Tuesday:
Spanish Level: My focus now is completely on verbs (any nouns I need to learn are pretty easily remembered now compared to verbs). You don’t realize how many verbs there are until you try to learn another language. There are about 100 we use all the time, every day and about 500 more that are good to know if you want to have a conversation with any depth, or understand a TV program.
This week is “final exam week” for the high schools. If I failed to mention this before, the Catholic faith is very predominant here. A lot of the holidays are centered around the Catholic faith and holy days. You don’t have to be Catholic to understand life here but it does help to know how Catholicism impacts the community. I suppose in a very basic way I’d say I don’t think church and state are separated here. With that said, today for my weekly field trip we went to a special mass that was held for the high school kids to bless them and wish good luck on their exams this week. Maria Fernanda (our neighbor from last week) should have been there but she did so poorly on her exams last week that she will have to take another year of high school, no need to take any further final exams, and sadly, her trip to the USA will have to wait.
When we left church, there was a big commotion in town. There were all these cars that had words written in shoe polish on their windows and they were all honking and following one another very closely so as not to let any other cars/trucks/busses in the middle. There were probably about 80 cars doing this. Most of them said “anything is possible” in Spanish of course. This was the day of the country wide taxi protest. Taxis here are governed and only the red ones are the legal ones. The legal drivers have to have a 4 door, red or maroon car in good working condition by the taxi association’s standards. They are each assigned their own number which is on a big yellow magnet on their doors. If you take an illegal taxi you are not assured of having insurance incase of an accident (and believe me the way they drive here, YOU WANT INSURANCE). The illegal taxis are cheaper however and the fact they are illegal is not really enforced by the police. The legal taxis here line up in front of the bus station; the drivers sit in their cars and wait for a customer to get in or for a dispatch call. If you call for a taxi there is only one # to call in the city, that of the legal services. The illegal taxis however line up behind the bus station and the drivers actually confront you when you are getting on or off the bus, they are there all the time every day, so it seems the police “allow” them to operate. Anyway, today the illegal taxis had an organized protest in every city in the country. In Quepos, apparently one car lagged behind and a legal taxi got between two illegals and blocked off the road so no more cars could pass at all. This really messed up traffic for about 45 minutes till the cops came. The busses couldn’t get to the bus station… my bus parked behind the station where the other illegal taxis were so it could avoid the roads that were blocked. It was pandemonium!!! Wonder how you say THAT in Spanish? I suppose I’ll look up plethora too dad since its near pandemonium in the dictionary.
Spanish Level: My focus now is completely on verbs (any nouns I need to learn are pretty easily remembered now compared to verbs). You don’t realize how many verbs there are until you try to learn another language. There are about 100 we use all the time, every day and about 500 more that are good to know if you want to have a conversation with any depth, or understand a TV program.
This week is “final exam week” for the high schools. If I failed to mention this before, the Catholic faith is very predominant here. A lot of the holidays are centered around the Catholic faith and holy days. You don’t have to be Catholic to understand life here but it does help to know how Catholicism impacts the community. I suppose in a very basic way I’d say I don’t think church and state are separated here. With that said, today for my weekly field trip we went to a special mass that was held for the high school kids to bless them and wish good luck on their exams this week. Maria Fernanda (our neighbor from last week) should have been there but she did so poorly on her exams last week that she will have to take another year of high school, no need to take any further final exams, and sadly, her trip to the USA will have to wait.
When we left church, there was a big commotion in town. There were all these cars that had words written in shoe polish on their windows and they were all honking and following one another very closely so as not to let any other cars/trucks/busses in the middle. There were probably about 80 cars doing this. Most of them said “anything is possible” in Spanish of course. This was the day of the country wide taxi protest. Taxis here are governed and only the red ones are the legal ones. The legal drivers have to have a 4 door, red or maroon car in good working condition by the taxi association’s standards. They are each assigned their own number which is on a big yellow magnet on their doors. If you take an illegal taxi you are not assured of having insurance incase of an accident (and believe me the way they drive here, YOU WANT INSURANCE). The illegal taxis are cheaper however and the fact they are illegal is not really enforced by the police. The legal taxis here line up in front of the bus station; the drivers sit in their cars and wait for a customer to get in or for a dispatch call. If you call for a taxi there is only one # to call in the city, that of the legal services. The illegal taxis however line up behind the bus station and the drivers actually confront you when you are getting on or off the bus, they are there all the time every day, so it seems the police “allow” them to operate. Anyway, today the illegal taxis had an organized protest in every city in the country. In Quepos, apparently one car lagged behind and a legal taxi got between two illegals and blocked off the road so no more cars could pass at all. This really messed up traffic for about 45 minutes till the cops came. The busses couldn’t get to the bus station… my bus parked behind the station where the other illegal taxis were so it could avoid the roads that were blocked. It was pandemonium!!! Wonder how you say THAT in Spanish? I suppose I’ll look up plethora too dad since its near pandemonium in the dictionary.
posted by GA_Peach | 10:18 PM
1 Comments:
plethora is pletora or abundancia; and pandemonium is jaleo.
You can look up theese, and others, in Georgia.
Pronto casa
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