Bowl number 45

The idea was that I was gonna make up for sitting around all day yesterday, by being really active today. I was going to make a point to working for a long time this morning even if it just meant weeding and stuff while Otoniel continued working on the fence. It has been raining all morning though. It is only 8:30 but I am not sure when Otoniel will be back. He usually is home by about 8:00 or 8:30 but he had to go kill a cow this morning at Alicia’s brothers’ farm. If it clears up, I may still just go out and find something useful to do. I may just spend the morning reading or maybe I will start paining something. It is weird because I both have lots of free time and also don’t have a lot of free time. I spend the day running, working on the farm, hanging out with Eduardito, playing soccer etc… there is a lot of “dead” time spent at the house where I am just sitting around. It seems like a waste of time to just sit around the living room while the T.V is on, the radio is on, and everyone is talking, but that is life. I could easily “accomplish” a lot more if I used all of this time that I spend sitting around the house “doing” something but I wouldn’t really be living here. I sit around with them, watching goofy Spanish T.V., talking with them about the day’s events and joking with them about who knows what. Costa Rican have the funniest sense of humor, or at least the people in San Luis do. Everyone, whether it is the kitchen ladies, Geovanny and Liliam, or my sixty-something year-old parents, everybody gets a kick out of dirty humor. I am not really sure how they do it, but some how it is such a joke that it isn’t even vulgar. I mean we talk about things at the dinner table that would make you blush and we all die laughing. Usually one person says something kind of inappropriate then someone else makes and even bigger joke out of it, then someone else takes it a little further until no one can say anything else because we are all laughing so hard. It is especially funny because I used to not understand most of it but now there is not much that I miss and of course every time I chime in it is that much funnier. They always joke about how much I am learning here. The truth is learning to understand humor has sharpened my Spanish skills a great deal. You have to understand the different meanings of things, you have to apply what you know about the context of the conversation and you have to be quick. When Alex and I were at Lelo’s last week for instance, we were all joking around at dinner (surprise) and Lelo and his wife commented on how surprised they were that I understood them when they were talking so fast because even Lindsay a lot of the time doesn’t catch everything when they are speaking that quickly. I am not nearly as good at Spanish as Lindsay but I spend my days with a family that is constantly chatting away and making jokes all day long. When they are talking only to me they usually slow things down, but amongst themselves they are a mile a minute so it is either get used to it, or not be a part of daily conversation.