Today was just another long day of classes. I discovered that they sell mochas and cappuccinos on campus, so I'm definitely going to check that out tomorrow! I started to learn some really interesting things in my alternative medicine class. I think that is going to be my favorite class. Tomorrow will be a little more interesting because I will be starting my internship and I only have one class in the morning. My host mom is going to the beach this weekend with her friends and she made us a bunch of food for the weekend and I am SO EXCITED about it! I absolutely love the food here; she's such a good cook! I definitely want to get a cookbook from here before I go back to the States. Their diet is really healthy and fresh here - we always have a fresh salad with dinner, and my roommate is vegetarian but she eats fish. So we either have some kind of fish and rice or beans. Tonight we had a spaghetti pasta with a light Alfredo sauce with vegetables. SO GOOD! I already can't wait for breakfast! ;-) Sorry this post isn't as interesting/long as the others!
I'm posting a little bit early for today because I didn't have much to do today. I just have one class on MWF 8-noon, so that was nice! I think today I really realized how tired I have been from trying to adjust to all these new changes. Granted, I am very lucky to have a decent bit of Spanish background because I can't imagine how it is for the others who don't understand a thing that's going on around them. It's pretty rewarding to communicate with someone who speaks a language you've been learning about for so long. Anyways, after class, my roommate and I made a trip to Pequeño Mundo again. I bought some snacks and some school supplies. I also had a meeting today to go to Clinica Carlos Duran, which is where I am planning on doing my internship. The clinic is a lot bigger and busier than I had imagined it to be. It is about a 7-10min walk from my host house. I was a little nervous when I met the doctor because she only spoke to me in Spanish and she also asked me how my level of Spanish was, but I know that I will be okay and will just have to continue practicing. After the meeting with the doctor, I came back to the house and slept for 1.5hours :P now i'm just waiting for dinner in an hour because I'm pretty hungry!
I also really experienced the heat here today in Costa Rica. It was in the high 60s-low 70s today. I will post a picture of the view from a window in my house. Another thing I noticed here that's different for me is that I need to get used to only eating three meals a day with some snacks in between. Back in the States, I was always constantly eating. I would eat a small breakfast, have a snack, eat lunch, and so on. But I would eat multiple times a day and have small meals each time. We have breaks during our long Spanish classes in the morning and I came home around 10am and ate some leftovers from last night's dinner. We are usually provided a decent-sized breakfast and a pretty filling dinner. We have to provide lunch on our own. I've been eating peanut butter and jelly on tortillas haha but I don't know if that is doing me justice at lunchtime! I'm trying to figure out if I should just take a chance and buy a loaf of bread (I've heard that their bread doesn't last very long here because they don't have much preservatives in it). Hope everyone is having a good day! Unfortunately, I don't have any photos to upload with this post today. I started my first day of classes today! I woke up around 5:40am this morning; felt relaxed and well-rested as usual but I wish I could've went back to sleep! My first class was from 8am-noon with a break from 10-10:30am (the reason this class is so long is because it's a Spanish class and it's only in session for one month, and then next month I start another Spanish class that will be 8am-noon & will last one month as well. They are called "intensive month" courses). That class is Intermediate Spanish for Healthcare Professionals. I LOVE THAT CLASS. It's going to be awesome! Even though I already have projects and exams scheduled, I can't wait. I am going to learn so much in that class, and it's something I can definitely benefit from! After that class, my roommate and I came home and made peanut butter and jelly on tortillas :D it was a little weird but pretty good! My second class was from 1-3pm, and it is Health Psychology. I enjoyed that class as well! My last class of the day was Alternative Health Approaches (aka Alternative Medicine) from 5-7pm. That is probably going to be my favorite class! I love all my classes and all my professors! Oh, and I also got my student ID from the university today as well!
