Turning work down

Another week over. The teaching is going fine, and I’ve had to turn down extra work. The rainy season continues with gusto, and we visited a local gay bar and a club in San José.

Rain, rain, rain
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Lest some of you think that we’re in beautiful tropical weather, I have to tell you that today it’s done nothing but rain. I’m sitting on the balcony, it’s just after 7pm, and I can just see sheets of rain in front of the streetlight opposite. The sky is just grey cloud. It’s been raining since I got up, and it shows no sign of stopping. It’s still warm though. I popped out earlier with just an umbrella and a t-shirt and I was fine.

Our local bar
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Shane popped over the other night. He's our first visitor to the apartment. He told us about a nice bar down the road, el Cholo. It’s just about 100m from the apartment. It’s Heredia’s only gay bar. We popped down for a drink the other night. It’s small, but quite nice. It’s a Spanish themed bar, and does Tapas. While we were there a couple of teachers from the school, Porter and Tom Todd, and Tom’s wife Elena, arrived in. So we ended up joining them for a drink, and had a good laugh. They closed the bar at midnight, but continued to serve everyone inside. We left at 2am, because I was teaching at nine. Everyone was dancing at that stage. Tom, Elena and Porter were there until three. I think it’s somewhere we may visit often.

Interamericana
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Shane works at the Universidad Interamericana. To avoid all their staff having to do visa runs to Panamá they decided to apply for work permits for them all. Unfortunately, it backfired. Not only did they not get the permits, but they were informed that there were plenty of Ticos (Costa Ricans) who could teach English. So they’ve had to let everyone go. Shane is one of only four teachers staying. Some of new teachers are quite poor. One told Shane that she hadn’t ‘teached’ yet that day.

La Avispa
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Last night, Saturday, we ventured into San José for the first time since moving to Heredia. It’s about 20 minutes by bus, which costs about 42c. We went to the main gay club, called La Avispa (the wasp). It’s a good sized club on two levels. We enjoyed ourselves and had to say we preferred it to the George. We got a taxi back, which cost less than €5.

Useful technology – Part IV
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The DVD drive on my laptop. We’ve joined our local video store, Videomanía. We’ve caught up on a whole load of films that we hadn’t been able to catch in the cinema over the past year.

Turning down work
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I was in class on Thursday, when Barbara, my boss, popped in to see if I’d take another private student on Fridays. Friday and Sunday are my days off, and the rest of the week is fairly full at this stage, so I had to turn it down. So it’s just taken a little over a month to go from a couple of hours a week to turning work down.

Signing off now as our favourite programme of the week, Desperate Housewives, starts in five minutes. It’s still bucketing out of the heavens.

Hasta la proxima semana