Well then, that's life for ya sometimes, now isn't it?

Wow, what a day…so October here means rain pretty much all of the time. Sometimes it’s nice out for part of the morning, but yeah, rest of the day, night=rain. So this morning leaving my house I realized I had forgotten my umbrella, was too lazy to go back and get it and justified this by telling myself that I had my rain jacket and that the umbrella wasn’t that great anyway and that I wouldn’t be outside for that long anyway…first Autumn Fail. Second Autumn Fail would be catching the bus to go to my volunteer work (I’ve already done this twice before, mind you, I just can’t for the life of me remember where to get off…) then asking the driver to tell me when we were at InBioParque so I could get off…now the other two times this plan worked perfectly. However, this time I felt as though I had been on the bus for an awfully long time, but the driver insisted that all was fine…finally, he pulls up at the bus station in SAN JOSE and I was like, dude, this is San Jose, definitely not where I wanted to go…and he was like there’s an InBioParque in San Jose, 300 meters that way. I was just like uhh….and I was already late to begin with. However, this very nice young man with beautiful eyes and entirely too much gel in his hair came up to me as he had heard my plight and told me that he would bring me to the bus station to catch another bus back in the same direction from which I had come so I could get to InBioParque and then he did and he even talked to the bus driver about where to let me off…and he also told me that my first bus driver really hadn’t known anything and had just made things up…he said it was because he was Nicaraguan (Ticos have the same bitterness and stereotypes towards Nicaraguans as many Americans have towards Mexicans, for many of the same, often insubstantial, reasons). I just don’t understand AT ALL why people here refuse to ever admit they don’t know where something is. They always just want to help and that constantly entails them just making things up off of the top of their heads. Which, my friends, is worse than “not helping”. Much worse.

Anyway, my new bus driver was super nice and super friendly and this woman in the front insisted that I sit next to her, and we talked the whole way there about my experience in Costa Rica and she gave me a brief, much needed but most likely fruitless geography lesson of the area. She was delightful. Then I finally got to the place, drenched, because I had to walk from the bus. And then the guard took a good 15 minutes and approximately 5 phone calls to let me in because the woman I’m technically working for decided not to tell me that she was out sick…

So, after putting back together a broken dead spider (actually literally I did that) and typing some stuff into the computer, I left to catch my bus. I waited at the stop for a good 25 minutes, and after Maria had told me I could take a different type of bus than usual, I did. However, this bus’s route stopped 2 kilometers from the bus stop I had gotten on it at and about 5 km from the university…meaning, I was stuck in a place I didn’t know with a random bus driver. He actually happened to be a sweetheart and helped me flag down a taxi and waited with the bus until the taxi came and then drove right up to the door so I could get in it and then I took the taxi to the UNA (my university). However, leaving the taxi, I heard the sound of something dropping and knew it was my phone. The issue there was that I couldn’t find it anywhere, not in the stream that was the street, not in the cab, not under the cab…even after giving the driver came out and helped me search and called my phone…nowhere. So now a random taxi driver has my number and probably my phone as well…which isn’t very logical…anyway, I really had no idea where my phone was, paid entirely too much for a number of different buses and a taxi, and was dripping wet. And in that state I met up with Molly, Maria, my Costa Rican friend Laura and her incredibly attractive gaggle of single (what?! Single guys exist here?) Tico guy friends. I was a bit of a mess…and now I am wearing two sweatshirts and shivering and wondering how I am going to wake up for yoga tomorrow with nothing to use as an alarm…

But, to make things a bit better…these experiences happen to everybody. My host mother reminded me that material things are superfluous and the important thing is that I’m safe. This experience is really teaching me to be more laid back about things and to realize that worrying and getting upset does nothing…in fact, recounting the experience makes for a pretty good story…thrift store tomorrow!! Really excited! Then a rainy beach weekend this weekend…ahhh…