The two afternoon classes are electives, so they are held every Tuesday/Thursday. The intensive Spanish morning classes are held Monday-Friday, but they only last one month each, like I said. So once March comes, I will only have the two afternoon classes. All my classes have field trips that are included. I can't wait to participate in those! One field trip is a two-day trip to the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica (for Alternative Medicine). I am really excited for that! Anyways, since my last class ends at 7pm and it gets dark here around 6pm everyday, the university has a shuttle that takes students home after dark. However, the house I am staying in is LITERALLY right around the corner from the school. It takes me less than 1 minute to get there in the mornings/afternoons. So I didn't want to be over-paranoid and take the shuttle around the corner, so I showed the driver my address and he just said that a security guard on a motorcycle could escort me home! :-) It was so cool! Three other girls ended up walking back to their houses with me, since there was a security escort. I felt pretty cool getting a security escort after class :-) I also found out that there's a girl in my class who lives right across the street from me! I also had a meeting with the internship coordinator today. For those of you who might not know, I am also participating in an internship here in Costa Rica at a medical clinic. The internship itself isn't actually supposed to start until January 20th, but I need to complete 135 contact hours with the doctor, so I made arrangements and am able to start my internship earlier than that. I am going with the coordinator tomorrow around 2pm to have an orientation/meet the doctor at the clinic, and it's a possibility that I might be able to start interning on Friday! I am really excited! I got a white coat and everything :-) The coordinator told me that there is another girl in my program who is interning at the same clinic as me, but she isn't taking any classes. Hopefully I will get to meet her tomorrow! Today was the longest day by far! So many crazy things happened. We had to be up at 8am for a university orientation. I will attach a photo of my university to this post. The university is actually an architecture/design school, which is why it looks so modern. So anyways... after the craziness of the orientation (I had to switch some classes around), we got free pizza, and after that, my roommate and I needed to go to the bank to exchange some American dollars into Costa Rican colones. So we knew that a local mall (el centro comercial de San Pedro) had some banks inside, and some other girls in the program wanted to go to the mall too. So we decided to go to the mall together. We were planning to walk, and we didn't realize how far away it was. We ended up spending around 30minutes trying to get to the mall (often asking locals directions to the mall), and after stumbling upon a cute little fresh market, we finally made it to the mall.
Once inside, I had to use my Spanish once more to ask where the bank was located. Once the security guard showed us, we found out there was a really long line. So I had to ask where another bank in the mall was, and thankfully the teller at that bank spoke English and he was able to help me exchange my money. I was so nervous because my host mom was preparing dinner at 6pm, and it was already 5:40pm when we were leaving the mall. I didn't want her to worry or get mad that we would be late for dinner. It was already getting dark outside, so there was no way that we wanted to walk back, let alone we didn't remember which way we came. The next challenge was getting back to our house in a taxi. In Costa Rica, you're supposed to take a red taxi with a yellow triangle (I'll also attach a photo; those are the official taxis) and you're also supposed to ask "tienes maria?" which basically means "do you have a meter?" The first guy we asked said he didn't have a meter, but he said the ride back to the university would be 3mil colones (about $6). I later found out that was a huge rip-off. My roommate and I ended up not taking that taxi, and we found one with a meter. The man was really nice and even spoke English, and he complimented me on my use of Spanish and he said I was doing really well for an American. That made me feel really good! We finally made it back to the house around 6:04pm, and our host mom wasn't mad that we were a little late. I had a good conversation with her in Spanish (I also did last night too), so that is really rewarding! I can't explain the feeling I have right now. As I write this post, I think about what I'm writing, but in Spanish. I'm becoming really good at expressing myself in Spanish, and it's sometimes a little overwhelming to think in both Spanish and English. But I know that I am doing the right thing and I will be fluent in no time! It's such a great feeling! Tomorrow, I have an extremely busy day. I start classes tomorrow, and I have some meetings to attend. Hopefully I will be well-rested and have time to eat! Today was quite a busy day for me! I had to be up by 8:30am for breakfast, but ended up waking up from the sunlight coming into my window around 6:45am. It was a really relaxing feeling; waking up naturally instead of by an alarm. And I felt well-rested when I woke up too! I could get used to that! But anyways, we had the program orientation and then we had a city tour. We toured downtown San Jose and saw some places like the Social Security office, Mercado Central (like their big indoor fresh market/flea market), the Gran Hotel Costa Rica (which I believe was the first hotel in Costa Rica), and other places. There were flower shops, shoe stores, clothes stores, drugstores, everything you could imagine. Definitely a place I would want to explore on the weekends and buy things from the little shops. There was also this big open area where people and children went to feed pigeons - there must have been thousands of pigeons there! After the city tour, I was exhausted. We also had our first experience on a public bus and it was interesting - the driver was probably going about 40-50mph down these little side streets! After the bus ride back to the university, the program directors basically just left us and let us find our way around. We weren't far from the university, though.
