Wednesday, April 30, 2014

The last day of student teaching had finally arrived.  I got up with a skip in my step.  My kids are super sweet and they threw me a party for my last day.  They brought a lot of cake, chips, and white tea; it was the works.  One of the classes actually went around the room and said something nice to me, saying that they wish me luck or that they hoped that I would come back.  It was really nice of them.  I also got a picture with the different classes.  I really am going to miss these guys because they were a blast to work with, but I’ll have to find my own set of kiddos somewhere else.  School actually got out early for Parent Teacher Conferences, but nobody actually showed up to ours.  However, one of my kids’ mom works in the office and she stopped by and said some very nice things to me.  Pan-American School was an awesome place to student teach.  For the evening, Neena got me a ticket to a soccer game as a good-bye gift.  This was excellent because this was one of the few things that I really wanted to do in Costa Rica before leaving.  We went with the middle-school coordinator Frances and her tico boyfriend Alejandro.  We drove to Alejuela and picked up our tickets from the gates before eating dinner at La Liga Bar.  I also bought a knockoff Liga (the team in Alejuela) jersey from a street vendor (for a knockoff, it’s actually pretty nice).  After dinner, we made our way to the stadium.  Apparently, you can’t have coins on you because people will throw them onto the field, so we had to hide our coins.  I just put them in my wallet and was good for the pat-down, but that was an interesting phenomena.  Upon entering, there were some very pretty promotional Tica girls.  Neena’s a good Cooperating Teacher, because she was like, “you’re getting your picture with them.”  I didn’t put up much of a fight.  Afterwards, we found our seats and they were pretty darn good if I do say so myself, close to mid-field.  The game itself was a semi-final between Liga and Heredia.  The winner would play in the final, so the stadium was pretty excited.  The players were playing all-out, with two red-cards for a fight and a bunch of yellows.  Also, the chants were pretty entertaining.  One was “Que equipo es mas mayor?!?!  Liga, Liga, Si Senor!”  Another involved the fans yelling at the refs telling them some mean things about their mothers’ profession.  And the last one involved the fans yelling at player who were “injured” and told them in sing-song fashion that they needed to get some “huevos.”  The game was tied until Heredia took the lead with about 30 minutes left or so, causing the tension in the stadium to rise.  Liga finally broke through in about the 85^th minute with a goal to tie it.  The stadium erupted and there was an incredible amount of excitement.  A couple of minutes later, Liga scored the go ahead goal, making the stadium go even more loco.  Then Liga got a breakaway goal in the last minute to seal it for good.  That was about as cool as it gets, rivaling when OSU beat Kansas in basketball a couple of years ago at home.  On the way home we stopped at the Beach House and had a nice time before I got dropped off late into the evening.  The soccer game was an absolute blast!