6/29/2018 0 Comments Aventurera / adventurerIt's been an interesting two days since my last post! Betty, the other girl who lives with my host family, is super nice and we are getting along great. She lives in Kentucky but originally from Texas and grew up speaking Spanish at home. So I've been able to learn about Mexican culture, Puerto Rican culture (her husband is Puerto Rican), and Costa Rican culture since arriving here. We started classes and they seem great so far - the culture and civilization class is super interesting, and my Central American lit class is going to be good because I know literally nothing about Central American lit. We have a bit of homework but I'm going to push that off until Sunday :) After classes were done yesterday, Betty and I checked out a "soda" (a cheap little restaurant) at the university and then came back towards our host family's house... but on the way we got stuck in a downpour walking to the bus (I was soaked despite having an umbrella). On the way we stopped at a Másxmenos, a grocery store that we found out was owned by Walmart... the chips were the "Great Value" brand - small world! Later at night, I was going to go to a language exchange night at the university but it was still pouring outside. So my host mom Sonia invited me to go to Zumba with her. That was quite the adventure - it was a very intense class but a TON of fun. I was sweating so much by the end of it. What most impressed me was that the class had a ton of people show up despite the rain, and it only cost $1000 colones ($2). I love that fitness is affordable here! This video has a snippet of the beginning of one of the songs. Today we had class 8-12:50 and then again had lunch at a soda. I had chicken, rice, beans, salad, watermelon and juice for $2500 colones which is like $5. We came back to our host family's house and our host mom asked if we wanted to go to a "feria" with her which was like a farmer's market. We went with her and her husband, José. They had fruits and veggies (lots of things we do not have as well - chayote, grenadilla, the list goes on) along with other things like baked goods, natural bath products, tortillas, bread, and coffee. I was waiting for our tortilla and cheese thing to be prepared (kind of like a quesadilla but not) and saw that Betty was chatting with a man on the other side of the market. José (host dad) went over and started talking with them as well and then I joined them once I could. It turns out the man owns a huge coffee plantation just down the street. He offered to take us in his car to show us his plantation. The paranoid anxious American in me was like "uhhh" but I decided why not? He laughed and said "I will not rob you" in English. My host dad and mom followed us there in their car. In the car he told us about his family and the community - he's 79 and still works producing coffee! We pulled into his coffee factory / plantation, got out and met his 3 super intense guard dogs (like they actually bite you if you run on his property... I didn't try it) and got to see the coffee process from start to finish. He ended up giving me two bags of coffee for free - I tried to pay but he said no! It was so cool for a random Costa Rican man to take time out of his day and take us and show us around. What was even cooler was that my host mom and dad were asking him a ton of questions about coffee and learning things themselves! We came back home and made dinner and now we are planning to head out and check out Costa Rican nightlife. Uber is SUPER cheap here ($10 for a 40 minute ride, for example) so that makes things really easy to get around San José. I am LOVING it here so far - I feel like I finally am in a place linguistically where I can legitimately follow every conversation, laugh at jokes, and soak up the culture.
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AuthorMy name is Nicole Thompson, and I am a semi-finalist for the 2018 National Spanish Exam Teacher Study Abroad Scholarship in Costa Rica. Archives
June 2018
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Photo used under Creative Commons from xia.aike