Does it better

There are some things that we Gringos do better. There are some things that the Ticos do better. Here's a break-down.

Ticos do it better:
1) All fruit (Except apples and grapes)
2) Rice and beans (That's really not a fair contest)
3) Conserving energy and gasoline
4) Coke and all other products that are sweetened with high fructose corn syrup in the U.S.
5) Tortilla chips. There's this kind that comes in a purple bag, and those plus some guacamole... SO delicious. Tostitos just can't compete.
6) Not having an overpopulation of gigantic ugly motorcycles
7) Use of public transportation
8) Textbooks and copyright policy (we just get copies of readings for like, $1, instead of buying textbooks for $100)
9) Fried chicken
10) Cheap food
11) Peace
12) Corner stores and quick-shops
13) Family closeness and get-togethers
14) Dressing in nice clothing for classes
15) Earrings

Gringos do it better:
1) Apples and grapes
2) Peanut butter
3) Roads/sidewalks
4) Driving (we actually stop for stop lights and yield to pedestrians ..... these things are in short supply down here)
5) Grilled food (That's not really a fair contest either)
6) Candy (I might be biased)
7) Efficiency in shopping (and efficiency in general)
8) Abundance of restaurants and places to eat out
9) War
10) Organization and naming of streets, and keeping the roads in good condition (you think your roads are bad? Trust me, it could be much, much worse).
11) Hot water
12) Laundry (their laundry system is okay, but let's face it, dryers are sooo much faster than hang drying)
13) Dressing in clothing that fits (aka not glued to body) for classes
14) Hats
15) Being on time

There are probably some other things I'm forgetting right now, but I'm going to blame that on my need to rant. You see, there is one thing that I have discovered that Ticos -- or at least the Ticos in my world geography class, and especially the Ticos in my world geography class with whom I am working -- are bad at: Power point presentations.

Today we began our presentations in world geography. The first group went, and their powerpoint was lackluster. Some of the slides were good, but like 75% of them were graphs which took up maybe 25% of the area of the slide. They picked ugly colors (I am a horrible person for saying that after I complained about my cartography teacher being so picky) and didn't center or label them properly. They also used line graphs for things that should have been bar graphs and pie charts for things that DEFINITELY did not belong in the pie-chart family of graphical representation. Another group went, and their presentation was about water. They used the water background from the old version of power point. This is the dumbest background in the history of forever. First of all, it's overused. Second, it's eerily and unnaturally blue. Third, you can't really use white OR black font on it -- both colors blend into the background a bit in different parts of the image. I bet there are thousands of better pictures they could have used for their background on that presentation besides the ugly one that Microsoft put in the program. One group did a presentation about the Arab-Israeli conflict. The actual slides themselves were okay, but they had about 6 maps on different slides, and the guy had to keep flipping through them to show us stuff. It was like a map flip book, and that was unnecessarily confusing. I don't remember my specific critiques of the other groups, but none of the presentations I saw today was particularly well-designed or good-looking.

All the other groups took so long that my group didn't have to go today (gracias a dios!) This is very good, because the ugliness of everyone else's presentations would have had nothing on the hideousness of my group's disjointed and half-ugly presentation. I say "half ugly" because only half of it would have been ugly. The part I did is quite pretty. I tried to find a happy medium between putting too much information on a slide and not putting enough information on a slide (another thing the Ticos seem to have trouble with). I found out what the other half looked like -- the half the guy in my group did -- when I went to the lab with him after class. He wanted to pull my part off my USB drive (this device will henceforth be referred to as a "llave"), then save it to his llave and combine it. Well, he pulled his up, and it's ugly. Or well, if you were just looking at his background as a picture, it would be fine. However, it's too busy and has too much variation in color to serve well as a background. He also put nowhere near enough information on his slides, and his animations were kind of dumb. Now, perhaps I'm just biased that I think mine looks better. But then again, perhaps the part of my brain that says "this is ugly, fix it" has more than one brain cell to rub together.

THANKFULLY, I had saved my part as a .pptx file (the new power point) instead of a .ppt (old power point) because the graphs I used wouldn't have transferred. The computers in the lab were not able to open my .pptx file. So then the guy in my group did this whole "download a thing to make it work" .... I did not want him opening my power point and ugly-fying it, so I suggested that he save his to my llave and I would combine them. Ahh, yes, how logical! Except there are several dilemmas. First, from what I understood, the girl in our group has not fixed her part of the paper (which was due today), nor did she really do any slides. I asked the guy if he could get her to e-mail me her slides so I could add them to ours, but some part of that was lost in translation and/or not going to happen because she's being a slacker. Second, the guy wants to add more to his slides. Why even bother giving me the half-done stuff then? Why not just e-mail me your part when you finish, and I'll put it together? If I do it now, I'm just going to have to do it twice, which is a waste of time. It made me very sad that I was not able to express this sentiment properly in Spanish. Third, I face a moral dilemma. Whose background do I use? His is ugly, but I wouldn't want people changing my stuff around. I'm tempted to just leave the parts with different backgrounds (although make the text the same and stuff) ... you know, to better "divide the sections" or something.

So now I have to add his 4 really lousy slides to my 11 very pretty ones. Then I have to find a way to save it in the old format but while keeping my graphs. Then I have to e-mail it to him so he can add more to his parts, at which point I would hope he would e-mail it back to me so I could un-uglyfy anything he did to it. This is riduculous. I think I'm just going to e-mail him and say that I combined them and I can send it as a .pptx, but I can't save it as a .ppt file because I get an error message about my graphs (which is true.) Then I'll tell him just to finish his slides and send them to me, then I'll add his to mine and we'll be good.

I feel kind of hypocritical for typing all this since when it comes to actually presenting the information, all of the Ticos are 20x better than I am (even if the language barrier were removed). However, ugly, unreadable power points kind of detract from what they're saying, so I still feel somewhat justified.

In other news, it's now officially "cold" here. Winter (which they seem to call summer, even though we're still in the northern hemisphere) has arrived. In general, this time of year is nicer than the rest of the year, especially later on, like in Jan-March. It's a little bit colder, but there's less rain and more sun. Well, anyway, today I guess there's a cold front hanging over the area, and it was pretty windy. I'd guess the temperature was about 65, although maybe with the wind it felt like 55 or 60. If I had a nickel for every time I heard "Ay, que frio!" today, I would be very rich. Come on, really? It's like, 60 degrees outside. That's NOT COLD. You guys do not know what cold is. You would die if you came to my state, and my state isn't even that cold. A guy in my geography class was literally wearing gloves and a scarf DURING CLASS, surrounded by 4 nice wind-blocking walls. It was probably 70 in that classroom, and he's sitting there in a scarf and gloves. I repeat: come on, really?