If the school teacher needs to make more money doing another job. That’s how it works in a school near Playa Samara, in Costa Rica. Sometimes the teacher declares random days vacation days, so she can go work and make more money doing something else.
Blog
Price of Tour Depends on Where You Buy It
La Fortuna is a tourist town with every street home to a travel agency trying to sell various tours — rafting, hiking, hot springs, etc. What’s remarkable is the variance of quoted price for a given activity. Everyone marks up the base price differently.
Our lesson from Fortuna is buy tours through hostels (such as Gringo Pete’s in La Fortuna), NOT from nicer hotels or even random street corners, as their commissions tend to be much higher. The difference in price is sometimes $30-$40 or more, for the exact same tour or service.
Arenal Day 2: White Water Rafting
(incomplete post)
On day two in Arenal / La Fortuna Laura and I went white water rafting for most of the day on the Rio de Toro Class III and IV rapids. We had both rafted before and enjoy it, so we were looking forward to taking on Costa Rica's rapids. Our day started at 8:30am with an hour van ride to the river.
All 30 of us who were rafting that day with this company then gathered around a rotund Costa Rican with an unwieldy beard who reviewed safety precautions.
10 minutes later five of us were in our own raft, each armed with one paddle, and a guide in the back who yelled out directions like "paddle forward," "paddle backward," "get down," etc.
The nature that lines either side of the river makes rafting in Costa Rica different from the States. Lush forest and weird-sounding birds and other assorted animals. At the halfway point, the guide got out, took a knife, went into the forest, cut off some pineapples, and gave us some pineapple pieces to eat as a snack. Where else other than Latin America?
The other rafters were a motley crew. A PhD candidate in geophysics from the University of Montana; an evangelical Christian; some weak-rafting Portuguese; a deaf kid (who had to have someone translate the commands into sign language, glad I wasn't in her boat).
After two hours on the generally manageable rapids (I fell out once) we were driven back to a delicious lunch spot with all the other rafters. Rice and beans, chips, some salad stuff.
Links from Around the Web
Quick thoughts and links:
- There’s nothing like reading about a personal experience that supports an age-old aphorism like "Try one new thing every day." To me, tired wisdom such as "work hard" only resonates if there’s a compelling personal example under it. My friends Paul Berberian and Seth Levine both recently blogged about doing something for the first time. For Paul, it was flying his plane through clouds for the first time. For Seth, it was kick-boxing with his wife. Have you accumulated an interesting and new experience this week?
- Hail casual attire! The official Neck Tie Association recently closed…after a particularly telling sign: members showed up to their annual meeting without wearing a tie.
- Awesome list of questions any sales exec should ask him/herself about revenue projection numbers.
- Megan McArdle on the ridiculous notion spread through European poltiical circles that American neo-cons got Ireland to vote down the Lisbon treaty:
Canada and Europe, particularly, seem to be prone to the illusion that we spend all of our time thinking up ways to make them feel bad, when in truth we barely think about them at all. Probably we should, more. But it’s hard to imagine a situation in which our first thought would be: "Let’s make Irish voters reject the . . . what was the name of that treaty again?"
- Felix Salmon with a wise line on what makes a person’s writing/thinking valuable, via Walt Mossberg rarely saying anything new but re-stating known ideas in interesting ways:
This is a powerful idea, I think, and one which the best politicians understand intuitively: if you say something which everybody already knows, that doesn’t automatically make you boring.
- Bill Flagg identifies two popular business models for internet companies: the profit model or the popularity model. Should a web company charge for their service (aka Match.com) or become really popular (aka YouTube) and generate profit via ads and sponsorship from that scale?
- An interesting assessment of David Foster Wallace’s voice:
Wallace has the vocabulary. He has the energy. He has the big ideas. He has the attitude. Yet too often he sounds like a hyperarticulate Tin Man. Maybe this is concentrated version of how we all sound lately. Data-dazed. Cybernetic. Overstimulated. Maybe this is the voice of the true now. Or maybe genius, like language, can’t do everything, and maybe the Wizard should give the guy a heart.
- Tyler Cowen on how to overcome book fatigue: read books in a category you wouldn’t normally touch.
The reality is this: the best popular book on geology, gardening, or basketball is very very good, whether or not you like or care about the topic. Try to find those books and read them.
- A deliciously devastating take-down of Sex and the City movie in the New Yorker. One of the best movie reviews I’ve read.
On Earnestness
"He’s nice, but he’s just too damn earnest. Where’s the edge?" a friend asked me in discussion of somebody else.
In an old post I asked which traits have a backstop — that is, for which personal characteristics is more of it always a good thing? For example, flexibility is a good character trait, but too much flexibility is bad. Persistence might be a trait that is valuable nonstop, but it’s hard to think of any others.
Earnestness, to me, definitely has a backstop. I value earnestness to a point. But I cannot spend large chunks of time with someone who won’t mix their style with irony, joking, or edginess in general. (I’m not exactly sure these social styles oppose earnestness — earnestness is hard to define.)
Say you had a shitty day. You come home and I innocently ask, "How was your day?" The earnest response would be, "Oh Ben, I had a really tough day. My car broke down. And I got in a disagreement with a co-worker. And worst of all, the supermarket was out of my favorite type of drink. It was, indeed, a tough day." The more amusing response would be, "How was my day? Oh, I had a super day Ben. Just super. First my piece-of-shit car broke down in the middle of the freeway, then my co-worker and I argued about some feature that was in the works, and finally the supermarket didn’t have my drink, which was icing on the cake."
Clearly, too much non-seriousness is hard to take. But in small doses, I find it endearing and funny. It’s a balance.
In general, in terms of the personalities I’m attracted to, I like people who can make fun of themselves, who can deliver good rants if the time calls for it, who know how and when to say "fuck," who aren’t afraid to say something that may not be politically correct, who aren’t entirely predictable, who try to get to the bottom of things (in other words, they rarely say "Whatever…"), who are open to changing their mind, who through it all have a big heart and sense of humor.
That’s my take. What’s yours, on earnestness?