School Starts! Sun! Montanita nights!

It's been a busy week! On the 13th, we had a "back to school night" for Talia at a nearby playground, where she met a new friend who invited her to her home to play for the evening. The other family spoke no English and our Spanish is no bueno, but, with some help from google translate, we managed to make a plan that involved us picking Talia up in the hills above Olon after dinner. The mom of Talia's friend instructed us to call her via What's Ap when we were on our way so that she could direct a cab driver to her home on a not-yet-fully-constructed street. I took a deep breath and sent Talia off into the hills in a pickup truck. Of course, we hadn't accounted for the fact that cell service is terrible in the jungle-y hills around Olon, so when it was time to pick her up, we ended up lost with our taxi driver in the dark for a half hour. We did eventually find Talia, happily eating pancakes with her new friends in their beautiful mountain home. Phew. Mom--are you still breathing? Are you on a plane, planning on kidnapping Talia?

The day after her mountain adventure, Talia started school at Anyi Green, a small outdoor school with about 35 kids between 5 and 14-ish years old. Talia loves that the classrooms have no walls, that the untamed gardens include hidden eggplants and that the main learning materials include mud and more mud. She's in a class of 8 that's evenly split between native Spanish and native English speakers. They alternate each week between an English-speaking and a Spanish-speaking teacher. We were hoping for a fully immersive program, but she's happy that it's bilingual. Currently, her favorite part of the day is riding the school bus--she's one of the first kids picked up and one of the last kids dropped off, so she gets to see a ton of the surrounding areas every day while chatting with "real teenagers."

We capped off Talia's first week of school with a sunny beach day in Olon followed by a dinner out in Montanita on Saturday, and a trip to Isla de la Plata on Sunday (more on that in the next post).Read more