Well, I'm feeling the pressure for major breakthroughs with my Spanish with less than a week before my return home. My Tica family and professors are very encouraging and keep telling me how much I have improved but I guess I dwell on my mistakes. The director of the program worked with me last week and said it's great that as soon as I say something wrong I correct myself before she has a chance. I tell my back patients that when they self correct after picking up something wrong before I have to point it out. My last two weeks in school are being devoted to conversational Spanish with of course pauses for grammar correction when I totally blow it. Over the weekend I realized I am ready to come home! I am tired of living in some else's house even though my "mom" is great. I am tired of not having my car to go wherever I want whenever I want. This past week "mom" had to turn the phone off because the housekeeper was spending all of her time on the phone instead of cleaning the house so I couldn't call home and didn't have access to the Internet at the house. Immersion is still the best way to learn a language but I'm glad I didn't plan on being here longer. It was a busy week as I am in class every morning for 4 hours and in the physical therapy clinic until about 4:30 in the afternoons. They have a patient that lived in the United States for 33 years and at 85 has forgotten how to speak Spanish. What a great payback that I can help the therapist out when she can't express herself clearly to the patient in English. Hmmm, sounds familiar. She loved the words clockwise and counterclockwise for exercise instruction to the patient. Today was my last day there as I have projects to finish up at school the rest of this week. The highlight of my week was going to the Mana concert in Tibas, Costa Rica. Mana is my favorite group in Spanish or English and what a coincidence that they were here for the first time during my short stay. It was held in La Cueva de Monstruo, "the cave of the monster". For the uninitiated, many Latin Americans are fanatics when it comes to futbol or as English speakers refer to it, soccer. There is a huge rivalry here between the local teams and this stadium is home to one of the historically best teams. The games get ugly and the crowds are even worse after the games. It is an outdoor stadium that was filed to capacity for the concert. Fortunately it stopped raining before the concert started. In a word the concert was ¡FANTASTICO! They put on quite a show. I looked around the stadium but didn't see any other gringas. Over the weekend my classmate and I finally made it to Tortuguero after three tries. My recommendation if you ever go from San Jose is to fly at least on the return trip. The bus picked us up at a hotel in San Jose at 6:00 AM (that was after the 20 minute bus ride into town). We rode by motorcoach for about 4 hours and then another 2 hours by boat to reach Tortuguero. The ride was beautiful! It is on the north eastern part of Costa Rica on the Carribean. Tortuguero is one of the most important nesting sites for the leatherback, green and several other types of turles. Tortuguero National Park is one of the most biologically diverse parts of Costa Rica. The park is a series of canals we toured by small boat looking for wildlife. We saw howler monkeys, white faced monkeys, spider monkeys, iguanas, chameleons, turtles, a two toed sloth, something like a small crocodile but I can't remember the name and lots of different types of birds. We had to have eaten and be ready for our water tour by 6:00 AM that morning. Brutal! It was very beautiful and peaceful and I'm glad I didn't oversleep and miss it. Our hotel was a series of cabins in the forest. I thought there was someone outside of my cabin trying to make scary sounds and then realized it was a howler monkey. As you can tell I am still a city dweller. San Jose is getting ready for Christmas. All of the stores and gas stations have been decorated for weeks. They don't celebrate Thanksgiving here and I forgot all about it until one of the professors wished me a happy Dia de Accion de Gracias at school. Greetings to all from Chepe (San Jose's nickname)! ¡Pura Vida! Mary