La Cachapa

No traveling this weekend.  We didn’t have a long weekend, plus between applying to jobs and making lesson plans we had actual work to do.  Tomorrow starts our final week of TEFL class. Every day we’ll teach an hour-long lesson to a group of ESL students, with our instructors observing us.  I’m definitely nervous for my first “real” lesson, since up til now we’ve only given three 20-minute lessons.  But if there’s anything I learned from the mini lessons it’s that the time flies.  And also that I echo myself too much.

After lazing around all weekend, today I convinced Pedro to go on a little excursion with me.  I was really in the mood for arepas and Pedro was craving cachapas. So Pedro looked up some good Venezuelan restaurants online and we took the bus into San Jose in search of the Caracas Arepas and Juice Bar.  Let me point out that at this point in time I was already super hungry and cranky.  Once we arrived, we had to take a cab to the restaurant. There are no addresses or even really street names in Costa Rica, so it’s tough to find anything yourself.  Typically directions are given in terms of how many meters N/S/W/E the location is from some landmark.  (Our school, for instance, is located “100 m south  and 50 m east of the old fig tree,” i.e. the spot where a big fig tree used to be.)

Anyway we get to the first place and its closed.  But we both still really want Venezuelan food, so we take a cab to a highly rated Venezuelan place in Escazu, a neighborhood outside the city.  The cab ride takes about 20 mins, costs about $10 and drops us off at a little shopping center (1 km from the BAC bank.)  We’re super excited.  And then we walk up, and it turns out the second place is closed too.  This is annoying because when Pedro called for directions and hour earlier, the lady who answered failed to tell him they were already closed for the day.  So now we’re out in the boonies, hungry and disappointed.  We grab a snack at some random cafe and wait for a bus back to San Jose.  I’m really pissed until we finally get back to the city, I find a fruit vendor and buy a ton of fruit.  The little things.  And then we take a bus back to home sweet San Pedro.  At this point its been hours since we left.  I had an empanada on the street earlier, but my bottomless pit of a stomach is not satisfied.  Fortunately, there have been food vendors at the soccer field by our hostel all week- some kind of fundraiser.  We stop by on our walk home, and I’m hoping they have empanadas.  They don’t, but they do have candy apples, churros, meat-on-a-stick and what do you know, the Costa Rican version of cachapas.  So we buy one and take it home and Pedro adds his own cheese (here they’re served with cream.)  At the end of the day, he got his cachapa.  And don’t worry I got meat-on-a-stick AND a candy apple, so I’m happy too.