I up and moved across town this afternoon into the bright yellow residential house I found yesterday. It´s the same setup as where I was at before; a bunch of students, shared kitchen and bathrooms, except I´m paying a lot less for a bigger room in a cool old house with a big backyard, avocado tree, and a grill. I don´t have to sneak booze around, there´s no fascist cleaning lady, and I´ll be speaking a lot more spanish. I´m also within walking distance of school. Not bad, eh? I´ll probably not be seeing the old gringo crew much anymore outside school, which is good and bad, since I´m so far across town. I´ve been meaning to strike out on my own anyway, find a tight crew of chilean punk rockers to kick it with. I was scoping out the bars near my new place earlier and found a potential replacement for Doble Cero, my favorite bar in Costa Rica and the world. The upstairs part of the bar is a room with a low ceiling and a window overlooking the park across the street. There´s graffiti all over the walls, which kind of made me feel like it was my own personal Bodeguito del Medio, Hemingway´s favorite bar in Havana where he drunkenly scribbled on the wall "Mis mojitos en el Bodeguito, mis daquiris en la Floridita" to the delight of Cuba bound camera-waving tourists everywhere. The communist bookstore next door even had pictures of Papa, he seems to be everywhere these days.
The one drawback (arguably) of my new place is that there´s no free internet in the house, nor a close internet cafe nearby. Watch my hands start to shake in the mid afternoon from pitchforkmedia.com withdrawels. Ought to be interesting.
Probably heading back to Valparaiso this weekend, then definitely off to Argentina the following weekend. I´ve also heard tales of a really beautiful lake only about 3.5 hours by bus from here with high rock formations next to it perfect for cliff diving. There´s nothing quite like the feeling of free falling from 60 feet up into water barely warmer than freezing. Bombs away.