Bienvenidos a Costa Rica!

5.31

I am officially sitting on my bed in what will be my home for the next 5 weeks. However the bed I’m sitting on is only temporary because the family I’m staying with is hosting another kid from somewhere (would know where if I would have asked him or if the host mom knew, but he doesn’t speak any Spanish…) so he is in what will be my room until Thursday. I’m writing this on Word right now because as expected, there is no wireless internet, so I’ll just have to zip drive this little blurp over to the internet tomorrow.

The second leg of the trip was a little bit more annoying than the first. Another girl from the program, Amber, and I were on the same plane both legs and had a 4-hour layover in Dallas. We ate, and then ate some more and sat and sat some more because our backpacks were too heavy to lug around wandering. Our flight was delayed some 45 minutes or so and we arrived to San Jose a little over an hour late. The flight wasn’t too bad; they served dinner; chicken with pasta and salad and a perfectly spherical roll. Watched Marley and Me, which, now that I think about it, may be the last American movie I see for awhile?

I sat next to a guy, Matt, that was from California headed to Costa Rica to surf for two months. He writes iPhone apps for a living, interesting guy he was. He was canceling his cell phone service as the plane was taxing onto the runway. That was entertaining because he had to put his phone down every time the flight attendant walked by resulting in several “I’m sorry I did not understand your request, please choose from the following options”, which made the process only so much longer. I thought I was last minute setting my plan up two days ago.

We landed, made it through customs, got our baggage, wandered outside, encountered the director waiting with a sign with a jayhawk on her sign, got on a bus with 6 other kids in the program and drove around dropping everyone off one by one all over San Jose and the surrounding areas.

I am Sabanilla. My host mom here is Laura, and she and I had a 30-minute conversation, which, much to my amazement went very smoothly. I sensed a lot of relief from her as well. And if it went as well as I would like to think, what I understand is that breakfast is at 7:30 in the morning and we need to be on the UCR campus at 8:30. To do what? I have no idea. So I am going to bed, in a twin bed with Noah’s Arc sheets :). The walls are painted green in both this room and my permanent room, which makes me quite happy. My window is open, sans screen, and I’ve got lots of winged visitors… better get used to it I suppose.

Adios