musical education, pt. 2

Munchkin entered first grade at the height of the pandemic. Facing school closures and restrictive social bubbles, we homeschooled him for part of the year. Being the one to teach our little man to read and make sense of arithmetic remains one of D’s most rewarding parental memories. We never formally “game-schooled” — there is a movement that incorporates strategy games into homespun learning curricula — but we did (and still do) play a ton of board games with Munchkin, helping him develop logic and strategic thinking skills through gameplay. Had he been a little older, we may well have incorporated a song-based module into his curriculum as well. The little man is now approaching the end of fourth grade, and D’s music class is very much in session.

exploring ancient civilizations

In addition to exploring the Maya underworld on several caving tours, we also visited two of Belize’s most important Maya ruins at Caracol and Xunantunich.

into the Mayan underworld

The first of the many things we learned about Belize is that 60 percent of it is covered in limestone, the karst topography leading to the creation of hundreds of caves all over this small country. We visited three caves during our stay, spelunking in Actun Tunichil Muknal (ATM) Cave, canoeing inside the Barton Creek Cave, and tubing through the Nohoch Che’en Cave. In addition to the obvious adventure aspect of cave diving, these tours provide an opportunity to learn about Mayan culture and see artifacts from Central America’s dominant civilization, including calcified remains of human sacrifices preserved deep inside the caves.

it’s unBelizeable!

We started 2024 in Belize — a country, we realized shortly after our arrival, we knew very little about. After living in and traveling extensively throughout the Spanish-speaking world, we usually have a pretty good compass for what to expect in most Latin American countries. Belize, which grew out of settlements started by British buccaneers and pirates on land previously dominated by the Maya and only partially overrun by Spanish conquistadores, does not fit neatly into this mold. After spending the last week exploring the country’s interior region, we’ve learned a thing or two about this land, which, as the tour guides frequently say, is unBelizeable!

exploring Guanacaste

Because we frequently write about our travels while purposefully bracketing our professional lives, this blog sometimes suggests that we may be on permanent vacation. This month, such an impression would be more accurate than most of the time. The kids are nearly two weeks into their holiday break, which comes much earlier and lasts much longer in Costa Rica than in the States. We too have taken time off this month to make the most of our kids’ vacation.

world wonders

Our encounters with greatness are all too often shaped by others, robbing us of the joy of discovery, coloring our perceptions, and diminishing the experiences while they happen. Consider the Mona Lisa, which one knows to be a great work of art long before one sets eyes on it, and which can only be viewed through thick plate glass by queueing for hours and jostling for space with a throng of camera-wielding tourists, many of whom defy the museum guards’ frequently shouted orders not to take pictures. Transcendent the experience is not. What’s more, it is impossible to develop an independent appraisal’s of the painting’s greatness separate from the widely accepted, received knowledge that one is viewing a masterpiece.

scenes from Supernova

This past weekend, which D spent at the Supernova Ska Festival in Virginia, was pure magic — a 72-hour dream of musical delirium and loving community from which D was rudely wakened late Sunday night by American Airlines alerting him to an eleventh-hour delay that completely derailed his return to Costa Rica. It took two hours of post-midnight phone calls and a scramble to purchase last-minute tickets on another carrier to sort out the mess before D could return to his post-festival reverie. Words and photos don’t do the Supernova experience justice, and videos only barely hint at its transcendent joy.

musical education

“Can you play Amy Winehouse or Voto Latino or that band with the Red Intro?” Munchkin has requested every afternoon without fail these last two weeks in the car on the drive to the kids’ after-school activities. Not to be outdone, Junebug immediately pipes up with song requests of her own: Mario Neta by Uruguayan rockers El Cuarteto De Nos or “the wizard song,” which upon further interrogation turned out to be the Nina Simone classic I Put A Spell On You. Extensive negotiations follow, during which Munchkin jettisons these newer favorites in favor of the handful of punk rock songs he knows, firing off a rapid-fire playlist of 90’s hits that always brings a smile to D’s lips. Slowly, a delicate truce emerges, the Fugees’ Ready Or Not currently enjoying strong consensus status among our backseat navigators.

oh, what a pity!

¡Qué pena! — literally translated as “Oh, what a pity!” — is used in Colombia almost flippantly to ask permission or express mild shame. “¡Qué pena! Your food will be ready in a couple of minutes. Would you like another drink?” or “¡Qué pena! Can I squeeze by you on the trail?” So when our camp host in Minca welcomed us with “¡Qué pena! It’s been raining a lot,” we took his opening gambit to be nothing more than a polite conversation starter. It took a couple of beats for the import of his next sentence to sink in: it had been raining so hard that the bamboo bridge across the stream we needed to cross had been washed away. The placid stream had been transformed into a roiling rain-engorged river across which we would need to wade to reach our accommodations.

in search of El Dorado

Beginning in the 1500s and continuing for some two hundred years, European explorers, Spanish conquistadores, and vagabonds of various stripes combed the jungles and mountains of the New World in search of the mythical city of El Dorado. Legends of the lost city made of gold and precious stones grew more elaborate with each retelling and found relic. The myth’s origins appear to trace their roots to what is now Colombia, where a so-called Golden King — a mythical tribal chieftain — was said to cover himself with gold dust before bathing in a sacred lake near present-day Bogota as an initiation rite. We did not travel anywhere near Bogota during our return trip to Colombia last month, but we did spend some time searching for our own El Dorado in Colombia’s Santa Marta Mountains.