Happily reunited

I have my luggage back! Yeah! It was quite a debacle. The American Airlines woman on the phone said they could deliver my luggage, but she needed an address. And I was like "What do you mean? There's no such thing as addresses here, but I could give you directions." And she was a Tica (local lingo for Costa Ricans), so I was confused why she was asking. Then I called my landlord, and he was like, "Sure, we have an address. It's '100 meters from the grotto in the neighborhood La Trinidad.'" Of course, I'd been giving these same instructions to cab drivers and the like, but I didn't realize it was an "address." So I called the woman back, and this apparent "address" was acceptable to her.

Of course, the driver got lost, as is prone to happen when you don't have street names or house numbers and when the grotto in question is not easily found. So the driver calls me on his cell and is speaking in Spanish, and I understand about one in ten words he's saying. Then he has the dispatcher who speaks English call me and relay what I'm saying to the driver. But this was apparently still not clearing up matters, so I got the driver's phone number and had my landlord talk to the driver and give turn-by-turn directions. That was apparently the magic ticket, because the driver pulled into the apartment complex about three seconds later.

Phew. But at least all my belongings were accounted for and not damaged. There was a little slip in one of the bags that said it had been inspected, so I wonder if that caused the delay.

As for other news, the hole in the road to the university is apparently fixed (and has had a few cars drive over it and withstood the heavy rains of the past few days, which is apparently encouraging, although the fact that they were holding their breaths to see what the rain would do to it isn't very encouraging to me. What happens when our 2-ton bus drives over it? )

We'll save that adventure for Monday. We finish this week's classes at LaSalle (the university-on-loan).