Blogs from San Ramon, Alajuela, Costa Rica, Central America Caribbean

I can’t even begin to express how good it feels to be able to understand nearly everything I hear in the streets or conversations I have with people. I may not be able to speak as well as I wanted to be able to, but it amazes me how much more I am able to understand these days. I thought I would be bored these past few days without my friends in town, but I have kept myself pretty busy! It has been quite the experience roaming the streets of San Ramon by myself and making conversation with random people. I have run quite a few errands, and got a lot of things done. I am not ready to come home. The only reason I am excited to come home it too see everyone. If you ... read more

The last two days I have been the littlest bit homesick. I think it is because Janne’ left. I have asked her to write a little bit about her experience in Costa Rica, so I can post it on here. : ) School has been crazy. Last week and in the following week I will have had 2 exams, a paper due, and a 10 minute presentation, all among other homeworks. It doesn’t seem like overly much- but when you don’t have weekends to do homework, it is quite a bit. This weekend we have a 3 day weekend! Today is Alyssa’s 21st birthday, so tomorrow after class we are going to head to the city of San Jose and spend the afternoon there. I am also planning on working on my tan this weekend! Now, ... read more

Last night I went out with some friends. ‘Monday night madness.’ A couple girls have host brothers our age, so we went to their house to hang out. They taught us slang and badwords in Spanish and we taught them the equivalent in English. It’s funny how different slang is here than slang that I have previously learned. This morning I had to get up at 5:30 in order to make it to my community service school by 7. WAY TOO EARLY. It took us about 35-40 minutes to walk there and by the time we got there, I was really sweaty. CEN San Pedro, as it is called, is a preschool for low income families. I was surprised to hear that, after seeing the kids- they were all well groomed and well dressed. I was ... read more

This morning I woke up early to catch the bus at 8. I am finally accustomed to waking up early, but am still always tired… Me and a few other girls went to the Zoo in a city about 45 minutes away. We had to tell the bus driver where we wanted to stop, and he literally dropped us off on the side of the highway. We are lucky there was a police man there to tell us where to go, in order to catch the next bus. To get to the zoo we had to walk about 800m to a different bus stop and wait. Here, another but picked us up. Once again we told the driver where we wanted to go, to make sure he would stop there. The first driver stopped and told ... read more

Where do I begin.. Saturday morning we left the school at 8 AM and headed out for the Biology Reserve. We had to take an alternate route because the earthquake damaged the usual road- which made the drive a little less than an hour. The hike up to the reserve is 11 km long UPHILL. I would say I am in decently good shape and I was drenched in sweat hiking up. The manager of the reserve was supposed to meet us at the bottom to pick up our stuff, but he didn’t show so we had to hike up with all our bags and what not. When we got there, we were all starving. We ate lunch and then had a little bit of free time. A few of us huddled up in our room ... read more

Today was an interesting day.. On Fridays I usually only have my Spanish class, but today we had a special lecture about insects. All day after this 'special' lecture, I felt like I had insects crawling all over me. After what I learned about bugs in Costa Rica, I am even less excited about my field trip tomorrow :P. Putting snakes and insects aside, I'm actually REALLY excited. After classes we went to 'la feria' which was like a farmers market, but larger. There were so many fruits and veggies that I had never seen before. The vendors were continuoulsy saying, "Oh nunca ha probado esta? La prueba!" Which means, "Oh, you haven't tried it, try it!" Everything was so cheap. Here, healthy food (fruits and veggies) are much cheaper than processed foods- unlike the US. ... read more

It has been a crazy week. First, my Wednesday field trip was canceled because the machine broke. So, on Wednesday we went to class like normal. At around 8:45, I got really annoyed because I thought the girl next to me was tapping her foot and shaking the desk/floor. In about 30 seconds, when everyone was looking at each other, I realized it wasn't foot-tapping... It was an earth quake... Our teacher calmly told us to exit the room and that's when everything REALLY started shaking. Things fell off the walls, the power went out, and we lost water- almost all day. When I came home for lunch I watched the news with my host family and they showed pictures of the real damage near the coast. It was really, really sad. I can't believe I ... read more