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Published: October 20th 2010
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Saturday the 16th of October was World Food Day and in Carpio it was celebrated with an event called Eat So They Can - which I keep mistakenly referring to as 'You Are What You Eat' which is both wrong and wildly inappropriate considering what we are doing there.
Eat So They Can was an event organised primarily by two people, one volunteer called Jamie who attends Carpio in the same way I do every day and the other, a lady called Hazel who works for the company we are all here with. The basic idea was for it to be a massive soup kitchen feeding somewhere upwards of one hundred and fifty children (as opposed to our normal weekly one which is attended by about sixty). As well as the food, the plan was that there would be entertainment in the form of children's performers doing things like juggling and walking around on stilts, and someone playing the guitar for the kids too. From start to finish I think it took a month to organise, and it worked perfectly. At the final count, there were over two hundred children and Mums who were fed and watered. There were sing-a-longs
with the guitarist, mass synchronised jumping around to the Macarena and drinks being split thanks to over-exuberant dancing. Infact it was one gin soaked, fat girl crying away from being like your average fortieth birthday party. (Admittedly the sing-a-longs were to Twinkle Twinkle Little Star but it's a nice image all the same).
The three children's entertainers did a lot of running and jumping around on stilts - no mean feat when the ground is a rocky dirt track. Their juggling was fantastic too and showed my limited array of tricks up to be the sad, paltry efforts they are. That said, I spent about half an hour with one of the older children (probably about sixteen years old) teaching him how to juggle three balls, and he picked it up pretty well, which made me feel a bit like Mr Miyagi. I know my student was doing circus clown tricks rather than beating people up, but I reckon the pride must feel the same.
Obviously the main thing was the food and as we didn't have any idea how many people would turn up and the fact that we wanted to make sure everyone ended up with
a full plate, we had to take a lot with us. The bulk of what was cooked was donated by volunteers or local companies and consisted of rice, beans, meat and bread - although somebody did donate three packets of dried Oysters, which we decided not to use due to the lack of silver trays to present them on. Given that we preferred the idea of having too much rather than too little (on the basis that we knew nothing would go to waste, Oysters excepted) we ended up with a lot of heavy bags for three of us and the Pastor to take down on Friday morning (incidentally, you just wait for the day we do noodles at the soup kitchen, you wont be able to move for the amount of Pasta/Pastor jokes I've got stored up.)
By half twelve we were all packed up, finished and heading back to San Jose very pleased with how everything had gone (every outdoor activity at this time of year has to be pretty much done by 1oclock unless you've brought enough cagoules and tarpaulins to go around). The kids were happy because they'd been fed, we were happy cos the kids had been fed, and the Jugglers were happy because they're Jugglers and how can you possibly be sad when you do that for a living. All in all, a very good day.
Two days before this, we discovered a little haven of beauty in amongst the cheesy Latino Pop bars. The Jazz Cafe in San Pedro is, as the name suggests, an intimate live music venue, in the style of the Piano/Jazz bars in Greenwich Village, New York. I had worried that something might have been lost in translation with the name and that we would walk in to be greeted with hideously loud dance music and the realisation that in Central America, 'Jazz' was just another word for 'PAAAAAARRRRRRRTTTTYYYYYYY'. Fortunately, this wasn't the case. By chance, we appeared to stumble into what appeared to be a secret, warm up gig by what I have since been told are one of the biggest bands in the country. They were called Escats, and the official genre that they placed themselves in was 'Jazz Pop' which reeked of marketing boxes needing to be ticked because the only element of Jazz was the saxophone at the back who was given two solos in a two hour set and if that's how these things work, it means Careless Whisper is one of the most successful Jazz songs of all time, which it isn't.
The music was far from being to either of our tastes. Even without a lyric translator present, there was a very clear Daniel Powter feel to the whole thing. A feeling partly brought about by the amount of young ladies shouting out to the lead vocialist and singing along to every word, but it was pleasant enough and something of a pleasure to watch anything in a venue like that. Despite the music being somewhat unchallenging for the listener, the drummer was absolutely brilliant and we found it very easy just to sit and watch him for most of the set. The lead singer did say that they were playing the Estadio Saprissa (the stadium of Costa Rica's biggest football team) in a couple of weeks time so if nothing else, to see a stadium band in an intimate venue is not something you turn down easily - although Bon Jovi played the same stadium a few weeks ago so perhaps there are always exceptions to any rule. In short, definitely a place for future visits.
Speaking of football, (which we weren't really) it is comfortably the biggest sport in the country. I thought that some American sports would be popular but have seen very little evidence of it so far, although I did have the misfortune to watch a baseball game in a bar at the weekend, and my God it was dull. It could and should have lasted about twenty minutes if they'd stopped dicking around and spitting everywhere. Just get on with it so I can go and watch a real mans sport, like cricket or snooker. I will do a football blog at some point in the future as we're going to a few games in the next month or so, so I'll keep this short. The standard of the league, from the games I've watched, is woeful - and that's coming from someone who's had a season ticket at Everton for seventeen years. The two biggest teams are Saprissa and La Liga, and in San Jose it feels like every second person is wearing one of those two teams kits. There are three or four games shown on terrestrial tele at the weekend so I get to see quite a bit of the league but it tells you everything that most of the sports coverage here centres around the only Costa Rican playing in the major European Leagues. Bryan Ruiz plays for FC Twente in Holland and if he sneezes, one of the newspapers has an exclusive on it.
My local team is U.C.R. who play at the Estadio Ecologico, about half a mile from my house and they're the team we're off to see in the next few weeks. Despite being a San Jose club, I am yet to see one person wearing their kit, but I'm already hooked. They play in blue, they're bottom of the league and Bon Jovi don't play at their stadium. Can't wish for more than that.
Pura Vida.
Dave
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Mike
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Any radio out there Dave?