City Living

We are sufficiently settled with our families in San Pedro - a suburb of San Jose - home of Mall San Pedro, Universidad de Costa Rica, Universidad Latina, and the Costa Rican Language Academy. Im writing from an internet cafe down the street from my homestay, and my computer has a really tricked out keyboard. Ive been here for an hour and a half and only just recently found the keystroke for the question mark and have yet to find the one for an apostrophe. So I apologize ahead of time for the lack of punctuation.

My host family is very nice, as you can probably imagine. More often than not, my host mom, Maria feeds me way too much, but in my defense I have been quite sedentary and without much of an appetite since arriving. Their daughter Marcela is very nice, but pretty quiet, and is very busy. She works full-time as a pharmacist and is going to school again for a degree in business administration. We watched the Tico equivalent of Dancing With The Stars last night after dinner (and ironically, the guy that teaches Latin dance at the language academy was competing! Small world... ). Maria fries me two eggs with ham every morning with toast, juice and tea. Its a breakfast muy rico, and a lot of my classmates say they do not get that much, so I think I just got a good mama Tica. I catch a bus to get to school right down the street. The bus system is pretty good here, apparently, and very cheap (175 colones per ride - about 30 cents). The city is very hard to navigate, but I am getting to know it little by little. Its difficult because streets are generally not named, houses do not have numbers (my address determined by the neighborhood in which I live and the supermarket that is across the street), and streets are not at all grid-like. Very confusing. I walked around this afternoon with one of my classmates and the map we got from the language school to try to get an idea of where our other classmates were living.

A group of us went on a day trip up to Sarapiqui (tropical lowlands) yesterday for a canopy tour and horseback riding. Included in the cost of the language academy is one of several excursions - so we had a great day of free fun including a very good lunch. I am excited to return to that region of the country at the end of October. We were close to the OTS La Selva Station yesterday, and it is a whole different kind of beautiful that I am excited to spend some time in. Even though we have only been in San Jose since Wednesday, leaving the chaos of the city for something a little more beautiful and rural was a big relief. Costa Rica is better seen from the boonies - this big, confusing city is a little much for me.

Language school is okay. It feels much more like school than going on field trips and listening to lectures at the station. We sit in the classroom all day, and I am bored with it already. It all feels like things I have done before in my grammar and language classes at UMM, and since I have been done with those for almost two years, the class feels like a waste of time. The best thing about it so far is that we are learning some medical terminology. I will try to bear with it this week and not have such a negative attitude.

But seriously, if thats all I have to complain about, I think I am doing just fine. Pura vida, man.