Friday, April 17, 2009

Karaoke Rockstars!!

As I mentioned earlier, my family and Costa Ricans in general loooove to sing karaoke. Walking through the streets of San Jose, you can find a karaoke bar on every other corner, and it is a staple activity at any town party. At my house we have a microphone, some huge speakers, and probably about15 different DVDs with songs to choose from. Our favorite evening activity is to all squeeze together on the couch, turn the volume up loud enough to broadcast ourselves to the entire mountain, and take turns belting it out for a good hour or more.

No matter how badly we sing, each performance is always met with applause, bravos and other exclamations like “que lindo” or “tiene un voz de oro” (how beautiful or you have a voice of gold). Most of the songs we have are older ones I’ve never heard, so I listen to Daisy and Gabelo rock out. They both have really good voices and karaoke is more like an art form than a pastime for them. Daisy especially likes slow sentimental love songs and Gabelo prefers the more peppy rancheros and drinking songs. I am pretty much limited to singing Juanes or Shakira, but every once in a while I’ll recognize something else.

My favorite karaoke moment was actually the first time we sang together, about 5 days after I’d moved in. We had the music up so loud that we couldn’t hear Gabelo’s son, daughter-in-law, and grandkids all pounding on our front door. By the time I glanced outside and caught their exasperated faces pressed up to the window, they’d been out there for a good 10 minutes. When they came in, Daisy and Ana Luisa, the daughter-in-law, went into the kitchen to get started on dinner. But Giovanni and his sons Alan (9) and Jason (5) plopped down on the couch to join in. The boys didn’t really know any of the songs but were determined to try. While their dad held the microphone and sang, they climbed on top of him and would randomly shout into the microphone whenever they thought they knew the words. Their best trio was a very dramatic song about nostalgia for home where the chorus is this agonizing cry that the boys especially loved to howl out: PUUUERTO LIMOOOOOOOOOOO-OON! Some other memorable performances included a translated version of Imagine which, to my dismay, totally changed the meaning of the song and Eternal Flame. I started Eternal Flame at their request (clearly I should sing it because it’s in English), but when I didn’t know it well enough to finish Giovanni had to take over- you can only imagine how amused I was.

Friday, April 3, 2009

It’s hard to believe that I’ve only been in Costa Rica for three weeks! Training so far has been a pretty intense whirlwind of new people and places to get to know as well as a lot of information to process. My week is divided up between language classes that are held in my training town on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, technical training with the other rural development trainees in a nearby town on Wednesdays, and then Fridays I catch a 6:15 am bus –yikes!- to San Jose for general Peace Corps information sessions with all of the trainees.

I am living in a small, “semi-rural” town that’s about 24 kilometers from San Jose. It’s really beautiful up here and I love walking out of my house every morning to see the sun rising over the mountains. (I’ll try to put pictures up soon!) I live with a retired couple who were both widowed and married each other three years ago. They are very cute and affectionate together, love to sing karaoke, always have family over visiting them, enjoy 80s music videos, and almost religiously watch the telenovela El Ultimo Matrimonio Feliz (The Last Happy Marriage). I have to admit that while at first I resisted watching the novela, and then became distressed by some of the questionable messages it sent, I have now become emotionally invested in it and every night I find myself huddled on the couch with my host parents- our eyes glued to the screen.

There are four other trainees living in my town and we all get along really well. We like to go to each other’s host homes to sing karaoke or have coffee, and it’s amazing to me how welcomed we always are. I used to worry about dropping in unexpectedly to visit someone or inviting one of the trainees to my house without checking with my host parents first. But after seeing how happy people are when you stop by to see them and how eager my host mother was to meet the other trainees, I learned to rethink my understanding of respecting people’s privacy and not imposing on them. A great example of this was when a couple of trainees in my town were invited to come over for “cafecito” (a cup of coffee and light snack in the late afternoon). The whole group of us ended up coming and we spent a good three hours there talking with the family, receiving an extensive a tour of the grandfather’s garden, and setting off left over fireworks.