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!
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!