La Piscina

When we returned to Costa Rica after our trip back to the States in August, I decided I needed to take up my pastor's wife, Cecilia, on her offer to help me with my Spanish.  Although conversationally fluent, I still make mistakes and still don't feel as though I talk like a true "tica".  So, every other week, I spend the day with Cecilia.  We talk, cook, eat, have coffee, run errands or any other thing that she wants to do that day.  Last week was an exceptionally interesting day.  We spent the first hour or so talking, with her correction/teaching.  Then, she said we were going to out to do some things and to eat lunch.  We walked all around the town she lives in, running errands.  We walked to a little store that, I promise, if there was an emergency, those people wouldn't make it.  We wound ourselves through little alleys (all with one way in/out) and finally landed at this little store way back and hidden in a maze of alleys that sold an eclectic mix of random things.  She was going there to buy hangers.  That's when I think about missing Walmart.  We ate lunch at bar stools in the central market at a little cafeteria there.  It was bustling and full of people.  It was a good test in Spanish because it's so hard for me to understand, even English, when there is a lot of background noise.  Finally, we ended our outing by going to the "piscina", as she called it.  "La piscina" in Spanish means "pool".  It didn't take too long for me to realize why it was called that.  The first 1/3 of the store was like a normal thrift store, with racks of clothes displayed on hangers.  The back 2/3 of the store were nothing but knee-high huge bins where they dump huge bags of clothes on top of the already mountainous piles.  In the "piscina", you just have to dive in, literally.  I learned the way you shop in the piscina is to sit on top of the piles of clothes and just dig through.  Everything is about 85 cents, and it's a lot of old, musty clothes.  We were able to find some "treasures", though, and it was a fun, bonding experience with Cecilia which was the best part of all.