My roommate and I paired up with three other girls (one girl was here last semester so she knew her way around the area and showed us two grocery stores fairly close to my host house). We went to the first one called Pali, and they had a lot of fresh produce/meats and other food items. I'll attach a photo of what Pali looks like on the inside. We also went to another larger grocery store (in my opinion, it seemed like a SAMs club, but cheaper and smaller quantities of items), called Pequeño Mundo. Pequeño Mundo was interesting - they had soda cans that were plastic (the top looked like a normal soda can, but the rest was plastic and the bottom of the can looked like the bottom of a soda bottle) - they were only ¢250 colones (which is 50cents in American dollars). They also had a clothing section and I saw clothes from Forever21 and Hollister being sold there. It was a really interesting place to explore! After that, we were really tired from all the walking we had done (Pali was about 5minutes from the house; Pequeño Mundo was about 10minutes from the house). I came back and took a wonderful nap, and am now planning on relaxing for the rest of the evening because tomorrow we have the university orientation beginning at 8am! I can't wait to see what my host mom will be preparing for dinner tonight! Today was the day. The day for me to start this new journey, this new experience. Leaving was hard this morning, and it hit me when the plane was taking off. All these emotions - nervousness, excitement, anxiousness - it was all new to me all at once and I didn't know how to respond. The flight was long and I slept uncomfortably, but landing was a beautiful sight. I can't even explain it and photos don't do justice. There were mountains that poked through the clouds and everything was so lush and so green. It was beautiful! I'll attach a picture to this post, but the photo doesn't do any justice. Once I landed, I was nervous to go through customs alone, but made it through. Had to wait 2.5 hours for other students to arrive, and met some people within my program during the process. Met three girls (from Kentucky, South Dakota, and Texas) who share common interests with me and don't really care to go out and party/drink (I was afraid that I wouldn't meet too many people like that so I'm thankful to have met them). After that, we were dropped off at the university, and our host families met us there. My roommate (another American student from Washington) and my host mom met me there. One great advantage is that the host house is literally a two minute walk to the campus! It was wonderful. My host mom is very nice and she is very patient and we carried on a good conversation in Spanish, which was nice because I could communicate with her and understood majority of what she said. We had dinner (tortillas con queso, homemade guacamole and salsa, and a fresh garden salad) and then I took my first cold shower - that is DEFINITELY something I'm going to have to get used to. Not sure if that will be an everyday thing or what. I've got a busy day of orientations tomorrow so I should probably get some sleep - we are an hour behind the Eastern time zone - so it is currently 9:27pm and back home it's 10:27pm. I have to be up at 8:30am.
I would be lying if I didn't say that this new experience today has messed with my emotions today. I've laughed, cried, and worried more in one day than ever before. But it's going to be okay! I know it is just the shock of everything at once and I know everything will work itself out and in a few days, I will be quickly getting used to this new place. I already was able to communicate with my host mom in mostly Spanish - something I didn't think I would be good at. Can't wait to see what tomorrow has in store for me! It's 1:21am and my flight leaves Atlanta in 8 hours. I can't seem to go to sleep. Saying goodbye is such a hard thing to do :-( but I have to remind myself that it's not really a goodbye, it's a "see you later!". Don't get me wrong, I'm beyond excited for the trip and my opportunities that await me. It's just saying goodbye to people you love & embarking on a completely new experience is really rough the first time around. I'm strong though and I have God to reassure me and I know He will take care of me and take care of the ones I love. This will be a great experience for me, I know it! I guarantee that before I know it, January will have flown by. I got my itinerary for the program today and I start classes on Monday and my first excursion is next weekend! And we have excursions every weekend in January. I know that once I get there and settled, everything will go by so quickly. I just need to take full advantage of everything & enjoy it all! Oh yeah, happy 22nd birthday to me. It still doesn't feel like my birthday! As I bring in the new year with my family and boyfriend, it really hits me for the first time that I'm about to leave for three months. The thought leaves me a little anxious, I won't lie. On the flip side, I know there is a world of new experiences and opportunities in Costa Rica and I tell myself that this will be okay. This is a huge step for me and a change in my normal lifestyle, but it's going to be worth every second and I absolutely cannot wait to see what I take home from this trip. I talked with my brother Aaron a little bit tonight (he's in New York visiting friends and I won't be able to see him before I leave - he left to go there on Christmas Day) and this past summer he spent a month in the Philippines and Singapore with relatives and friends. He gave me some really good advice that reassured me in preparing myself for this trip. He told me to take lots of photos and just to take advantage of the experiences and opportunities, because it will go by quickly. I know this trip will fly by, so I'm ready to make the most of it. I'm going to fully immerse myself and not take anything for granted. Oh, and I keep forgetting that my 22nd birthday is the same day that I depart for Costa Rica. HAPPY NEW YEAR! |
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