding and I was pretty nervous about the whole thing. I mean if I'm getting married and some tall awkward foreign dude comes strolling in uninvited im probably bouncing his ass from the reception. Especially when he is bringing nothing to the table, no gift, no witty dinner conversation, and no dance skills whatsoever. The people there were incredibly nice they made sure I had plenty of food and kept sneaking me shots of tequila(it was a dry wedding due to the father of the brides drinking problem) and basically going way out of their way to make me comfy. As a wedding it was pretty interesting, it was in a beautiful location tucked into the valley surrounded by waterfalls. Everyone dresses casual, jeans and hoodies mostly, or slutty(im talking about the ladies) and then just hangs out, maybe dances(some ridiculous kind of dancing). I also pitched my idea of an all cake menu(cake for every part of the meal, possibly cake designed like steak chicken or fish for the main course) at my wedding to one of the daughters in the family and she said I was an idiot and I would never find a woman who would let me do that. So true but maybe if I pitch that idea my other wedding ideas wont seem as stupid and one of them will slip by.

Well im off for now. Andy and Lindsey visited a few weeks ago so ill blog about that as we did some zip lining and visited the cloud forest reserve, though im waiting for the pics because as many of you have told me you dont really read any of this and only look at the pictures.