Party, Fiesta

We just arrived back from my work do at the Fiesta hotel resort. And I'm feeling much better now, having got over my cold earlier in the week.

Fiesta Resort
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For a language school in Central America, the last thing I expected was an all expenses paid junket to a holiday resort hotel on the Pacific for all the staff. You may remember that we went on this last year.

The Fiesta Hotel is a resort hotel. It's basically a compound with swimming pools, bars and restaurants beside the beach near the coastal Pacific town of Puntarenas.

When you arrive, you're given an armband, and once you have that everything is free. Whatever food you want. Whatever drinks, whether beer or cocktails. It's absolutely fantastic. We had a beautiful room and really had a ball. I worked Saturday morning, but they cancelled the afternoon classes for the trip. We set off at 12.30 and it just takes 2 hours to get there. We didn't leave until 3pm yesterday.

In the meantime there had been meals, drinks, a disco, and a long lie in on Sunday morning. It was a great trip, and a great way for the old and new teachers to get to know each other, as well as for the integration of the English and Spanish departments in the school.

Weather
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We've been quite lucky with the weather this year. At the start of the rainy season it looked like it was going to be much worse than last year. We were told that this was because of the weather phenomenon called La Niña. We were also told that the hurricane season would be much worse than last year's already terrible season.

We don't get the actual hurricanes themselves, but we do get a lot of bad weather and rain if they're big, or hit Central America further up the coast.

However, completely at odds with the predictions, this season has been relatively quiet. There hasn't been one hurricane, and just five tropical storms. This week last year was the week of Katrina. So they were on storm 11. I remember because we had to detour our flight home to avoid it when we were travelling back for my sister's wedding. Ernesto is the current tropical storm, and it's expected to turn into the first hurricane of the season during the week.

John Mark Karr
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Whenever there is a fugitive from justice in the US, I often suspect they will turn up here in Costa Rica, because there have been a number of cases since we've been here.

It's now the case John Mark Karr, recently arrested in Thailand in connection with the JonBenét Ramsey murder.

He worked in San José in 2004 as an English teacher. His former landlord, a Canadian, said he had to get him to leave the house, because of inappropriate comments made to his wife and daughters.
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Well, that's it for another week. We're still trying to recover from our weekend. I find it so hard to believe that we're nearly into September. The time is really flying by.

Pura Vida,

Éamon

Sunday's headline from La Nación: Costanera Highway could have been built in cement for the same cost