Posts tagged lunch
Flagler College faculty-led trip to Costa Rica
Jun 5th
The following is an update on the program from Flagler student Adam Krell who is currently on location with fellow classmates Ana Chambers, Diane Cassidy, Matt Garber, Elijah Hayes, Adrienne Gonzalez, and Stephanie Sweeting.
The program is led by Assistant Professor Agnieszka Johnson.
It is not every day you get on a plane to travel to a different country for five weeks. Upon arriving in the beautiful country of Costa Rica, we were greeted by our host families at the airport, who speak no English. From that point on, it has been non-stop Spanish speaking for all of us. It is truly a rewarding experience watching not only myself, but also my friends grow in the language and culture.
Intercultura School of Languages here in Costa Rica strives to provide full Spanish immersion for students so we can fully develop the skills and techniques required for learning a second language. From the intensive Spanish courses and the homestay experience with our Tico (Costa Rican) family, we are building the confidence needed to speak in Spanish.
Each day we wake up early with the sun and eat breakfast with our host families. We converse about what we have planned and make our way to the school. Spanish class starts at 8:30 a.m. sharp each morning and lasts until 12:30 p.m. with two fifteen minute breaks. After taking an hour to walk around and eat lunch, we either have a Costa Rican cooking class or dance class followed by another class taught by our faculty leader, Professor Aggie Johnson. During the cooking classes, we have learned how to cook several local dishes, like Patacones (smashed plantains that are fried, like chips) with guacamole and beans, biscochos (a Costa Rican corn cookie), and empanadas, all while learning our way around the kitchen speaking Spanish. During our Latin dance class, we learn one of three styles of dance: merengue, salsa or bachata. As we move our hips to the beat, we have fun dancing with each other and a variety of other students who also are attending Intercultura.
Our other class, with Professor Johnson, is a Spanish literature course that will eventually end with each of us writing and reading our own short stories. This class is more challenging, as we come to class and discuss a short story completely in Spanish each day. After class, we head home to eat dinner with our host families and talk about our days. It’s non-stop Spanish speaking until we go to bed.
As we are ending our third week here in Heredia, a suburb of the country’s capital of San José, we have experienced many different adventures. From seeing an active volcano, Póas, visiting a waterfall garden, taking a tour of the coffee plantation Doka (a local company near Heredia), to taking weekend trips to San José, we are not missing out on anything that Costa Rica has to offer.
In the next two weeks we are going white-water rafting on Mount Chirripó, the highest peak in Costa Rica, and making our way to Playa Sámara for a week. There, we will spend the week with another homestay family and attend classes right on the beach. When the week ends, we will make our way back to Heredia for one night and fly back to the United States on June 11.
As the Ticos say here in Costa Rica, ¡Pura Vida! (which translates to “pure life”)
Source: Flagler College
“Chronicle” Is a Total Waste
Mar 4th
“What a Waste”
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
Chronicle is another one of those movies in which the gimmick is that the audience sees what the characters in the movie have recorded themselves with a camera, and yet we see footage from more than one camera and even footage from surveillance cameras, as well.
Right. What is the point of the gimmick, especially when such extraordinary lengths have to be taken to be able to show the person behind the camera, like, for example, when he is flying up in the air high enough to almost get hit by a passing airliner?
At the beginning of the movie, we meet Andrew, a high-school senior, and he establishes the gimmick when he sets up a camera on a tripod in his bedroom and then says to his drunken father outside the door, “I bought a camera, and I’m filming everything from here on out.”
Andrew takes the camera to school with him and keeps it recording while he is eating lunch by himself on the bleachers at the football field, and we see him creep out the cheerleaders who are practicing their routines and also see him get picked on by bullies.
Now, any intelligent person in the audience is going to figure out that this is going to play a part later in the movie. You guess which one.
Andrew has a cousin named Matt, and Matt tells Andrew not to take his camera with them when they go to a party together, but naturally Andrew doesn’t listen.
While they are at the party, Matt and another friend of theirs named Steve find something out in the woods, and they tell Andrew to come out and get it on tape.
It is a large hole with a loud unusual noise coming up out of it, Steve falls in the hole, and Matt and Andrew, who keeps the camera with him, of course, go down into the hole after Steve.
We don’t see what is in the hole, and the movie cuts to a different day when we see that the three boys have unusual powers that they are trying out and practicing, powers that allow them to manipulate objects with just their minds, and they learn that they can increase their abilities with practice.
So, do they do good or evil?
Chronicle is a total waste.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”