Advertisement
How's everyone doing? I can't believe I've been gone for over a month. Time really does fly. Keeping up this blog has been a lot harder than I thought; I was sick for a few weeks and didn't do much of anything exciting, computers aren't always working at the language school, and most recently, I got some things stolen, including my camera....BUT, I'm back now!
Everything-- scratch my bag being stolen-- has been going great. My "Tica" family is so good to me and the other students that they house and they're a LOT of fun. There's the parents, Mari and Ronald, their 4 kids, Tatiana, Diego, Chino and Laura, Ronald's mom and aunt, along with the 4-5 students they host. Did I mention they have 2 dogs and a parrot who speaks Spanish? It's quite the full house. Ronald is quite the jokester and we've had several dinners where I've left the table with a stomach ache from laughing so hard. For example: my roommate Catherine's birthday was a few weeks ago and the family had a little celebration for her. She had to play pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey (which she had never played before...apparently they don't have that in Canada)
and right before she was about to pin the tail on, Ronald put up a drawing of a man's torso therefore making the game pin-the-penis-on-the-man. I was bawling from laughter!
A typical weekday goes like this: Wake up; have at least a 1/2 hour long breakfast (a lot different from the usual chomping on a bagel in the car on my way to work that I was used to); take the bus to volunteer; work from 8-12; take the bus to Maximo Nivel, the language school, for lunch and Spanish class; run errands or go to the gym; dinner; sometimes out for a bit, but usually bed.
My volunteer project isn't actually in an orphanage as I thought it was going to be. There's only one orphanage in San Jose that I've heard of and there's already several people from my program who are placed there. So I'm working at a daycare/ school in a poorer neighborhood of San Jose called Casa de Ninos. At first I was disappointed, feeling like I was at the Casa to be more of a babysitter rather than someone truly helping the kids and making a difference. But all notions of idleness
have been lost. I felt better and better with each passing week about what I was doing at la Casa and now I love it. I work with the teacher, Yessinia, with 10-17 3-4 year olds. Of course they can be a handful and obviously have their bratty moments, but it's the perfect age for me because they're old enough to carry on conversations (so I get to practice my Spanish) but still young enough to be wicked cute cuddly at times too. Yessinia told me that I could plan some lessons of my own with them so hopefully my creative juices will start flowing and I'll be able to come up with some fun things to do with the kids.
People from the program will usually go out on Thursday nights for drinks and sometimes dancing. I definitely have a good time, but I can't seem to get real into the whole going out scene here as much as at home. I must just miss my homies too much 😉 But yeah, we definitely have a good time here. One night my roommates and I went to el Teatro Melico Salazar for a Malpais concert, a really well-known
band here in Costa Rica. They played with the Costa Rican philharmonic orchestra so the music was amazing. I can't wait to go home and download some of their songs.
Of course I could go into a lot more detail about everything, but just wanted to give people a taste of what I do here. Hopefully I'll get an entry up about my past few weekend excursions soon. Hasta pronto!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.092s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 12; qc: 49; dbt: 0.0484s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb
tripp
non-member comment
woohoo, kara!! looks like you're having a good time!! we're all jealous, keep posting updates, i look forward to hearing from you. xo tripp ps...bagels on the way to work are overrated anyways...