I’m presently sitting in the American Airlines Admirals club San Juan, Puerto Rico with Krystyana, awaiting a flight to Miami and then on to San Jose, Costa Rica.

As I had previously noted, we’ll be spending just over two weeks in Costa Rica taking intensive Spanish language classes in an immersion format. We booked our classes via Bridge Abroad, and Krystyana and I each have separate private instruction so that we can each progress at our own pace. Should be interesting.

But perhaps even more interesting is that while the Spanish language work occurs weekdays, we have the weekends to explore a bit of Costa Rica’s amazing nature. Granted – Costa Rica is in the midst of its long rain season, but even then there is supposed to be sun for as least part of the day. So, tomorrow morning, bright and early, we head off in search of quetzal (colorful, long tailed birds) and explore the paramo (grasslands and shrublands) to find exotic critters and plants. We will spend Sunday white-water rafting – one of the best times of the year for that because of the heavier rains.

And the following weekend we do a three day/two night trip to the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica to visit the Tortuguero National Park to try and see if we can find turtles nesting and then spend one of our days in the lagoons and waterways looking for a variety of monkeys, birds, reptiles, and perhaps even tapirs and jaguars. Should be a pleasant, and different, diversion from the language classrooms, as well as an opportunity to practice whatever Spanish we’ve retained by then.

I will try and post pictures during the trip if I can, but probably no travelogues until after our departure so as to not interfere with the immersion process.

We have a couple of days in Miami for rest and pampering and practicing our Spanish after that, before heading home to Bonaire for an 11 day stay before our next journey – this time to the Canadian Maritimes and New England.

But, since today is being spent traveling – mostly waiting in airport clubs, actually – I plan on writing several more posts about specific things we did in New York City, so if you’re subscribed to get notices about new posts, be forwarned that you’ll be getting a number of e-mails from this blog today.

I also wanted to mention that we’re not sitting idle in September either – or at least Krystyana and I are not.

It has long been a goal of mine to learn to speak Spanish fluently, and Krystyana has also had an interest in learning to speak and read Spanish. While language CDs and software are all good and fine, they require a particular learning style and regular allocation of time in order to be effective. Both of those criteria don’t work well for me, but what does work is being dropped into things and immersing myself into new projects. So that’s what we’re doing next month.

We’re going to San Jose, Costa Rica to take part in a 2-week Spanish language immersion program. Krystyana and I each get our own teacher, and for either hours a day we work with our teachers to try and speak, understand, read, write, and think in Spanish. Everything is done in Spanish. It doesn’t work for everyone, but should work for us.

Part of the experience involves outings to markets, museums, and, of course, dining out. And on the weekends we are going to try to explore other activities in Costa Rica, such as white water rafting and the rain forests.

Wish us luck. If I post from Costa Rica, it will be in Spanish (or something that looks a lot like Spanish anyhow). You’ll be able to translate the posts at a place like www.google.com/translate if you don’t read (my version of written) Spanish.