Then There Were 3.

Hi! So a Canadian lady staying at the base left last Saturday, two South African boys who enjoyed killing and barbecuing iguanas left on Sunday, and on Monday, Ina finally arrived! She caught a few buses from San Jose and made it to the little old Quebrada Honda bomba (gas station) which is about 30 minutes away from the base on very a rocky road. We didn’t know she had made it until after she arrived at the gas station, so she waited for us on the side of the road like a good little hitch hiker, and made friends with a rogue cow in the meantime. I drove, for the first time in Costa Rica. And a stick shift no less! We didn’t crash once.

In the car, Ina recounted the highlights of her long journey to Vivi and I , which are just too good not to share. 

On the flight to Miami, Ina gets ‘surrounded by greatness’, in her words. On one side, there is a Ukrainian man who fell asleep and stayed asleep the whole flight, with his mouth wide open. His breath smelled, according to Ina, ‘like pumpkin pie’.  Two male flight attendants tried to wake him up for the drink service, but couldn’t.  On the other side are two German lesbian teenagers who don’t speak a word of English. They started the flight in good humour but eventually a fight started and things escalated so severely that they were crying and yelling at each other for approximately an hour, with everyone around them looking on. By the time the flight was preparing for landing, however, they’d worked things out and were hugging and kissing and one began singing “Welcome to Miami!”, so apparently she did know some English.. 

Because Ina’s flight arrived in the evening, she stayed the night at a hostel called Charly’s Place. After getting there, she meets the owner’s daughter, Connie, a 50-something Costa Rican woman who comes out in her pajamas and asks Ina if she has a cigarette. Ina leaves to go get water and comes back to find two American guys outside the hostel who ask her if she wants mota (weed). Ina sweetly declines, and one of the guys tells her about losing his left flip flop earlier that day. Later he was walking on the street, and suddenly a flip flop flew out of a nearby window, landed right next to him: it was the left flip flop AND the right size. What?! Ina goes to bed. She gets up in the morning to enjoy the continental breakfast, and is joined by Connie, still in her pajamas. (Ina wants to note they are bright pink with green frogs on them.) Connie talks with a lisp, and her bottom lip hangs down, and she proceeds to tell Ina, “I took LSD for 7 years, and then I got really depressed. But it could be because I’m schizophrenic.” Also, her Dad is the infamous “Charly”, who is currently in Miami with her mum who is having surgery. He doesn’t allow smoking in the hostel, but while Connie is in charge, Ina gets a nice little (huge) helping of smoke with her breakfast. When Ina eventually leaves, Connie gives her a hug and a ‘big sucky kiss’ on the cheek.

The end. 

Now there is just Ina, Vivi (base staff), and me here, working away. Yesterday we did a few interviews at the hospital, picked up massive amounts of groceries for the cowboy team coming from Wyoming this weekend, and cooked up some African peanut soup, which would've been really delicious had it not been a bajillion degrees when we were trying to eat it.