ah, yesh. after much hemming and hawing, and an unreasonable amount of trouble (one day i will go off on a long diatribe about the airline industry -- with the exception of Jet Blue -- and how fucked up their pricing system is), i have booked our tickets to Costa Rica. we nearly flew business class until i realized i couldn't upgrade the second ticket. that would have been fun. but we're booked. one ticket is frequent-flier-miles-free, the other is full fare coach. so it works out to be fairly inexpensive. considering.

we leave on January 31st and take an overnight flight, through LA and Guatemala (it's ridiculous how hard it is to get a more direct flight), and arrive in San Jose at 8:15a. which is great. we don't waste a day traveling. from there, we take a quick flight to Tamarindo and spend four days unwinding on the beach. then we hop back to San Jose and have a car drive us up into the cloud forests near Monteverde. we spend four days there playing in the tree tops and watching a volcano erupt. then back to San Jose and onto a bus to Puerto Viejo (on the Caribbean side) to snorkel, watch dolphins, and sit in hammocks for five days. then, finally, back to San Jose for one night before flying back to San Francisco in the morning.

sound like fun? it should be. very tropical, very lush, very pretty, and very easy going. i'm just glad it's booked.

in other news, we went to see Waiting For Godot at ACT last night. what a gawd awful play! seriously, it was painful to watch. the dialog makes no sense, it's metaphorical to the point of lacking a story, and there are so many long silences followed by moments of nonsensical screaming that half the audience (including Corinne) fell asleep only to be woken up by the din. we left at intermission.

afterwards, Corinne admitted she was in agony but trying desperately to pay attention in case i wanted to discuss the deep meaning of the man who may or may not have gone by the name Godot whom the two main characters were supposedly waiting for. i assured her that it was an equally excruciating experience for me and i was just as happy to be out of there. we giggled and guffawed our way through the rain and back to the car, then went home to play with our vacation and revel in the free time we'd gained by escaping that monstrosity.

am i uncultured? do i lack sophistication? am i too dense to see the value of such a thing? who cares. after the train wreck that was the Chekhov play we saw earlier this year, we have decided that if the play is deemed "a classic" (Shakespeare excluded, of course) or mentions things like "intense sadness" or "despair", we should consider ourselves warned and should only attend such a performance at our own risk. we have learned that a cultural "treasure" is sometimes best viewed from afar.

the next play we see at ACT features Olympia Dukakis. please let that be a positive omen.