February 24, 1998 - Tuesday

You can call me houseboy

I woke up at 6:30 to the sound of crashing waves. It was wonderful to be here again. It was low tide so the jetties could be clearly seen from the condo. There was a doorbell and a Tica showed up at the door. I answered it and told her that I didn't speak Spanish and was going to go get Fabio, but he came down the stairs already. They talked for a few minutes and she looked at me a few times and eventually, she came in and started cleaning. Apparently, Fabio's mom has a maid that comes in once every two weeks to clean the condo.

Fabio asked her if she could come back later but she said she has to travel far to go back to her village. She then asked if the "Chinese boy can clean instead?" How rude, she thought I was a houseboy just because I didn't have a shirt on.

It was a day of rest and relaxation. We ate breakfast and then went down to the beach. I snorkeled a little bit but by the time we got down there, the tide had returned so the sediments were being churned up by the waves and it was had to see anything. I then started building a sandcastle instead and got parts of my body burnt in the process.

I used to be able to take at least a few days of full sun before getting burnt, but I guess my body had been "Americanized" over the past 18 years that I lived there and had became too sun sensitive. The tide went back out again and I went to snorkel by the tidal pools. It was the usual bunch of fish and invertebrates I saw last year. I brought my net and was able to net a yellow-bellied blue damsel fish and a very colorful blue devil, but the blue devil paled from the stress of being caught.

I took pictures of them before returning them to the sea, then caught one of the cutest thing I've ever caught in my life - a little puffer fish about 0.75 to an inch long. I caught two of them and tried to take a picture of them, but I didn't know if any of my pictures came out because I didn't have a photograph box for the fish. We came back to the condo just in time to watch a beautiful sun set over the ocean and over the Nicoya Peninsula.

Elizabeth and I waited about an hour for John and Fabio to get ready for dinner. For Dinner, we went to the French restaurant on the top of the hill again over looking Gulf of Nicoya. It was a snobby restaurant but the food was good. I had coconut crusted jumbo shrimp in a mango sauce. It was John's birthday so they all had Champaign for dinner.

Toward the end of the dinner, we were all trying to get John to decide on a desert for his birthday and Elizabeth just rambled on and on in her Brooklynish-Jewish-Italian accent and finally, John lost it and just yelled for everyone to just shut up. I was quite amused at that point and sat back and watch Elizabeth trying to be quiet.

There was a large group of loud smoking obnoxious French people eating at the next table and they started their desert when we got there and they were still there 2 hours later when we left. We returned to the condo and I sat out under the starry night, listened to the sound of the rolling waves for a while before headed to bed.