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Tim with Lampara
Here Tim displays the candle in the sardine can used for finding our way down from the mountain in the rain. We arrived in Orosi on Monday afternoon and Tim and I got checked in at the language school. I went to stay with the family that I had met last year and Tim went to stay at the hostel. I really like the family but with Tim here, I kind of wish I had made arrangements to stay at the hostel, because I have little time to visit with the family. Since Tim is not much of a cook we asked Amada if she would make dinner every night for Tim and then he would get a short visit with a family every night. She was happy to do this and Tim gave her some money. One of the workers at the hostel, Adrian, told Tim that he had the best room in the hostel. Tim has a single room that is upstairs and there is not much room for anything but the bed and gets quite hot during the day. We like this guy Adrian, since he speaks Spanish, English and German but Tim suspects that he broke into his cereal and didn't close it up afterwards. Tim ended up with ants in his cereal and had to throw it
Nano shows the can
Here is a close up of the can used to make the lamp, out.
On Tuesday we started in the morning by doing a walking tour of the area around Orosi. We crossed the river via the famous Blue Bridge and went to the neighboring town of Paloma. We only walked about 1 hour and Tim got a sunburn on his neck and face. He only has SPF 15 and it is obvious that he needs more. We met another guy, who is about 26 and is from Switzerland and his name is Marcos. He has classes from 12-3 like us. We decided after class to go see Nano, the crazy guy who lives in the mountains near Orosi. So after class we headed up the relatively steep hill to his house.
All the people we talk to call Nano, Nano loco (Crazy Nano) but he is very entertaining to visit. The proprietors at the hostel suggest that visitors give Nano 1000 colones (about $2) for a tour of his farm and the waterfall on his property. He spent a lot of time with us and showed us his dogs and his house and the waterfall. He made us some coffee and showed us all his coffee plants. Nano is great friends with Margoth who is Marcos' teacher this year and was mine last year. While we were having a nice visit with Nano it started to rain and get fairly dark. So, we told Nano that we needed to go so that we could see our way down the mountain before it got dark. Nano told us don't worry, "Tranquilo" (be calm) because he had lamparas (lamps) and needed to get some stuff together and would walk down with us. He told us to go ahead and have more coffee while he got ready. So he changed out of the pajama top that he was wearing and got ready to go to town. Then he got Marcos a rain jacket and asked us to help him get the "lamparas". Well, they were actually candles placed in with melted wax in the bottom of a large sardine can. He had a nail through the can into a small dowel rod for the handle. I hope you can see the picture of Tim holding the lamp. But amazingly these "lamps" worked well to see the ground ahead of us so that we could follow Nano on the path down the hill. It was quite slippery going down in the rain and it was all we could do to concentrate on not falling. Meanwhile Nano keeps up his monologue in Spanish all the way down the hill. I tried to strain to understand him and to keep my eyes on my "lamp" and the path. He took us to a lookout point on the way down and it was quite nice to see all of Orosi from the mountain at night.
We were pretty exhausted after our first full day in Orosi and were happy to eat quickly with the family. Tim left shortly after eating and I tried to do some homework but didn't get much done before I headed to bed.
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