The First of Few

Hola y pura vida de Costa Rica! After a lot of thought and suggestions to keep a blog while I'm here, I finally decided that I might as well try. Although, I keep no promises to update this on a regular basis. Things like journaling, taking pictures, and making albums do not always occur to me. Unfortunately, these are all things that I'll need to be doing here in Costa Rica to remember my brief time as a Tica. I'm sure it will be the first of many lessons I learn here.

With that being said, let me talk about our first three days in this beautiful country. After a long layover, I fell asleep in an airplane in Denver and woke up at 6:00 a.m. to the most gorgeous sunrise over Costa Rica. If I was smart, I would've taken a picture, but that didn't happen and I definitely regret it. After we were driven back to the center, we ate breakfast, took a 2-3 hour hike up the mountain and got settled in. Our campus is wonderful! We're in a small area called Monte de la Cruz on a mountain in the middle of a cloud forest. The scenery is amazing. We have two ponds out back and are surrounded by trees. It's a little bit of an oasis here. Normally I would insert a picture here, but I left my camera cord at home and my SD card is too small to fit into my computer. I'm sure of this because when I went to slide it in it got lost and I had to carefully use tweezers to fish it out. Needless to say, I won't do that again.

Continuing on, yesterday we had a fantastic day! We ate breakfast at 6:00 a.m. (I won't lie, it was not easy to wake up), then walked down the hill to catch the 7:00 bus into San Rafael, the nearest town to the Center. There we did a mini-urban plunge and walked around the town to get oriented. An hour later, we took another bus into Heredia, the nearest city, and did a much larger plunge there. We spent the next few hours walking all around finding various churches, La Casa de La Cultura, an ice cream shoppe, and many other things that we might need to find in the future. Talking to the locals and asking for directions was scary at first, but once I began speaking it was wonderful! I only had one instance where I got nervous and seemed to forget nearly everything I'd learned in the last 6 years. Afterward, we took yet another bus up to the campus and trekked back up the hill to campus.

We're just beginning classes today. For this month, I'll be taking SN 419 which is a Latin American Culture and Civilization course. I'm ready to start school again, though. We've had a lot of free time lately and I'm not sure that I'm great at keeping myself busy, so it will be nice to have things that I need to get done.

That's it for now. If you made it this far, congratulations. I know it's not the most interesting thing you could be reading, but it's the best way to tell everyone what I'm up to. Maybe after Saturday when I move in with my host family I'll have more interesting experiences to relay to you all. Until next time, pura vida :)!