Dinner and a Ballet

Hola amigos!
This weekend has been pretty interesting. I stayed in San Jose for the third weekend in a row, but this weekend everyone else did too! On Friday night they had a ballet at the National Theater for $10! It was "La Sirenita" which translates to The Little Mermaid. I forgot that ballets don't have words but I guess that was a good thing because I didn't have to try to translate in my head. We did however have to read the program that was in Spanish to get some idea of what was going on even though we know the story. The ballet used a screen with images projected on it to tell most of the story but the way they used it was kind of hard to follow. We kept waiting for the prince to show up, but he only did on the screen. There wasn't a single male ballerina in the whole thing! After only about a half hour it was intermission and we were all surprised because not much had happened yet. Then we realized it was time for the switch to land to take place and figured that was why and the second half would be longer, only it wasn't! It was maybe an hour total and if I wouldn't have read the program I would have been lost! I did like it though, and we had fun getting dressed up and going!
Saturday, Kathleen and I finally decided to make dinner for our family. They've been wanting us to for awhile we just don't have time during the week and we're never both here on the weekends. We made Chicago style deep dish pizza, those pickle rolls with ham and cream cheese (which we've found out we're the only two Americans in our group that know what the heck those are!) and chocolate chip cookies! Everyone loved it and wanted to know how to make our ham and pickle things, they couldn't believe they were that easy! We ended up taking Deanna some of the pizza, a cookie, and some pickle rolls (because when we told her about the pickle rolls she thought they sounded disgusting) and she loved the pizza too! It did turn out really good, we made the dough ourselves and Kathleen even made the sauce too! And we measured everything for the dough by eye because they don't have measuring cups. Also they didn't have a pizza pan so we used glass pans. One of the glass pans already had a chip in it, and we ended up cracking it in half, oops! Our host family wasn't mad though. The pizza was supposed to go in at 500 degrees, but the oven only went to 300 so we cooked one in there and one in the toaster over which did go to 500 because both pans wouldn't fit in the tiny oven anyway. Only once we were putting the pizza on the table did we realize the numbers on the oven are in Celsius! But it all turned out ok because the pizza tasted great! I don't know how Mari manages to cook anything in that kitchen. The sink and stove and oven are all tiny and there's really no workspace, it's nuts! We also had to use a wine bottle for a rolling pin because they didn't have one. The only crazy part was we spent $60 on the ingredients, but it was for 8 people. Some of the people are supposed to chip in and pay us back for some of it, I really hope they do! We got a bag of mozzarella cheese for 9000 some colones....wait for it...that's about $16! Cheese is crazy expensive here, I miss it sooooo much! Dill pickles also weren't cheap, we've also missed them!
Anyway, our cooking adventure was successful!
Hasta luego,
Chelsey